Posts Tagged ‘solo time’
Solitary Refinement
In the middle of my solo escape to the lake, I find myself thinking about how I can most fully absorb the pleasures of these agenda-less days. When I am tasked daily at home with duties, the dream of having nothing pressing me into an activity grows and grows. I long to have no reason to get out of bed and to pick and choose what comes next by whim instead of by the hour on the clock. An hour, by the way, that has once again shifted disorientingly forward to DST overnight. Ugh, I say, and I don’t even have any schedule that needs to be upheld today.
Looking back on the already vanished last two days of luxurious solo pursuits, I fear the benefits of getting what I so dearly wanted are disappearing without my fully appreciating the greatness of the moments. Today, I plan to see if I can improve on that perception.
There is a herd of deer wandering the grounds that I have enjoyed seeing each day. I counted seven yesterday in the middle of a sunny afternoon. From the obvious pattern of their heavily traveled hoof prints in the snow, it appears they have a much more set agenda than I do.
I made my way to our mini labyrinth in the woods and reclaimed the pathway with my own footprints. There was no sign of wildlife traffic in that area.
No, the deer have been walking right past the house along the ridge above the lake. One or two of them had approached the house to nibble on the branches of one of the landscape shrubs.
I took a few pictures on my walk yesterday morning when the temperature was still below freezing. There was a striking difference in the texture of the snow where shade had kept it all wonderfully powdery, as opposed to the hard crust more prominent everywhere else.
Later in the day, the clouds broke up, and the sun kicked up the amount of melting significantly.
My slow, aimless wandering was one of the divine pleasures I want to deeply appreciate in its contrast to strolling along with Asher, which is more my norm.
Oh, my. Look at the hour. How can it be this late already? Oh, yeah. That.
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Got Away
Made it to the lake place yesterday afternoon for a few days of solo holiday. Without doing much in the way of additional cleanup of snow from Wednesday, in the morning I walked Asher with Cyndie, and we did horse chores together. The scenery was pretty striking, with the bright morning sunshine bouncing off the oodles of snow that had fallen.
The horses didn’t seem as fixated on their grain as usual, and Light even left her food to seek some hands-on attention from Cyndie. After obliging Light with lots of robust scratching, Cyndie ended up covered in shedded horse hair. When she got back to the house, Cyndie changed her shirt but moments later reported she was soon covered in dog hair.
After breakfast, Cyndie assembled enough home-cooked meals from our freezer to feed me for more than a week and sent me on my way for the drive to the lake. Before I left, I drove my car around the hay shed a couple of times to convince myself the crude job I did of clearing the heavy, wet snow would be adequate for traffic while I was away. We are expecting the farrier today.
I texted a message to Cyndie to let her know the tire tracks were mine and not some unexpected visitor. When we were walking Asher first thing in the morning, I spotted footprints in the deep snow of the north loop trail, so we trudged over to check them out. Cyndie asked if they were mine from the day before when I brought Asher back from the neighbors’, but I said no. We wondered who would have been walking on our trail.
Then, when we came upon a pile of branches under the snow, I realized it was me who had made those tracks. I remembered noticing the branches and had thought it was a limb that had fallen in the storm before figuring out it was the pile I had created when cutting up the downed tree a couple of days before.
Memory problems much, John?
When I had been pulling Asher down the middle of the unplowed road after his escape, I spotted a truck coming toward us and diverted to the ditch to give the driver the full width of the road to navigate his way against the drifts. We then made our way along that short section of our trail to reach our driveway. I blame the temper tantrum I was having at the time for completely forgetting we’d made those tracks less than 24 hours before. [shaking my head in embarrassment]
There is a lot less snow in Hayward. The short leg of the driveway to our place hadn’t even been plowed.
I am going to see how long I can keep myself from shoveling the front steps as an exercise in letting one of my compulsions go unaddressed for once.
While puzzling in the afternoon, I listened to a couple of 1960s recordings of Bill Cosby’s standup routines. I have no idea what caused me to think of choosing that.
I think my mind really needs to get away for a while.
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Pretty Colors
Have I written much about the weather lately? When I’m trying to pretend my country isn’t spiraling ridiculously down the proverbial drain, the weather provides a convenient distraction. One thing I appreciate about weather is that the conditions I experience right outside our door are the pure truth. It is hard to gaslight me and tell me that the snow falling isn’t actually falling when I can see it absolutely is.
In the dark of night last evening, we could hear the pelting rain on the roof, but the radar image of the storm revealed the full gamut of what was swirling our way.
So many pretty colors! I am curious what we will find when dawn breaks. The ground was completely covered in white when we headed for bed last night.
We have been warned about the probability of heavy, wet snow in the amounts of 4-8 inches. I’m not looking forward to the effort of pushing wet snow off the driveway with the ATV plow. At least I have the benefit of sun and melting temperatures expected to follow this batch of precipitation. I can get away with doing a rudimentary job of exposing pavement. Solar energy will clean up the asphalt in short order.
My plan at the beginning of this week was to head out today for a solo mini-vacation to the lake for a few days. Cyndie just returned from California for the second visit in several weeks and will be leaving for Florida next week, so my getaway is a chance to balance the workload of taking care of the ranch alone.
I will relish the time free from dog walking and horse care since they become my exclusive priorities whenever Cyndie is away. I love the job, I really do, but I also love the opportunity to stay in bed for as long as my brain and body desire and then do whatever I want for the rest of a day without worrying about any other tasks that need to happen.
Sometimes, the best adventure is no adventure at all. Or, the adventure is in following whatever whim shows up and letting it play out for as long as it holds interest before dashing off after whatever shiny thing grabs one’s attention next.
I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit how often the adventure I long to experience involves lounging in bed well past a decent hour and falling back to sleep whenever sleep beckons. Some of the best dreams come to me in the morning hours. My mind is most creative in the morning. I have found that most of the time when I have mentally conjured up solutions to the world’s problems, it has been before dawn. Like a dream, I tend to forget those solutions by breakfast time.
Maybe tomorrow, I will wake up at the lake and take a crack at the long, slow effort to get out of bed. It all depends on when snow stops falling and how long it takes me to plow and shovel pathways for Cyndie to navigate while I’m gone.
That is today’s adventure.
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Payback Week
All’s fair in taking turns covering the ranch while your spouse gets a break from the routine. Cyndie is out of town for a week, and I am chief cook and bottle washer, dog walker, and horse wrangler while she is gone. It’s a bit of a mixed blessing for me since I really do enjoy time on my own, but unlike my time up at the lake last week, now I am responsible for the care and feeding of our animals throughout each day.
It’s not that much different from when both of us are home, except everything tends to take a little longer alone. The benefit of getting two things done at the same time is gone. Luckily, our animals all demonstrate a respectable amount of patience with me. I think they can tell I’m on my own.
To my benefit, a January thaw has taken away a lot of the stress of doing anything outdoors.
I thought about doing some tree branch trimming, but for the life of me, I can’t remember where I put a new pruning hand saw I got for Christmas. Didn’t find it in the shop or the storage cabinet in the house garage, so it must be somewhere more ingenious that I picked so I would know where to find it later.
Think, John, think.
As long as I was rummaging around in the shop, I decided to bring a wood sculpting project to the house and spread it out all over the dining room table. It’s one of those perks of being the only one home for a week, leaving a mess out, and not having it be in anybody else’s way.
I’m ready for the week to go smoothly, so Cyndie won’t have anything to worry about while she is away. I want her to have such a great time that she will come home eager to pay me back with another chance to escape to the lake when no one else is around.
You should know that all my gleeful ranting and raving about having time alone lately is simply because it compliments the wonderful times with Cyndie when we are home together and times with my many friends when I get to let my gregarious side run wild. Don’t let my advancing age fool you into thinking I have become a crotchety old, anti-social curmudgeon.
I’ve got a couple more years left until I fully grow into that description.
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Fair Exchange
I have been given a chance for a mini-vacation for a few days this week in an advance payment for holding down the ranch solo next week when Cyndie takes a trip to visit friends. Cyndie arranged for a local contractor at our lake place in Hayward to do some work inside the main house and wanted to have someone here to let him in and be around while he worked in case he needed anything.
Her solution was brilliant, as far as I’m concerned. She offered me the chance to come up alone, and I accepted without hesitation. A solo road trip! Yahoo!
Not that I was excited or anything, but I packed the night before and snuck out the door at 5 a.m. yesterday for the drive to the lake. It felt reminiscent of my time commuting to the day job, except it took another hour and a half longer to get here than it did heading to the old workplace.
There had been just enough snow (you know, “nuisance snow” amounts) that I did a fair amount of shoveling to clean up walkways and stairs to both buildings for Brad, the contractor. He will also be doing some work for us in the little cabin while waiting for the sheetrock mud to dry.
Old seals on the hoses to the washing machine in the laundry room leaked when nobody was aware of it, and the resulting water damage included moldy sheetrock.
I took a picture while he was dismantling some shelving to show the yucky wall. After helping carry the frame and countertops out of the way, I gave Brad some space and listened to construction sounds from a distance.
With all obstructions out of the way, he made short work of ripping out the old and installing the new.
While Brad was doing real work, I enjoyed a leisurely day free of any animal duties and listened to my music library at high volume, set up a jigsaw puzzle, did some reading, took a nap, ate like a king (of course, Cyndie sent me off with oodles of good food!), and watched shows on Netflix that Cyndie won’t tolerate.
The hardest part of my day was learning that after a full day of the waterer in the paddock working fine and the temperatures moderating a bit from the most bitter cold, the line still froze again yesterday afternoon. Aaarrgh! Cyndie was able to melt it again and has the installer coming today, hopefully, to check out whether one of the heat tapes needs to be replaced.
I feel bad that the problem continued into her solo watch. One way to look at it though, maybe the added stress yesterday could help her to appreciate even more her vacation from animal responsibilities next week.
Giving each other separate turns to have an extended break from daily chores is a fair exchange. Right now, I’m soaking up my brief autonomy opportunity at the lake with maximum appreciation.
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Fresh Snow
While hiking with Delilah on our trails in the freshly fallen snow, I noticed this uncharacteristic specimen hanging about head-high on a tree.
Maybe the handiwork of some ingenious squirrel?
When we emerged from the woods and continued around the perimeter of our pastures, I caught sight of three of the horses standing out in the open. Only Mix appeared to have enough sense to stay under the overhang. I’ve never understood why horses choose to stand out in the rain or snow when they have the option of cover available.
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Mix was still a little wet, so she hadn’t spent all of her time sheltered.
Thus far, all four horses appear to be coping well with the winter weather we have been experiencing, but the real test comes next. We are expecting a cold spell for a few days that threatens to go below zero (F) at some point.
I went out late last night to plow before the temperature dropped too much for comfort. Clearing snow in the limited illumination of the ATV headlights is an imperfect science. I’ll find out this morning if I missed some spots. Not that I plan to spend much time racing around on the four-wheeler to finish cleaning up when it’s wickedly cold out.
This is “stay indoors and work on jigsaw puzzles” weather.
If we are lucky, Cyndie will return from her mom’s today and it will get a little more festive around here. I’ve been alone since the day after Christmas and the isolation is starting to get old, especially coming on the heels of all the socializing of the holiday gatherings.
Cyndie and her brothers have been working to move furnishings to her mom’s new residence in the Friendship Village community and clean up and stage the old residence for filming by the realty company. That meant immediately stashing any and all Christmas decorations. I wasn’t surprised when Cyndie’s plan for a one-night overnight mushroomed into three nights away.
Too bad I can’t bring the horses inside the house to keep me company and get them out of the cold.
They’d probably prefer to go out and stand on the deck, anyway.
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Relative Something 