Posts Tagged ‘relationships’
Silly Victory
“I win.” Simple as that. When engaged in meaningless banter with Cyndie, particularly if my point has no basis for accuracy, I will swiftly blurt, “I win.” The debate is over.
Most accurate at that point of our back and forth is that I have totally lost. It served well for many years in introducing humor into our interactions but not so much anymore.
Pretending to win when you obviously haven’t isn’t funny after a certain grift leader managed to make it to the highest office in our country and then inspired his minions to violence in an attempt to keep his position.
One of the safeties of a home is the opportunity to be silly in ways that might come across poorly in public. [loud belch]
This morning, to occupy Asher’s mind for a moment of distraction, Cyndie assembled a hidden treat vessel from found materials. He would need to figure out a way to get to the delicious bites he could smell wrapped inside paper and resting in the 12 pockets of an egg carton.
I watched as he was trying to figure out how to open the carton, surprised that he didn’t just bite into it to rip it apart. As he picked up his head to see what Cyndie was doing, his paw rolled across the carton and it popped open. When he looked back down, there were all the wads of paper.
The exercise lasted maybe 5 minutes and certainly won’t help to discourage him from scrounging in our trash in the future, but it was something new and different to entertain his food-driven curiosity and distract from his whining for attention.
Even a mere five minutes of re-occupying his mind can feel like a silly victory sometimes.
“We win.”
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New Visitors
This morning we found evidence of new life arriving overnight down under the overhang.
At least two recently opened eggshells were on the ground beneath the horses. I won’t be the least bit surprised if the many barn pigeons have expanded their numbers. They will share a close birthday with the new robin hatchlings nesting in the branches of the spruce tree just outside our sunroom windows.
Yesterday we spotted the momma bird hopping up branches of the tree with a worm in her mouth and the little heads soon appeared with mouths opened wide.
We also enjoyed a visit from a new connection made at the Tour of Minnesota bike week. After several years of seeing each other on the tour, Scott Skaja overheard me mention having horses and quickly showed interest in bringing his family to see the place one day.
Yesterday was our opportunity before his oldest leaves for college in Florida and we were graced with a beautiful day to roam the property and mingle with the horses while also giving Asher plenty of attention.
The Skaja family was able to witness our experiment with refamiliarizing the horses with the inside of the barn. A vet appointment on the calendar in early August will require the horses to be in the stalls, so we will be offering them multiple opportunities to grow comfortable doing so.
We tried this last year but when Cyndie shattered her ankle in November it interrupted the process and the horses ended up making it through the winter without ever needing to be brought in.
Moving them one at a time when they aren’t sure about coming inside was a challenge I did not want to deal with all alone.
Scott and his wife and daughters stood outside the half-doors to observe how the four horses made their way inside and sniffed around every nook and cranny before eventually finding pans of feed to snack on inside each stall. Cyndie and I felt as though the horses showed evidence of remembering the visits last year and seemed pleasingly comfortable being inside.
It was a great chance to let the Skajas watch the horses explore new things and behave like the big, beautiful creatures they are, including pooping in the barn. Daughter, Bella graciously volunteered to do the scooping up afterward. I took advantage of that momentum to show off my manure composting process.
Not very impressive compared to Cyndie serving up freshly baked scones, a variety of incredibly delicious cold salads for lunch, topped off with a peach pie she baked earlier.
Obviously, Cyndie and I have different areas of expertise.
It will be tough to beat the fun we had yesterday, once again confirming our impressions that hosting visitors is truly what brings our paradise to its fullest splendor.
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Pain Management
Which is more difficult: Suffering great pain ourselves or watching a loved one suffer pain that we can’t do anything about? It hurts either way. The good news is that Cyndie is home and making great progress in coping with the immediate after-effects of a TKA.
You know, Total Knee Arthroplasty. Geesh. Loosely, arthro -joint / plasty -molding, grafting or forming. Otherwise known as knee replacement.
Progress doesn’t mean mastering. As of last night, I would describe it as the pain having the best of her. Pain: 2 / Cyndie: 1.
My biggest challenge is figuring out how to keep her from doing anything that isn’t helpful to her situation while she is on pain medication. Keeping Cyndie from doing things is akin to herding cats.
She was on the couch resting when I stepped out to walk Delilah and tend to the horses yesterday afternoon. In the fraction of an hour that I was outside, she got up off the couch and worked on hanging up new shower curtains that were delivered to our house on Monday.
That wasn’t something that needed to happen and could easily have waited for me to take care of later.
This kind of behavior makes it even harder on me when she later cries in pain and admits maybe she did a little too much. Ya think?
I’m not a great one for policing her actions in general. How do you stop a perpetual motion machine? As a result, it’s complicated for me when my role in caring for her involves trying to control her activities. She tells me it hurts if she lays too long, so she gets up and walks. Looks to me like it hurts to walk and it hurts when she struggles back into bed.
Thankfully, there was room to increase the dosage of pain meds to manage her comfort at this phase of the recovery.
The saving grace of this knee replacement is going to be the iceless cold compression therapy machine Cyndie rented. Chilled water is automatically pumped through a wrap on her knee and it cycles on and off in programmed intervals.
I was able to watch Cyndie’s initial physical therapy session before we left the recovery hotel and I asked the therapist about how important the exercises are to optimizing recovery. Her answer: they are 100% the key to achieving full range of motion but you must do them all consistently as prescribed and no more than prescribed. Shouldn’t underdo or overdo it.
Hmm. I’m gonna opt out of being in charge of that.
Hopefully, it won’t be long before the pain is managed without narcotics altering her consciousness. It’s challenging enough for me to keep pace with Cyndie’s mode of operation on normal days.
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Never Enough
There are a lot of ways that Cyndie and I are wonderfully compatible, and near the top of the list should be our shared appreciation/fascination with rocks. We both agree that you can never have enough rocks. Toward that end, yesterday Cyndie went into our woods where our newly cut trails had uncovered old piles of fieldstone and hauled a bunch out for use in the labyrinth.
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Our farmer neighbors think we are weird to hold their old rock piles in such high regard.
Cyndie shared a sweet story from her day. When she dumped one load of stones it made a loud clatter that caught the attention of our closest neighbor who was out trimming branches near his deer stand. He called out to her to ask if she was okay. I’m sure from his location it could have sounded like quite a crash.
It’s very comforting to know neighbors watch out for each other here.
These perfect specimens will get placed around the labyrinth pathways to build up the existing borders and allow removal of more of the artificial rocks we used when first establishing the circuitous route. We had pallets of manufactured stone left over from the decorative veneer plastered around the block foundation below the log walls of our house. At the time, it seemed like a good use of the material, but they don’t hold up well against the elements when laying flat on the ground. Some have broken apart from the moisture and many others are simply getting swallowed by the earth around them.
It was interesting for me to work on the different labyrinth design up at the lake over the weekend because that one has very wide borders that are three times the width of the narrow path.
Our labyrinth at home has wide paths with just a single line of stones as dividers.
After working with both, I now wish we could make our rock dividers wider at home, but doing so would narrow the path more than we want. Maybe by placing larger rocks strategically we can beef up the pathway borders enough to provide more of the visual impression I desire without compromising the walking space too much.
There never seems to be enough time to work on the enhancements we both dream of and there are never enough reasons to stop tweaking the design once and for all.
Our labyrinths will always be growing and changing with time.
And they will never have enough rocks, no matter what.
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Incidental Accents
I suffer to imagine how plain my world might become if I lived alone. Once again, I am tending to the day-to-day alone while Cyndie is away from home. My meals have become embarrassingly simplified. I don’t change sheets, I wash the ones I just slept in and put them right back on the bed. I move from one chore to the next methodically, practically.
Too often, I take for granted the myriad enhancements Cyndie bestows upon our surroundings. Incidental accents that subtly enrich my environment, not only visually, but energetically, too.
As much as I like having alone time, the void created by Cyndie’s absence greatly impacts the cost/benefit ratio.
Where do the magical flower blossoms come from that are scattered along our pathways? I don’t have anything to do with them. That’s all Cyndie’s effort.
I usually walk past all the places she stashes them without noticing, but the other day, I spotted this one that looked like it was reflecting the expanse of starry space, light-years beyond our planet.
That priceless morsel wouldn’t be here if it were left up to me at this point in my life.
I might fail to pay worthy attention to the flowers, but I will never fail to appreciate that the compliment of Cyndie’s and my way of doing things is so much more than just the sum of two parts.
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Co-Favorite Place
For all of my adult life, Cyndie’s family vacation home on Round Lake near Hayward, Wisconsin has been my favorite place. As I wrote yesterday, my affections are now split between our paradise of Wintervale Ranch in Beldenville and Wildwood Lodge Club up north.
I now have co-favorite places.
It is wonderful to be up at the lake again.
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As always, the special feature of the lodge club is communing with the other families and we received an early dose of camaraderie when the next door Whitlock clan showed up just after Cyndie and I arrived. Much love ensued.
There is a lot to do around the property to make it look less neglected as the ravages of winter appear to have wreaked havoc on anything left out in the elements.
Case in point: The front steps to the Friswold “cabin” for which I was so proud to have repaired a single paver block last summer are now failing en masse as the foundation underneath appears to be giving out.
Entire rows are tipping forward. I suppose it’s unfair to blame one winter for this, but it sure seemed fine last year.
I can’t blame the extreme state of the smoke clouded doors of the living room fireplace on anything but neglect to tend to the task of cleaning them in a timely manner. When Marie asked me to build a fire, I figured it wouldn’t add much to the ambience if we couldn’t see the flames. It took a lot of ash-soaked newspaper to rub off the insanely thick baked-on accumulation of smoke on those glass doors.
At least I had the joy of trying to ignite unseasoned firewood that had been supplied for our fire-building pleasure. No wonder there was so much gunk on the glass of the doors.
Maybe, if I love this place as much as I do home, I need to more equally split my attention to maintenance chores. Is the building of a lake-place woodshed in my future?
I would sure appreciate the luxury of selecting dry wood for our fires. So would the chimney flue.
The more immediate concern will be cleaning the beach today. The lake ice pushed a new berm of sandy leaves about a foot high along the full length of our beach shoreline.
What a wonderful location for putting in a day’s work.
My co-favorite place, in fact.
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Chicken Thoughts
It was a good question. What are we going to do differently to protect our new chickens this time? When I heard myself answering, I realized how little in-depth thought I have actually given the subject.
Are we doing them justice by raising them amid the same risk of predation that decimated all our flocks before? I’m not sure.
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Cyndie has dubbed them the Buffalo Gals and the Rocketts in reference to their origins.
My primary reason for wanting our chickens to free-range is for the service they provide in controlling bugs. I’ve also discovered how much fun they are as companions and that they convert the things they find to eat into amazing eggs.
I’m not against considering ways we might dissuade such frequent attacks on our flock as we recently experienced. I will put renewed effort into staging my trail cam in locations where I might capture evidence of visiting predators to give better confirmation of what we are dealing with.
It feels a little like our efforts to constrain water runoff and control erosion or prevent excessive sediment where we don’t want it.
Nature does what it does. Our best successes will come from finding constructive adaptations instead of entirely stopping things we don’t desire from happening.
Imagine the predation phenomena from the perspective of the flies and ticks that try to survive on our land. They are under constant assault from chickens.
Our chickens face threats from their natural predators. We’ve decided to not confine them to fenced quarters that would make it harder for the fox or coyotes to kill them.
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Today, we hope to clean up the coop and try making some modifications to accommodate housing more birds than ever before. The Buffalo Gals will be moving to the coop soon. That will allow us to get the Rockets out of the basement bathroom and into the larger brooder tub in the barn.
We will give our chickens the best life possible for their time with us. Past demonstrations have shown their natural instincts help them control their own destiny up to a point. Their life here will not be risk-free.
For the time being, I guess we are demonstrating we are choosing to accept that.
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Strong One
We all have different strengths, don’t we? Yes. Yes, we do. But I am not sure about the comparison of muscle strength between my precious wife and me. This occurred to me yesterday after I got our lawn tractor stuck and needed to go get Cyndie to help.
Despite the more than three inches of rain that had fallen the previous 24-hours to thankfully soak our parched land, I was attempting to mow before things began to adequately dry. I was literally cutting between the trailing scattered showers.
Mow the front yard until rain started falling, park the mower in the garage.
Mow by the barn until it started raining again, park the mower back in the garage.
When I tried traversing the recently re-landscaped dip where Cyndie and I had rolled up the sod to dig out accumulated dirt, the tractor became hopelessly wedged in the muddy turf. I was stuck.
I was also in a hurry because a few drops were starting to fall again. I hiked around behind the barn, past the empty chicken coop, around the back pasture to the labyrinth where Cyndie was rearranging sunken stones and pulling weeds. She happily obliged my request for assistance.
Then, the woman who asks me to use my superior strength to open jars for her in the kitchen proceeds to pick up the back end of the tractor and move it over so my push from the front can roll it around the rocks bordering her perennial garden.
In my whiny sad voice, “Honey, can you come lift the tractor out of the mud for me so I can keep mowing in the rain?”
I know who the strong one is around here.
I’m pretty sure she lets me open jars just to prevent my ego from starving to death.
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Typical Exchange
This is a classic example of a typical exchange between Cyndie and me. To set the stage, it was business as usual around the house last night when I walked into the bathroom to brush my teeth while Cyndie stepped into the garage, focused on a task of her own.
Through the white noise of my activity and whatever self-talk was flowing around in my head, I thought I heard a shrill little distant shout. I paused for a second and my creative mind raced through possible scenarios, including the concern Cyndie was shouting in distress about something. The most likely conclusion I came up with was that she had probably sneezed.
As I finished dabbing toothpaste on the bristles of the brush, I heard the door to the garage open.
I said, “Did you sneeze?”
Cyndie replied, “What?”
“Did you sneeze?” I repeated.
When I heard her say, “Yes” I turned on my electric toothbrush.
Over the hum of the motor and with the sound vibrations of the rotating agitator polishing my teeth and resonating through my skull to the bones in my ears, I detected additional distant mumbling that could only have been Cyndie still talking.
I kept brushing. But I thought about the fact that she most likely would assume I heard every word she had said. I wondered to myself whether it warranted stopping my toothbrush to ask for a do-over on that added detail I had missed. Honestly, it probably involved descriptions about her sneeze or what triggered it, both of which I suspected weren’t critical for me to know.
In contemplating all this, I realized this sort of thing happens all the time between us. I tend to hear the first part of an answer, but the colorful addendums tend to get drowned out by whatever else is going on at the time.
If I don’t point out the fact I haven’t clearly heard anything beyond the initial speaking, there arises a falsehood of a common shared reality. Cyndie will assume a point has been communicated and I won’t have any idea that I’ve missed something that might have been significant.
The thing is, nine times out of ten it turns out to be a spur-of-the-moment colloquial expression of silliness or pleasantries. Both welcome enhancements when palling around with a companion, but neither very costly if not fully deciphered. At that, I must admit to being guilty more often than not of letting my ignorance go unnoticed.
A nod and an auditory “Mmm-hmmm” augment the facade of my feigned grasp.
I’m afraid if I were given a test about each day’s conversations, I might score embarrassingly low.
When I told Cyndie this story about not hearing anything beyond the fact she had, indeed, sneezed, she said the added comment was, “…and it was a Lollapalooza!” or something to that effect.
Mmm-hmm. Yes, dear.
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Unknown Connections
There is so much music that I feel connected to, a lifetime’s worth, really. More to the point, the songwriters and performing artists. They have shared their creative visions and I have absorbed their renditions, on repeating rotations for years and often decades. Some of the people whose work has resonated for me draw me to want to know more about them.
I am an unabashed fan.
Their music is the most listened to in my library. They become connected to me in the unique way of celebrity, in that they have no idea who I am, but to me, it is as if we have become friends.
Upon fantasizing about how things would go if we suddenly found ourselves hanging out together with no agenda or time constraints, I wonder, would the artists of my liking honestly show any sense of connection with me?
My cat seems to like me in a way that hints at a connection. She also will just as quickly demonstrate total disdain. I guess, in reality, that combination of feelings is mutual.
That creative artist who penned lyrics that trip my trigger of perspectives, curiosities, emotions, longings, or visions of the world probably also chews food with their mouth open or has some other odd characteristic that would sour my attraction.
I could get all stalker-like and make my fanaticism known to them to find out for sure, but it makes much more sense to me that I leave the connection unknown, other than my anonymous contribution to their financial success by buying what they are selling and listening to the product of their genius.
The secret to connecting with an artist, in my opinion, is by not knowing anything about them when you meet. If a connection clicks, it isn’t a result of the preconceived perception one would have in mind. I have been curious to know how celebrities feel about meeting people who have no idea about their fame.
I would guess for really famous people, it would be refreshing.
In this scenario, I hope I wouldn’t end up dissing the person like the way my cat disses me.
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Relative Something 