Posts Tagged ‘Rain’
Desperation Move
On Saturday we took steps to provide our horses access to some dry ground by stringing temporary electric fence around a section of the gravel drive between the barn and the hay shed. As you can see in the image, they were most enthralled by the small area of green grass that was available in one small corner.
Eventually, they spread themselves out and each nibbled on hay we distributed in 4 spots, hoping to entice them to stay long enough to dry out their poor muddy feet.
It’s not a very big space, but it is better than nothing and they seem to appreciate our effort. With rain storms continuing to roll through, the mud situation just gets worse every day. We had to come up with some option to give them a break. The areas around the feeders where they previously found refuge, standing atop the buildup of spilled hay, has started to fail them and their hooves are beginning to push through. There was nowhere else for them to go.
That area of the driveway is solid, and they can stand there to give their hooves a chance to dry out. It is a bit of a desperate move, but it is a means to an end that buys us time while we await a change of conditions that doesn’t look to be arriving any time soon.
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Disappearing Act
It is that time of year again when piles of brush get burned into oblivion. This pile was on the top of the hill on the north side of our driveway. There was a moderate collection of fair-sized branches that had been there since before we arrived. A couple of days ago, I tossed on some cuttings I recently cleared that were leftover from when I mowed this area last fall.
That created a collection that was half-fresh-cut and half-long-dead. I wasn’t sure how it would burn, because the old wood was damp from the recent rain, and there was a gusty wind that could help, or it could possibly drive it out of control.
I started daintily, pulling a small amount of debris off the pile to create a moderate fire, although, up wind of the rest of the fuel. I started on that side to take advantage of the wind, because I felt I needed it to cause the green wood to burn.
Progress was ideal and I enjoyed a fine afternoon by the fire. Cyndie made the trek all the way out on her crutches, and kept an eye on things while I took a break to walk the horses, one-at-a-time, off that damn muddy paddock and out where they could graze for a spell on the grass. After that last storm and its additional inch of rain, the little spot of grazing I fenced off for them is too soft for their weight and they will tear it to shreds if we let them on it.
When I got back to the fire, I found Cyndie had outdone herself with the cutest little burn pile ever, all clean around the edges, safely pulled away from the main one, making me think I may have over-stated my concern that she do it my way. She was sitting on a chair, weaving a basket out of the vines that were growing all over the ground up there. Being forced to use crutches does little to stop her ambitions, it just redirects her energy toward more creative pursuits.
It had turned into an absolutely gorgeous evening for a bonfire, so we decided I should head to the house to feed dog and cat, and then bring back a picnic dinner. That meant washing the manure and mud off of Delilah, before letting her inside.
That done, I picked up my bag of food and headed for the door. Before I even opened it, I could see the flames through the glass. The entire pile was ablaze something fierce. I know the feeling of standing next to that. Elysa and I were present last year when one of our burn piles went rogue and roared alive with incredibly dramatic energy. I pictured Cyndie in that chair, hobbled by the healing hip, and my heart jumped a bit.
Luckily, this pile wasn’t quite that large, and although dramatic, it was not a catastrophic event. I arrived with the bag of food and prepared to make a joke about her little clean pile burning safely on the side. She asked if she could tell me something funny.
She was sitting there as the fire appeared to be burning itself out, and was fretting over having let it burn out while I was gone, by not adding enough new fuel to the side fire. Knowing I could just re-kindle the burn, she decided to stay seated. Without doing a thing, the core of the pile ignited!
Fire is not to be trifled with. Kids, don’t try this at home.
We dined by the warm fire on a chilly evening at sunset, lingering until after dark, when our shadows eventually appeared in the moonlight. A spectacularly magnificent experience for us once again at Wintervale. Cyndie used my camera to take a few more pictures after dinner…
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Acknowledged Risk
Yesterday was supposed to be the day I took Cyndie back to where her surgery was performed, for an appointment to get her stitches out. We ended up rescheduling, when the risk of severe storms loomed large for the time we would be on the road. It turned out to be a smart decision.
Our dog, Delilah, has been demonstrating an extreme anxiety over rumbles of thunder. Unfortunately, the thunder-booming storms started here on Wednesday evening, and her panic-barking kept me up until well past midnight. I was at the veterinarian’s office yesterday to pick up some new tick repellent, since our previous product isn’t doing the trick, and when I happened to mention Delilah’s anxiety, they asked me what we “give her” for it.
Hadn’t entered my mind to medicate her. Their first recommendation was Benadryl, but they also reminded me of the “thundershirt,” a hugging body wrap that calms dogs. Good idea.
Shortly after I returned from the vet visit, our predicted rough weather rolled in. I’ve been through worse, but we did receive a blast of wind, small hail, and heavy rain that more than convinced us we made the right decision to stay home. If we had gone, Delilah would have been trapped outside in her kennel during the worst of it. The folks at the vet’s office said dogs can, and do, injure themselves in their efforts to escape whatever is causing their anxiety.
That wind would have probably put her into a tizzy, especially when it picked up and rolled over my woodshed, which is located right next to her kennel.
Lesson learned on the heartiness of simply standing the structure on stones in the ground. That was the design I chose, even though I knew it was a risk. On the bright side, it gives me a chance to try building my second structure ever, using what I learned on the first one. I guess the next one will have posts buried well into the ground.
I’ve discovered an interesting fact about how I see our woods. No matter how familiar I think I am with the views, after a big wind storm, I have difficulty identifying what is new damage, and what is old. There are plenty of downed or leaning trees and broken branches. In the area near the up-turned woodshed, something doesn’t look right to me, but I’m not certain if it is damage from yesterday’s event, or something previous.
Actually, with another inch of rain increasing the saturation of our ground, it’s a wonder there are any trees left standing at all.
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Choosing Hardship
Things are not going very easy for us on the ranch right now, but despite the difficulties we face, we are still basking in the richness and fullness of this life we have chosen. The primary frustration is the current weather pattern we have been under for a week. It has been chilly and rainy every day. Too rainy, for many of them. The wind has calmed a bit in the last couple of days, so we do have the benefit of that misery being removed from the rest of the miserable onslaught we have had to endure.
In direct correlation to the troublesome weather is our plight in caring for the horses in the manner we aspire to maintain. We just can’t alleviate their predicament of too much mud. We anticipated a certain amount of hassle, but this week of rain is just over the top. Not just the rain, but the cold, cold temperatures, too. We have tried to provide some relief, by allowing them time in the barn, but that is a temporary solution for a problem that has far exceeded being of temporary duration.
The amount of work required to manage our property is significant, but adding the universal difficulty of non-stop wetness compounds the burden dramatically. Every building is leaking, including my wood shed! The grounds are a mess. That makes the house a mess, and clothes a mess. It’s hard!
But it’s good. It’s a good hard. There are easier life styles a person can choose. Mankind spends a fair amount of energy devising ways to make life easier. I make jokes about the situation where life gets so easy a person has to join a fitness club and pay money to engage in sessions of doing hard work. People will workout in a gym, running in place or moving weighted levers up and down to get sweaty, develop strength and muscle tone. But, dig in the dirt? Carry heavy objects long distances? Walk the hills of 20 acres? Why would someone choose to do that?
Maybe we choose to live like this precisely because it is hard. A life of hard work offers special rewards that more than justify the effort. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself whenever our hard life starts getting really hard. Of course, I’ve got the benefit of being in proximity of Cyndie’s positive outlook, which she graciously shares, encouraging me to check my focus and recognize our many blessings.
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Uninvited Situations
As April draws to a close, we would like to be preparing our minds for the transition that May should offer toward connecting us to summer. Instead, we are feeling shriveled and wrinkly from 6 inches of rain in 6 days. The events and situations of the last few days are beginning to take a toll. I think one of my unconscious responses is to clench my jaw more than usual. I have been trying to practice better awareness of that habit. Each time I catch myself clenching, I am startled at the discovery. How is it that I so easily start pressing without realizing it? I can’t help but wonder about how often I do it and fail to notice.
Our house feels uncomfortably out of whack, because I haphazardly pulled furniture out of the far end of the sunroom and stashed it anywhere and everywhere to get things out from under the leaks.
One of our garage doors is so water-logged, the electric opener can’t lift it. When I pulled the release handle, a pin popped out and now the bracket hangs loose, and swings menacingly.
Cyndie reported that she discovered one of the boards of the wall separating Legacy and Cayenne’s stalls in the barn was wrenched loose and lying in Legacy’s stall yesterday morning. She thought Legacy had done it, but I am suspicious of Cayenne, as she appeared to be working on the next board down while I was in there feeding them and freshening their water buckets. I’m gonna need longer screws.
After throwing one of Delilah’s toys for a series of “fetch” exercises before dinner, she walked past me on one ‘retrieve’ and stepped into the wading pool where we often wash her before letting her in the house. Pretty smart way to let me know she is ready to go in. After we got inside, I toweled her off and noticed she started to favor her left front foot, sometimes drastically avoiding putting any weight on it. She went from walking fine, to limping obviously, in an instant.
I have developed my first poison ivy rash of the season, on the inside of both arms, very consistent with the most likely source being contact with Delilah’s fur.
When I got home from work yesterday, I noticed something on the floor in front of the kitchen sink. There were six small ball bearings in one spot. I deduced that they must be from the pull-out waste basket under the sink, but I have no idea why or how.
These kinds of little uninvited situations start to have a cumulative effect, but they are probably small potatoes compared to what is really weighing on my mind. Today I will be driving Cyndie to an appointment to have an arthroscopic procedure done to clean up her hip-joint. She will be confined to crutches for an uncertain amount of time.
It sure would do us wonders to have the rain end and get a little warm sunshine beaming down on us soon. It would at least be one less reason to grit my teeth.
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Nastiness Unleashed
I’ve been referring to the weather of the previous few days as looking grumpy, but yesterday it turned downright angry. That wind and rain was coming with an attitude! It felt like there was some message being sent in the intensity of extreme gusting wind. The driving rain just kept coming, round after round, hours on end.
It proved to be too much for the shell of our home. Mid-morning yesterday the sunroom started dripping. At the start, it was leaking over a bay of windows at the end of the room. I called the gutter company that recently replaced our soffits and gutters in that area. Before our gutter guy arrived to check on things, the dripping was showing up other places, so I knew it wasn’t anything they did to cause it.
I called the man who built our storage room for advice about the possible source of my problem. It is likely that the flashing where the sunroom joins the main house is not doing the job. Somewhere, water is finding a route beneath shingles, and once under there, it has a variety of directions to travel. Unfortunately, there is nothing to be done until the weather breaks and he can get up on the roof to verify the problem and plot a fix.
It was an unpleasant way to start a day, but it alerted me that I should check our other buildings for possible problems. Sure enough, the roof over the shop is leaky, which is not surprising because I have seen previous evidence of that. I found that I had left the side windows open in that garage, resulting in a bit of mess.
We have received another 2 inches of rain, which brings us to about 5 inches on the ground since last Thursday. With the extreme winds blowing, the poor trees are going to have a hard time staying up. While I was walking toward the barn I heard a tree falling over on the neighbor’s property. Before I got in from my inspection tour, I heard another one go down on the neighbor’s land on the other side of us. Holding hope for the trees on our property, that they will all somehow endure and remain standing.
When I got down to the barn, it was no surprise to find the paddock surface a complete disaster of wet mud. Cyndie had let the horses out in the morning, with blankets on, and they were now just doing their horse-best of enduring the insult of cold and wet. They were again greatly relieved to be able to come in for the night and get a break from the nastiness being unleashed on the land.
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Precious Gifts
We endured one heck of a nasty day of weather yesterday. It produced another inch-and-a-half in the rain gauge, which may not be entirely accurate, because much of the rain was moving horizontally due to significant wind. There were way too many scarily powerful gusts. It was a good excuse to have a fire in the fireplace, watch a rented documentary movie up in our loft, and putter around with indoor tasks. We finally hung some pictures that have accumulated over time.
The inspiration to hang pictures came from having brought home a precious gift-upon-gift after visiting our friends’ house yesterday. Mike Wilkus had already gifted us with a watercolor portrait of a horse in motion which he painted, and that we absolutely love. When I explained that I had some old barn wood that I hoped to use for a frame, but no experience or tools to cut a mat and build a frame, he accepted the challenge without hesitation.
We gave him back the picture, handed over the barn wood, and he created a superb, professional quality framed work of custom art. The result is the epitome of priceless to us. It is all that I hoped for, and so much more.
We moved a couple of things around to make room for this picture on our wall, and once on a roll, were able to get another precious portrait hung that Cyndie recently put in a frame. Marco Morales gave us a pencil drawing portrait of Delilah that he did during his visit this winter.
We made a spot for it right beneath another priceless creation that our friend Nancy Olmsted made and presented to us. She created a picture using sewn fabric that depicts an image of our house and incorporates the labyrinth and cardinals, symbols from a weekend visit here with Cyndie and a group of friends.
Our house continues to evolve to become more and more our home. Being blessed with so many precious, personally created gifts of art is deeply enriching for us. These are all gifts that really do keep on giving, over and over, every time we see them.
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Significant Soaking
For all those many days of last July through October that left our land under stress from drought, I wish I could capture the current thorough soaking and redistribute it later this summer. This is what spring is all about though, and all the growing things will be happily slurping this up, soon to burst forth with explosive growth.
I captured a shot of the rain gauge showing that we came just a fraction short of a full inch-and-a-half over about a 24-hour period. It was the perfect ongoing precipitation, able to soak through the top layer and saturate everything very completely. In fact, it seems wetter now than at any previous point during the recent melt of the full winter’s-worth of snow.
Another difference from then and now is that there are worms coming up out of the ground all over the place. If that doesn’t feel like spring…
We took a chance of leaving the horses out in the overnight rain on Wednesday evening, and it turned out to be the wrong choice. Cyndie went out into the soaking rain early yesterday morning to feed them, and found them all shivering drastically and begging to be let inside. They were crowding so tight at the gate that she couldn’t manage getting Legacy through alone, although he was the only one she had a rope around. All four horses came in at the same time, and with no hesitation or funny business, they each walked directly into their appointed stalls.
Message received.
I checked on them several times during the day yesterday, and they seemed as happy as could possibly be. I topped off their water and when the rain stopped late in the afternoon around their dinner time, I opened all the outside doors for them while I delivered feed and fresh hay. Not one of them gave a hint of being anxious to get out of the barn. It’s a good thing, because even though the rain had stopped falling, the runoff was still flowing and every last hoof print in the paddock was filled with water. There was not a dry place to stand anywhere outside.
I spent the rest of my day trying to be productive in the office of our house, organizing files and putting documents away in places where we just might stand a chance of finding them again should we need them. Delilah alternated between lounging around, napping, and demanding to go outside and get soaking wet in order to come right back in and get dried off so she could beg to be let back outside to get soaking wet so she could come right back in to get toweled off again. I started to wonder if she didn’t just want to be rubbed with a towel over and over.
Today should be a different day altogether. We expect to get some sunshine and reach reasonably warm temperatures. Will it dry up enough to mow? I doubt it, but there are other outdoor chores available. If nothing else, I can always get another kind of soaking, bathing in the warm solar rays while watching buds appear on tree branches. This is spring!
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No Foolin’
I think we just might have gotten past the messiest part of the spring snow melt season yesterday. At least, that’s what the optimist in me is hanging his hopes on. It is hard to shake the memory of that 18 inch snowfall that buried us last May and significantly prolonged the drying out of our property last year, but something is telling me that won’t be our plight this year.
A remarkable amount of ground made its first appearance of 2014 during yesterday’s dose of warmth and wind. We were blessed with two separate periods of relatively light rainfall which is always a big help in melting the snow pack. I was able to make my way along a good portion of our southern property line and was thrilled to find that the new culvert we installed, along with the preliminary improvements to open up the drainage ditch, are functioning brilliantly. It is easy to see where we should continue, and I have renewed inspiration and confidence about what I want to do next to maximize the benefits possible in helping our land drain in a controlled way.
The channel I made on Sunday is still in place at the edge of the southern ditch. Looking back up toward where all the water is coming from, you can see how much it wants to spread out now. One of my goals this summer will be to dig out a more defined creek bed across this field with our tractor, and then soften the edges to a gentle slope, and seed it with grass. Most of the year it will simply be a dry depression, only filling with water during the snow melt or a significant rainfall.
Our water-loving dog, Delilah, is mad about helping me get the water to flow. She runs up and down the channels and tries to bite the water wherever it ripples or gurgles. I like it when she helps down here because the ground isn’t muddy and the water is clean, so she just gets wet. The running back and forth does wonders to burn off her otherwise endless energy. When we came in, I toweled her off as she lay on her back, and then she curled up with the towel and took a nap.
On my way back to the house, I plodded past the labyrinth and discovered an interesting phenomenon. The melting snow is creating an inverse image as compared to the way it looked when I was shoveling the route in winter. It takes longer for packed snow to melt, so the path that I repeatedly trekked with snow shoes is now taller than the border areas of stones. They appear as depressions between the paths now.
It’s true. I’m not just saying that because it’s April 1st. Seriously.
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Relative Something 