Posts Tagged ‘weather’
Winter Indeed
I thought it was going to stop snowing early in the day, based on the way the radar looked in the morning, but the flakes just kept falling the whole time I was out shoveling and plowing yesterday. That really messes with my perfectionism for having a clean driveway and walkways.
It is fascinating to me how dramatically life changes between summer and winter. In summer, I get to walk out the door without a thought. Now I pause at the front door for 5 minutes and put on several additional layers of clothes, boots, hat & mittens. It’s the way of winter.
It has been a long time since I plowed snow with the Grizzly, but in minutes I was back in the routine. Down with the blade, forward gear. Up with the blade, reverse. Back and forth, to and fro. Snow flowing off the blade, off the driveway, and into the ditch.
Summer is a distant memory. I am now fully in winter mode and it feels totally normal to be so. The repetitive motion of shoveling and plowing becomes something of a meditation for me. Meditation with grunting and sweating, that is.
I suppose it’s not much different from mowing the grass in summer.
They just seem worlds apart to me.
I noticed yesterday how my mindset changes dramatically with the seasons, in terms of what is most important. In the spring and summer I work diligently to rake out the gravel from the grass beside the driveway. As I plowed the snow off the gravel driveway yesterday, I had no problem shifting the priority to removing the snow without worrying about pushing gravel up onto the grass.
What matters in this moment isn’t always the same as what matters in another.
Today, snow and cold are the prominent attention grabbers. Winter, indeed.
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Winter Muckxtravaganza
The daytime temperature yesterday climbed well above freezing and turned that beautiful snow we received over the weekend into a soaking slop that the horses converted into a regrettable mucky mess.
As I pulled in the driveway after work, I spotted the horses in a tizzy over a loose ribbon of fence that was blowing in the wind. It was at a spot we had barricaded last spring to separate the hay-field from the drainage alley. The horses have been showing us they want to cross at that point instead of through the usual open gate because of how wet it is.
On Sunday I had hastily opened a section for them to get through, but I didn’t permanently tie off the ribbons I had pulled back. When I arrived yesterday, two of the horses were across that opening and two were still out in the hay-field, frantically trying to pass through but turned back by the scary flailing ribbons that had come loose in the strengthening wind.
I quickly realized I should have pulled all four of the t-posts on Sunday and been done with this. With temperatures expected to drop significantly in the days ahead, I decided to pull the posts while I still could and open this whole avenue to the herd for the rest of the winter.
Of course, in no time I was out of daylight and fumbling around in the dark to finish the task. While Delilah stood by patiently, I rolled up the length of ribbon fence and muscled out the posts. I hooked her leash to my pants and gathered posts and ribbon, setting off in the darkness to cross the mucky hoof-marked turf of the field and paddocks.
The footing out there is just plain miserable right now. When it freezes solid in the next day or two it will become a treacherous ankle-twisting obstacle course. It will also become much harder to keep clean with our usual routine of frequent manure scooping.
This is the point where I want a lot of snow to fall. A good 6-inches would cover everything nicely and smooth it out quite a bit.
As of last night, it was nothing but mudzilla. Mucktastrophe. Swampageddon. Mudsaster. It was a real muckxtravaganza.
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Looking Down
I have an affinity for looking straight up or directly beneath me when I’ve got a camera in my hands. I’m also a fan of surface textures and single content features filling the frame.
Adding in the shadow of a perfect hoof print is a real bonus.
I had just been looking into the sun at Cayenne when I dropped my gaze and captured the ground in front of me. She had turned to observe my activity and then resumed the noble pose that had grabbed my attention in the first place.
I captured both.
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I think she was enjoying the last of the warm afternoon sun prior to our latest bout of cold rain. That is, cold in the relative sense, because yesterday it climbed to 50° (F) here, which is rather warm for late November.
Leaves us wondering when we will get to look down at our feet and see some useable snow. For the time being, it is mostly mud!
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Last Thing
There was one last thing I’ve been wanting to do in the paddock before the winter weather sets in for good this season. When we had the fences installed to create our two paddock spaces, the smaller side encompassed two trees. There was a gorgeous willow tree with a cottonwood close beside it.
It didn’t take long for both trees to show evidence of not being entirely happy about the new arrangement, but the willow has at least continued to show signs of life. The cottonwood gave up in the first year. It has been standing dead for quite a while now and the small branches from it have started to litter the ground with increasing frequency.
The tree makes a convenient scratching post for the horses, so I have no interest in cutting it down. I just wanted to cut off the branches and leave the snag for birds to perch on and horses to rub against.
Mark this one off as “Done.”
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Bringing all those branches down created quite a pile that needed to be dealt with. I tend to overlook that detail when I get all fired up to trim our trees. Cutting branches down ends up being a small part of the whole project.
Luckily, George was available to help and I opted to try chipping them without delay. The other option was to move the pile somewhere and save the chipping for a future opportunity. That could lead to a lot of chances for procrastination, so I felt pretty good about taking quick action on this occasion.
I cranked up both the ATV and the diesel tractor, attached a trailer to the former and the chipper to the latter and away we went. Parking the trailer beside the chipper allowed us to fill it directly from the chute and save any extra handling to convert a pile of branches into chips unloaded in our convenient storage location by the labyrinth.
That leaves me about as ready as I’ve ever been for freezing temperatures and oodles of snow to arrive for winter. Unfortunately, the weather continues to run warmer than normal and the precipitation we are getting is all rain.
Do they make galoshes for snowshoes? I might have to get me some of those so I can do some trekking in all this rain.
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Shaping Up
It has snowed and then melted again, so the ground here is well saturated, but not frozen. It was time to tend to the raised circle in the paddock before the earth becomes hard as rock. It’s been a year since I last shaped it and the definition was fading to the point it wasn’t really performing as a raised perch above the wet.
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Try as I might, I am not able to pack it firm enough to support the weight of the horses, but if I keep reshaping the circle as they stomp around on it, eventually it will become what I envision. It worked in another spot that we created when the excavator was here digging out our drainage swale.
That flat mound is visible in the corner of fence in the picture above on the left. Since it was made from slabs of turf scraped from the swale, there was a lot of grass in it that seems to have added a lot of stability. The circle I am creating in the middle has a lot of layers of hay which the horses’ hooves punch through with ease. It becomes a pock-marked uneven surface.
On the plus side, residue from the hay includes plenty of grass seed that wants to grow and will help firm up the surface over time. If I keep tending to it, I’ll get what I’m after. In the end, it’ll seem like it’s always been that way.
Good thing I’m a patient person.
Dezirea supervised my progress while Legacy grazed from the slow-feeder behind her. I get the feeling the horses recognize what I’m trying to create, and they approve.
When I came out from taking a lunch break halfway through the project, I found Cayenne standing beside the circle on the ground I had just raked flat.
It was as if she wanted to be close to what I was doing, but didn’t want to mess it up by stomping on it too soon. I appreciated her discretion, but in no time, the results of my reshaping will be hard to perceive amid the multitude of hoof prints.
Watching the horses all day long, you get the impression that they don’t really move very much. They don’t appear to cover much ground in a day. However, if you survey the ground over time, it becomes evident that there isn’t a spot where they haven’t been at one time or another.
In the long run, they are definitely shaping the ground of their confines.
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Snow Arrives
The drive home from the day-job yesterday was a fascinating adventure in the full gamut of transitioning to winter precipitation. It was wet at the start, then turned in to a variety of audible ice hitting the windshield before becoming heavy snow. Traffic slowed to a crawl as the visibility dropped and the sides of the road turned white.
The delay only added a half-hour to my commute because no sooner did I clear the delay occurring at the sharp curves where I94 touches I35E near downtown St. Paul, when the precipitation slowed and flakes transitioned back to ice.
Speeds picked up again and before I knew it, snow was no longer visible on the shoulders. As I reached the Wisconsin border, the roads were dry again. Before I made it home, I passed through one more brief barrage of clattering icy precipitation followed by calm.
I stepped in the door to find Cyndie had Thanksgiving preparations well under way. My favorite cereal treats, and a major threat to my control of daily sugar calories, were prominently displayed on the counter. Without hesitation, I grabbed a handful.
Instant reward in the pleasure centers of my brain!
On top of that comfort, there was a warm fire in the fireplace and she had dinner all planned.
I’m spoiled rotten and I admit it.
As the night wore on, the weather I had driven through earlier arrived and began coating the world outside our door in a beautiful blanket of snowflakes.
This is more like it. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
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Cold Blow
The prolonged warm spell this autumn has finally come to an abrupt end. We swung from warm sunshine to blowing snow in about a day, making it feel colder than it probably is. I had planned to avoid the expected precipitation by holing up in the shop and working to restore some order after days of dumping piles of tools and lumber used on the chicken coop construction project.
After a morning of some lightning, thunder, and hail, I stepped out to find a temporary reprieve. It was almost sunny for a moment. I decided to postpone the shop tidying and wander down toward the chicken coop to look into fixing the ramp we have in mind for the chicken door.
Cyndie had tried weaving some grape vines but bailed on that idea after discovering the vines she collected were not supple enough for her methods. I suggested we simply slide small branches over/under a center strut as an alternative.
After finding and attaching the integral strut, and testing my concept with 10 or 12 of whatever sticks and twigs I could find lying around, I switched modes to collect a bigger batch of raw materials for the weave. Conveniently, I had planned a new route through the trees between the coop and trail to the shop garage which needed to be cleared of saplings. These will be ideal for making the ramp.
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Those shots are dark because I can’t seem to finish anything around here before the sun sets anymore. By the time I finished clearing the trail and thought to snap an image, there was barely enough light left. A fact which also makes it difficult to discern the horizontal flying crystals of frozen rain that were happening at the time.
I found it surprisingly disorienting to have a new opening in our woods where one had not existed before. It was shocking to suddenly have the feeling of not knowing where I was for a second.
What doesn’t show in the path is the old rusty wood stove that I had just hauled away. It is a relic of days when they tapped the maple trees here and boiled off the sap for syrup. It wasn’t visible through all the greenery during the summer months, but for the last 5 years it has been very conspicuous during the fall and winter, looking like a sad neglected relic.
That’s one more thing taken care of that I’ve wanted to do since we got here, discarding scrap and making this place ever more our own.
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Beneath Trees
After a bit of a pause in construction, I was stepping out to work on the chicken coop again yesterday, now that Cyndie is home to lend a helping hand. We were taking advantage of the very summer-like weather gracing our region this first week of November.
Striding across the yard I was suddenly struck by how distinctly different the carpet of leaves was within just a few steps. Photo op!
Beneath a big old oak tree that holds most of its dried leaves through the winter.
Next tree over is a dominant poplar that lost a significant portion of its top in a storm during the summer.
On the other side of the driveway, the grove of maples create a thick layer of light crunchy playfulness that is a delight to walk through.
Another example of the micro-environments that collectively make up the paradise where we live. We call it Wintervale Ranch.
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October Flowers
It’s All Hallow’s Eve and we have still got some flowers blooming. Who’da thunk it?
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Today is the 25th anniversary of a blizzard that hit the Twin Cities in 1991. One of my memories of that event is of our next-door neighbor trying to navigate his car through the mess of deep snow and ice on the road and his not being able to get into his uncleared driveway. There was still a MN Twins flag attached to his car, a remnant of the 2nd World Series championship the team had just accomplished days before.
It seemed so surreal to me. Baseball. Halloween. Blizzard. It was rather odd.
It was actually morning of the next day and I was standing in our driveway, almost finished with shoveling the 2-feet of snow we had received. We mutually agreed he should park his car in our driveway until he got his cleared.
That storm now serves as a benchmark for me to always be aware that winter could arrive all at once, in one big storm that changes from a warm fall afternoon to snow that lasts a season, all in a matter of a few days. And it could happen in October.
Which is similar to the benchmark I now use for spring snowstorms. The first year we lived here, in May of 2013, we received 18 inches of snow. Who’da thunk it?
It could happen.
But it doesn’t look like we will have any worries of snow in October this year. More likely, we’ll have November flowers.
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Rain’s Back
At least we had a week where it didn’t rain on us. Yesterday afternoon, the ground was just starting to show signs of drying out a bit. That’s over now. 
The horses were grazing in a tight cluster under the gloomy sky. I’m pretty sure they had a sense of what was coming our way. The precipitation made a slow approach, prolonging the wait for the inevitable.
I had just the plan for a rainy night. I had volunteered to prepare dinner for George and Anneliese, and I was serving up my specialty. I brought home a pizza.
That meant we could warm up the kitchen by using the oven. But, shhhh… don’t tell Cyndie. I had her favorite pizza delivered to my workplace, half-baked. She wouldn’t want to know she was missing her beloved deep-dish and more episodes of our current tv series addiction, 2007’s “Life” with Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi, and Adam Arkin.
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We’ll keep that secret just between us.
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Relative Something 