Posts Tagged ‘routine’
Good Behavior
I maintain a routine (imagine that) in the morning when I walk Delilah and then feed and clean up after the horses. On my own for the last four weeks, while Cyndie has been convalescing after her knee replacement surgery, the horses are showing recognition for my consistent way of doing things.
As Delilah and I round the bend of the back pasture into view of the horses, I always offer a soft verbal greeting to the horses. No matter where they happen to be standing when I make that turn, by the time I pass through the barn to grab the wheelbarrow and open the door under the overhang, Swings will be standing in the first spot by the door to greet me.
It’s a crapshoot whether the two chestnuts will be on “their side” or anywhere else at that point, often a function of wherever Mix has harassed them to be, but not always. This morning, Mia was right where she should be, opposite Swings. Mix was close enough to where she is served her feed pan. Light stood on the wrong side, about halfway down toward the waterer.
My first order of business is to clean up any manure piles located under the overhang. In the early days of this exercise, the horses demonstrated some impatience with my actions delaying the service of their morning feed. Now they remain wonderfully calm and wait politely for me to work at a leisurely pace to get the job done.
When I disappear back into the barn, they know what will come next. I return with filled feed pans. Today the distribution went flawlessly, which is not always the case. Too often, Light will upset the order by ignoring her feed pan and instead choosing to steal Swings’ pan, which triggers what I call the morning ballet.
Swings will switch to eat Mix’s; Mix will choose either of the chestnuts’ pans, which they theatrically abandon. Mia will be the odd mare out and Light will go find a different pan.
When I am able, I put gates between them, isolating the chestnuts. That calms things significantly. It is only when one or both of the chestnuts stay on the wrong side that I am unable to take advantage of using the gates.
Today, as I placed the pan for Swings and then walked over to place Mix’s, I saw Light stroll downhill around the waterer and come up on the correct side to allow me to close the gates and give her and Mia their pans in the usual locations. All four stayed in place and munched away peacefully.
When Light chooses to play along with my intentions, everyone benefits.
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Several Routines
As I was going through my usual work-week routine last night, preparing my breakfast and lunch for today, this is what I observed: I have a tendency for routine. Every night before work, I take steps to support my quick departure the next morning at an early hour to beat traffic in my long commute to the far side of the Twin Cities.
In the morning, all I need to do is get dressed and go, after waking and going through my planking and stretching routine. My clothes were selected the night before and my breakfast and lunch foods prepared in advance.
My process for preparing my foods for the workday is equally routine.
I precisely measure my serving of cereal for the morning breakfast to stay below my threshold for added sugar. The amount of yogurt that I serve with my cereal is only a fraction of the amount in a typical “single serving” package. There is a perfect-sized spoon I like to use for this small serving of yogurt.
Since I do this routine repeatedly, I don’t simply put the spoon in with dirty dishes when I am done with it. I wash the spoon and place it back in the silverware drawer, but not just anywhere. I slip it beneath all the other various spoons of that style so I can be sure to find it the next day.
Some have a smaller scoop. Some have longer handles. Those aren’t the ones I want.
I do this because, if I leave it right on top, the odds are high that Cyndie will take it next time she is looking for a spoon.
Seems simple enough at this point, I hope. However, this plan doesn’t always produce the desired results.
Very often, when I reach in to grab “my spoon,” it’s not there on the bottom anymore.
Why not?
I’ve talked with Cyndie about it, and she has no clue.
In my head, I picture her reaching in and grabbing whatever spoon is on top at the time. This shouldn’t mix the order enough to dislodge my carefully stowed particular spoon.
Must be some other mysterious law of physics I know nothing about.
Now, by this point, you must be imagining any number of easy alternative solutions to avoiding this problem of keeping track of one specific spoon. I could tie a ribbon on the handle. I could place it in a different location away from the other spoons.
I know.
But, honestly, this situation doesn’t even deserve the number of words I’m wasting on it here. If I seriously fretted over this, I could easily come up with a more permanent solution. It’s become more of a game for me to see if the spoon will be there, or not.
I’m intrigued by the odd phenomenon.
And look, it provided fodder for another of my ROUTINEs: writing a daily blog post.
Obviously, I have a tendency for routine.
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Reclaiming Normal
For all the times we look forward to holidays and time off from work, it feels wrong to be so interested in having things get back to normal. I am a big proponent of staying open to variety and change, but at the same time, I have a very strong comfort with routine.
This weekend, we brought a return to normalcy in a variety of ways at home, not the least of which involved the taking down of Christmas decorations and returning furniture to the usual arrangements. I will be lobbying for a return to our artificial tree next year.
Getting back to my routine of days commuting to the day-job, and (full) days home without travel holds a surprising appeal now that we are a week into the new year. I’m guessing one of the reasons it seems so appealing to me today is because my health has also made great progress toward normal wellness again.
I spent much of the weekend lying low in quest of recuperation. It seems to have produced desired results.
Here’s to the rare phenomena of feeling good about the arrival of a typical Monday morning.
Hah!
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Epic Normal
Some days are just days. The simple steps of tending to basic maintenance and chores that happen every day can become so routine they fade to obscurity.
Yet, living it feels anything but obscure. Each simple accomplishment brings huge satisfaction.
This weekend, having our son, Julian, visit to pick up a package that Fed-Ex delivered here, and recruiting his help with some compost distribution and wood splitting, were particularly rewarding.
We used the Grizzly to pull trailer loads of wood, and with him driving, I gained a perspective of the squeaky brakes that helped to push me toward finally taking it in to professionals for service. Julian helped me get the ATV secured in the bed of our truck and I dropped it off in River Falls.
It could be several weeks until I see it again, so we are hoping there won’t be significant need for clearing the driveway of snow until well after that.
Maybe in a sympathetic response to Delilah’s painful condition, I experienced a return of degenerating disc symptoms as I leaned forward to pick up a piece of firewood, which brought a quick end to the delightful progress we were accomplishing. I’m on limited duty once again.
Luckily, that presented no disruption to a planned visit from a co-worker and her husband. She wanted to surprise him with the trip because he has a big appreciation for the majesty of horses, despite little access to them. Cyndie was wise enough to guide some time inside the fence for them, a step that is reserved for very few visitors.
As always, Legacy proved the consummate companion for the interaction with his herd-leading confident calmness. Dezirea couldn’t spare but a moment to accommodate us, as her attention was otherwise fixed on something in the distance that I couldn’t see.
Regardless the obscuring nature of the inherent normal-ness of the weekend, it all felt perfectly epic.
Given the right perspective, living in the moment can provide that result.
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New Routine
After spending the 3-day weekend as guests at a place we’ve never been before, getting home to the familiarity of the daily chores associated with caring for our animals can be a comfort. This thought led me to consider how I perceive the old routine, especially from the fresh perspective of the fabulous weekend we just enjoyed with the Walker family.
Traveling anywhere involves living with a limited selection of your clothes and devices, and getting oriented to a bed and bathroom other than your own. Back home again, places and things return to a level where you don’t have to think. Every thing just “is.”
When I went out to turn the compost piles and fix a flat tire on the wheelbarrow, it had a feeling of our old routine. Even though I saw that as a good thing, it occurred to me that “old routine” or “returning to the old grind” of the work week after a holiday weekend is more often framed as a negative.
I turned that around in a blink of mental gymnastics, choosing instead to consider our activities as routine, but new. We have done these things before, but never on September 6th in 2016.
Every day is a new day, even if we are doing something similar to what we’ve already done before.
This week is a time when school starts for a lot of people. We put the vacations of summer behind us and roll into another year’s routine.
Enjoy the familiar, but frame it as a brand new version.
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Very Wet
Yesterday was a beautiful day and we spent the middle hours of it in moderate traffic driving home from the lake. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me more to have driven up to that beautiful place and then experience most of the time confined indoors due to incredibly wet weather. When it finally turned nice, we were packing up and driving home.
For some reason, I didn’t mind one bit.
Just like that, we were home and it was back to the regular routine. I finished the day mowing our grass. The ground was completely saturated in many areas, surprisingly so in the back yard, to the point that the mower left muddy tire tracks in its wake. There is standing water in multiple places, which I needed to navigate around instead of cutting.
I’m looking forward to the few days of dry weather being forecast for the beginning of this week.
The signal booster I ordered last week is scheduled to arrive Wednesday. Getting it installed and calibrated will become my primary objective on Friday if the weather permits.
If it works as intended, it should significantly reduce the time it takes for me to load photos and program my daily posts. I’m hoping to convert the precious freed up minutes into added sleep time.
Getting more sleep will be a welcome change to my daily routine. I’m hoping my posts will begin to reflect it with a little bit less sleep-typing going on during the processsssssss.
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Breakfast Served
I’m posting a little later than usual for a weekday, but it’s a weekend day for me, since I work a 4-day week at the day-job, so that’s my excuse. The actual truth is that I am busier than usual tending to tasks because my ranch partner is on vacation. Cyndie is lounging by the pool at her parent’s home in Florida for a couple of weeks.
I know! She deserves it, make no mistake.
She threatened to pay me back by taking care of our place and George’s for a few days so we could go up to Hayward, WI and do some skiing. That’s nice, but sounds like a lot more work than lounging by a pool, to me.
I am back in the old routine of waking up alone and giving all the animals the morning attention they require. The first task is cleaning up after the horses in the area of the barn overhang. Then I serve up their breakfast cereal in a dance that has become very routine for them when I am doing it. I love how apparent it is that they understand what I will do, and they wait patiently, for the most part, for me to mosey through the steps.
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You may notice in the images, we are being treated this morning to a picturesque “snow-globe” snowfall that is adding a magical feeling to this winter morning. It doesn’t hurt that the temperature has warmed considerably, bringing more than a magical feeling, it is a very real sensation of being much more comfortable for a winter day.
On the way to the barn, Delilah has already taken care of her first order of business, and then she busies herself in the barn by searching for mice or barking annoyingly at the horses or some distant other dog that is inevitably baying for attention. Delilah is more than happy to oblige the neighbor dogs, regardless the anxiety it creates in me and the horses.
If she would be quiet, that morning time can be incredibly serene. When she’s not, her harsh hollering is exceptionally grating. It usually earns her a short leash in the middle of the barn, after which, I close the doors on her. There. Take that, Ms. Barksalot.
When the hay boxes are topped off and the immediate vicinity is poo-free, Delilah gets what she has been waiting for. I take her for a walk. This morning’s was a shortened version, because when we reached the road, there were empty garbage and recycle bins ready to be returned to the garage.
Delilah is usually more than happy to have a short a.m. walk, because returning to the house means she will be presented with her morning meal.
After all that, the master of the house finally is served. Well, not really served. I have to get it myself. Time for my breakfast!
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Rinse, Repeat
February is beginning to feel like a lot of the same thing over and over again for me. It’s all good, so I don’t want to complain, but I’m finding myself increasingly thinking that a little more variety in the weather would be nice. I need to be careful what I wish for, or I could end up facing the kind of epic weather that Boston has been enduring.
To keep things interesting, I have taken to purposefully trying to widen the trails Delilah and I walk everyday, by tromping down the edges on each side so it becomes about 3-times wider than just a single person walking footpath. Most places that is pretty simple to do, but out in the open the trail keeps getting obliterated by drifting snow. It’s like starting over each time when I run into drifts, and it packs down on top of the previous path, so the trail gets higher and higher instead of deeper. If you step too close to the edge, it becomes a dramatic drop through all the unpacked snow to a level much below the packed trail.
Delilah doesn’t like to walk in the drifts, so when we come to them she will move over to a nearby ridge and trot along easily as I bullheadedly try to forge my way straight through the deepest part. I’m sure we make quite a sight.
The later sunsets are becoming very noticeable now and even though it is still very cold, the added light seems to be enticing the animals toward shedding already. Information about Delilah’s breed, Belgian Tervuren Shepherd, suggests she should be brushed weekly, which I don’t come close to achieving. We prefer brushing her outdoors because it creates a blizzard of dog hair, but it isn’t much fun in the extreme cold.
I tried to do just a small bit inside, grabbing hair off the brush at every stroke, but soon the air flowing through our heat vents was carrying stray hairs aloft in spectacular numbers. One of those comical disasters.
Can you see Legacy’s breath in the cold air?
Unlike this picture, the horses are currently wearing their blankets. I think Legacy’s blanket is really bugging him. I keep spotting him trying to scratch his itches and he hooks the blanket on everything possible, making it look like he is trying to rip it off. He rarely tolerates me putting hands on him, but the other day he leaned hard into my hand as I scratched his neck and chin for him. There was plenty of hair floating loose, so I think the horses are on the verge of changing their coats.
Other than issues of shedding, our routine is on repeat from the day before, and the week before that. Walk the dog, feed the horses, clean up after the horses.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
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Morning Routine
We are in the third weekend since Cyndie’s surgery and things are going really well. Struggles have been minor and triumphs have been many. This morning I am experiencing a bit of a longing to be able to sleep in. Normally, weekend mornings are Cyndie’s chance to greet the horses she has been missing during the week, allowing me the opportunity to wake slowly, linger in bed, and compose my weekend blog posts.
I’ve long heard stories about dairy farmers who needed to get up early every day of every week, without exception, to milk cows. I am feeling an increased appreciation for that commitment.
My morning routine has normalized for all of us and is flowing very comfortably of late. Delilah has pleasantly announced her waking with soft mutterings, remaining stretched out on the bed in her overnight crate after she hears sounds of me getting up. I switch on the kitchen light and she lolls in place luxuriously while I get myself dressed and ready to take her out and feed the horses. It is a very soothing pace to start the day.
We step out and locate the horses during our stroll to the barn. It takes the herd no time at all to sense our approach, whereupon they begin something of a controlled stroll toward their morning feed. It is as if they don’t want to appear too eager.
The one variation in the pattern happens as they select who gets which feed pan. Some days it is very straight forward, and sometimes it becomes a complicated exercise of gamesmanship as the chestnuts take turns flaunting domination by driving each other off one pan to another.
If it is windy, or something else has them already on edge, feeding under the roof overhang is fraught with multiple emergency response drills as they all erupt in a hasty dash out from under cover whenever any one of them even flinches at the slightest thing. Just as quick, they seem to figure out it was a false alarm and come right back, but that doesn’t stop another panic from happening 20-seconds later.
It’s interesting that my presence is sometimes a contributor to their alarm, but more often completely ignored. I need to stay alert to be out of the way when they panic, and they surprise me that they don’t react at some of the clanging and banging noises I make when I am fumbling about.
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While they are focused on the feed pans, I wander over to the hay shed to fill the wheelbarrow with flakes that I distribute to the two feeders. As soon as the horses have licked the feed pans clean, they come munch hay. Hunter most often chooses to wait until the other three dive into the first station I have filled, then he chooses the other one. Sometimes another horse might meander over to join him, sometimes not.
After horses are fed, Delilah and I head out on an exploration of our trails. I will often let her choose the route, and I just follow along, stopping wherever she chooses to linger, examining the source of some scent that has dramatically grabbed her full attention.
Once back to the house, both she and Pequenita are served their breakfast, after which there settles a wonderful calm over the house.
When Cyndie gets back to full mobility, and we get back to the old weekend morning routine, that calm moment will be about the time I think about finally getting up.
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Same Old New Routine
So, this is what it is like to get back to the old routine, except that it is actually the new routine, since we are now in a new calendar year. I can’t help but notice that it isn’t any different than the routine from before. For all the difficulty I have with maintaining a focus on the present moment, it would actually be fair to describe me as one who gives rather limited attention to the future and as only sporadically dwelling in the past. Today’s routine is pretty much just what I bother myself with tending to.
It is becoming apparent to me that I find routine to be a comfortable thing. I like to claim being flexible and willing to adapt to change, but I do prefer to put things in a particular order and behave in a way that supports and maintains that order, even if it is a loose definition of order. Lately… say, the last couple years, it seems, I have fallen into a pattern of keeping a large majority of my laundry on the floor in front of Cyndie’s vanity set in our bedroom. Clean clothes, folded and piled, get set there and my not-yet-dirty pants and shirts, recently worn, get draped over the top. I dig through the piles during the week until it is a random mixture of once folded clean clothes and my more preferred and frequently worn, but not yet dirty, shirts and pants. It is a routine that serves my process better than having things get put away. Sure, it looks better put away, but it just never seems to last very long.
That is my version of order, I guess.
My penchant for routine stood out to me yesterday afternoon when Cyndie got home from an errand, having used my car, and reported that she had filled the gas tank. She wanted to tell me because she knew I keep track of the details, saving receipts and logging mileage and she hadn’t done that. I stepped out to the garage right away, because if I didn’t, I was sure I’d forget, primarily, to reset the trip odometer that I use to track fuel progress along with the gauge. But in so doing, I felt a twinge of my being a bit obsessive in my establishment of routine. Partly because Cyndie knew enough about me to feel impelled to need to tell me about it and partly because I write down my mileage each time I fill the tank, yet I have never used that information. I am tempted to just quit doing so, just for the change of routine it would be.
I used to be pretty compelled to go through the exercise of balancing my checkbook and verifying my account every month when my bank statement arrived in the mail. I got knocked out of that habit, for better or worse, when my briefcase, containing both wallet and checkbook, was stolen from my car. All sorts of my routines were disrupted at the time and this is one that for some reason, I ended up never choosing to bring back. Now I randomly review the account online and when the statement is delivered, I don’t even look at it before filing it in a drawer. Maybe that’s an example of living in the moment for me.
I don’t know what the point of all that is, but certainly this rollover of the calendar year, that I rant doesn’t hold any more significance than any other day for taking stock in ourselves, has got me doing so anyway. Go figure. Maybe some of you will find it relative to your own routines today.
Happy first Monday of 2010!
Relative Something 