Posts Tagged ‘possibilities’
Thriving Eight
Despite the risk of jinxing the prosperity that our eight chickens have been enjoying all summer, I can’t help myself flaunting their surprising continued free-range survival on these unprotected acres.
Two Black Australorps, three Golden Laced Wyandottes, and three Buff Orpingtons continue to thrive. They’ve had pasty butts, gotten broody, chosen “unauthorized” nesting sites, and survived last year’s harsh winter and this summer’s heavy thunderstorms. They lost a sibling to a devious possum and dodged an eagle that I saw swooping through the trees in a failed attempt to grab one of them.
That last fact now triggers a new level of anxiety whenever we spot one of the many bald eagles in the area circling low overhead, which I have witnessed them doing twice recently.
Still, our chickens hang together for the most part and seem genuinely happy about their lives.
I did find a “soft” shelled egg in one of the nest boxes yesterday, so one of the hens might be dealing with some new anomaly.
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Is This Possible?
From the potentially too-good-to-be-true files, yesterday I heard tell of an entity that pays decent money for space to place unwanted horses. A salesman who stopped by to deliver a quote on replacing the boards on our deck told wonderful stories about his days as a racehorse owner.
He described an acquaintance who couldn’t afford her property and was planning to move, until some company contacted her and offered to pay a reasonable amount to use her barn and fields to keep their unwanted/rescued horses.
“Heck, yeah, I’m interested!”
He promised to look into it and forward a name and/or number we could contact. Can’t hurt to inquire. If they supply the hay and pay to use the barn and pastures, I would be happy to accommodate them.
My inner skeptic is not quite as inspired as the rest of me, but I won’t let that prevent my creative imagination from visualizing unbelievable possibilities.
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Dream On
I recently had one of those dreams where I awoke with the feeling that it had actually happened. When you dream about someone you know, do you find yourself inclined to tell them about it?
“You were in my dream!”
I struggle with that urge. I usually want to tell the person. It was so real!
But they weren’t involved. It was my mind conjuring a depiction of them. I could just as well imagine a scene with another person while I am wide awake, and then go tell them the details. Seems rather creepy when considered like that.
At the same time, we are all connected. When we think of others, we can strengthen connections with them. Spending time with someone in our dreams creates a strong feeling of connection, but I figure it probably is a lopsided one.
When I experience a dream connection with someone, it ends up commanding my attention for a long time. When I am able to recall the details of a dream that involved a perception of a person I know, it will seem no different to me from memories I have acquired about experiences while awake.
It is not surprising to hear someone questioning themselves over whether they are remembering an actual event or something they dreamed. People have even come up with the generally accepted and universally understood phenomenon of pinching, to establish whether an experience is a dream, or not.
At this point in my life, I don’t usually want to know.
Why spoil the unlimited possibilities of a dream state by checking for reality?
Dream on, I say.
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Fortuitous Failure
The plan was to get one load of gravel, one load of sand for the round pen, and two loads of lime screenings —one to spread around in the paddock, and one to keep as backup to fill washouts as they occur. In order to receive all these deliveries in the time while weather is good for doing so, we plotted out the order and location for dumping the piles.
The primary concern was to avoid having the heavy truck drive into the paddock, because the previous time we allowed that, it led to problems from the extreme compression straining buried electric fence wires between gate posts. I was also concerned about collapsing the buried drain tube we had installed from the barn gutter downspout.
The truck driver always seems more than willing to drive anywhere, leaving the responsibility on us to restrain the choices in protection of property. He long ago demonstrated complete disdain for the well-being of our asphalt driveway.
By my figuring, if we got gravel first and spread it out before the next delivery, the truck could drive on the new gravel and dump the lime screenings at the entrance of the paddock. I would spread them inside the paddock. The sand could then get dumped beside the barn, where I could move it by loader scoops, driving over the new lime screenings through the paddock to the round pen.
That would be a lot of tractor hours, but it was worth it to me to protect the paddock from the heavy truck.
Then Cyndie received word that they currently had no stock of lime screenings. The driver delivered gravel on Thursday with a plan to bring the sand on Friday morning. I had a short window of time after work on Thursday to spread the gravel, so he could drop the pile of sand the following morning in the spot where we wanted it.
In the middle of that task, as I tried to back up in order to spread the scoop of gravel I just dropped, the tractor lurched forward. I shifted again. This time it wouldn’t go backward, or forward. Tractor fail!
That wasn’t in my plan.
I struggled to remove a cover plate to see the mechanism of the gear shift lever. That didn’t help much, because even though I could then see it, I didn’t actually understand what I was looking at.
The options rattled through my mind. Call my very knowledgeable neighbor? It was getting late. Call the implement dealer? That would have to wait until morning. What about the sand delivery? Where would I put that?
Well, this failure caused me to rethink the possibilities and opened up a new willingness to have the truck drive through the hay-field. He would only need to pass through gates in which there was enough turf to limit the compression that happens from the weight of the load.
In the end, I have a new appreciation for the inconvenience of that shifting failure, because it has saved me a lot of work. The dump truck placed the sand in the center of the round pen. The hay-field held up well under the load, but the driveway has some new wrinkles where he made the turn on and off it.
The service man from the implement dealer made short work of the tractor repair by afternoon, replacing a pin and snap ring at the base of the shift lever, and I finished spreading the gravel.
That shifting failure is one I will remember fondly for the better outcome that came as a result.
There may be a life lesson available in all this.
Ya think?!
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I’m Curious
If you read yesterday’s Words on Images post about the simple choice that we make every day, how do you interpret the suggestion about accepting the obvious as the only plausible explanation?
After I wrote those words, with one thought in my mind, I got the impression that it likely implied the opposite of what I was thinking. I considered changing it, but then decided to let it go out into the world, as is, for readers to take from it what they will. We each come to our individual conclusions from a place of preconceived notions and personal perspectives that color our perceptions.
I expect some will align with the version in my head, and some will perceive the opposite.
Let me just say that I believe that there are unknowable possibilities, likely beyond imagining, available as explanation for what we sense and experience in our world, which others choose to miss by constraining their options exclusively to the one they construe as obvious.
I may be wrong.
And that’s the key.
Imagine the possibilities of embracing uncertainty.
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