Posts Tagged ‘progress’
Finally, Progress
The hardest thing I have faced since becoming a full-time ranch manager has been getting contractors to bid jobs we need done. In the last few days I have successfully communicated with three of them. Two actually showed up in person. The other has already been here. Even though no work has actually begun, just getting them to see and discuss the situation, and estimate a time when they hope to actually do some work, is rewarding enough to fuel my dwindling supply of hope to get improvements in place before winter arrives in full force.
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It’s a bit like seeing signs of the sun preparing to make its appearance over the eastern horizon.
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With that bit of inspiration, I found myself drawn toward a chore I have been neglecting all summer long. One of our main trails through the woods had been left untended since the snow melted and it had become overgrown to the point of being difficult to discern.
I was pleased to see how much growth had occurred in volunteer trees, most of them butternuts. Too bad they were growing in a path where they wouldn’t be able to remain. I used the power trimmer to do the bulk of the clearing, then made a few passes with a pole saw and my ratcheted pruner. There is much left to be done —I only went as far as one tank of gas on the trimmer allowed— but the part I did complete looks wonderful and inviting.
After dinner, where I devoured fresh-picked ears of gourmet sweet corn that Cyndie picked up on her way home, we took Delilah for a walk down that trail. It was a treat to experience all the “oohs” and “aahs” from Cyndie as she marveled over how great it looked. Then we arrived at the stretch where I had cut down trees on Monday to widen the southern leg of the trail. They still lay where they fell, all over the trail, in stark contrast to the section I had just trimmed.
It’s a work in progress. But, alas, there is finally some progress!
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Patience Practice
Slept in today, on the first day of September. Nine hours of slumber last night! Woo hoo! Even though I didn’t accomplish everything I would have loved to yesterday, what I did do, wore me out. By the end of the day, Cyndie gave up on her idea of going up to the lake, too, so I guess we were both beat.
I spent more time than was productive for me, just watching the guys working on the hay shed, and even that seemed to contribute to making me feel exhausted. Unfortunately, their progress was much slower than I anticipated, and I think slower than they hoped. By the end of the long day, the only sheet metal attached to the frame was across the front of the roof.
Cyndie worked the ground in one of the paddocks to level it out, pulling out weeds and raking up dead grass, whenever she wasn’t helping hold boards for me. I was framing and hanging boards on the wall of our barn under the overhang, to protect the steel siding from horse activity. We continue to upgrade the infrastructure from what had been set up for mini horses, to become a full-size equine facility.
It’s all good, just not as much progress as we’d hoped.
What can we do but be patient? We are discovering opportunities to practice patience over, and over, again. The process of refining our patience will serve us well when we finally are caring for horses here. So, even before they arrive, we are learning from our horses, through the process of getting prepared for them.
Great Surprise
Yesterday, it being Saturday – in which neither Cyndie nor I needed to depart for our day-jobs – we set a larger than possible list of goals for chores we wanted to accomplish. We decided to start in the barn, because the 
crew had arrived there to work on putting rafters on the planned hay shed. We cleaned two of the four stables, and leveled the dirt floor in them so we could place thick stall mats that Cyndie recently purchased. She also brought home lumber for raising the walls, but we postponed that for another time, to allow us to get on to other goals we had in mind. (The previous owners had mini-horses, so their stalls and fences were all undersized for our plans.)
After a brief lunch snack, we moved on to the second project from our list, deep in the woods, clearing our trails of the downfall still remaining from the May 2nd snow storm that snapped limbs on so many trees here. We had the chainsaw, a pole saw, our new Stihl trimmer with a saw blade on the end, (like the one of Ian’s I used when we were in Portugal), a pry bar, rope, shovel and rake, along with a can of gas packed in the trailer behind the lawn tractor.
I had just cut a very large branch that was broken 12 feet farther up, and the bent-over portion was caught in the branches of several other trees. We tossed the rope over it and Cyndie and I were well into the tangle of growth nearby, tugging to pull the branch over and off the others. Suddenly we heard voices calling and wondered who it could possibly be.
I hollered an acknowledgement and hiked out of the woods and up the hill to find that our good friends, Rogie & Kris, had made a surprise visit! What a treat. I coerced them to hike back down with me to surprise Cyndie, and see the complexity of our clearing project underway.
We had a wonderful visit, walking them around to show off all the progress we have made since they last saw the place. We paused for refreshments and later, captured the moment with a picture, using the self-timer on Cyndie’s camera.
What a great treat it is to have friends stop by to see us. With the good energy of their visit, we headed down to finish what we could of the lumberjack work on the trail. The task becomes all-consuming and, as we often do, we lose sight of how long we have worked. In a blink, the sun is getting low, and we have worked right through the dinner hour.
Cyndie spent a loooong time afterward, brushing burrs out of Delilah, before we let her back in the house.
Without a doubt, these days are a lot more work than the comparative hours spent at our day-jobs. It was a real blessing to have the surprise break in the middle, and to reconnect with friends.
Thanks, Roeglins!
Slow Process
Last year, late in the fall, we kicked off our big fencing project, enlisting the services of a fencing company to remove a portion of old fences, including some very old barbed wire that was entangled in years of tree and brush growth. When that work was done, the ground in those areas was a mess of deep divots with tangles of root remnants protruding every which way.
Two giant piles of root bundles and brush were created from the tree debris that was removed. Slowly and methodically, we worked to burn those piles through the winter and spring. Meanwhile, the fencing crew moved on to build new fences, creating our two paddock areas attached to the barn.
The incredibly wet spring disturbed most of our progress and planning, and the areas of dirt and divots that were too muddy to go near, fell to neglect. We ended up leaving them for nature to address. They eventually became less conspicuous beneath a cover of grass and weeds that grew through the summer.
A couple of weeks ago, when the excavator was here to dig the trench for our new water line to the paddocks, they dug two huge holes and buried what remained of the piles of root bundles that never did burn.
Last fall, a large pile of cut logs from those trees was left at the bottom of our back hill for me to split and stack for firewood. Yesterday, I finally got the last of that pile moved up to the top, near the wood shed.
The uneven terrain remains to be dealt with, but 9-months after we started that first phase of our initial fencing project, we are just now feeling close to having completed the entirety of that goal.
Of course, I still have all that wood to split and stack, but that task will get lost in a never-ending exercise of firewood production here. There are a couple of perfectly burnable dead trees waiting to be felled, and a few new ones that came down in the spring snow-pocalypse, that are all awaiting being cut into logs.
Forward Momentum
I’m not confident that I can adequately convey how thrilling it is to finally have our septic issue resolved. On Monday, as I pulled up to the house after work, I spotted Cyndie out in the yard, shoveling dirt into the channels of the drain line. The repairs had been completed earlier in the day, after over a week of waiting for the weather to dry up enough to allow the work to commence.
The two projects that were underway on the high ground, around the house, have been able to proceed, while everything at lower elevations has ground to a halt. Our geothermal furnace installation is complete, and the septic system is fixed. All that is left is, to grow some grass over the two dirt spots.
When we got the septic lines re-buried, and raked out all the dirt, it was possible to finish mowing the remainder of the front lawn. Since we were dressing up the area, I cut down the dead pine tree that had been staring at us since the day we moved in. I wanted to wait, to be certain there were no signs of life. We are certain.
We put the new trimmer to a good inaugural use, and then Cyndie raked out a big section to de-thatch the grass.
It looks great!
Overall, it may be a modest set of accomplishments, but it is forward momentum, and that has significant meaning to us lately. I’m hoping something might rub off on other projects. Maybe we could see something of a trend develop. Forward progress would be a very welcome phenomenon.
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