Posts Tagged ‘Winter’
Vet Visited
Before our thoughts became totally consumed with this latest blast of a winter storm –which has drifted snow across the 4 foot banks of our driveway, filling it completely– we received a visit from our veterinarian for a well-check of our horses.
It was Thursday, and Cyndie and I had both stayed home from work in the face of the posted winter storm warning. We had cleaned up the stalls in the barn, and moved the horses inside out of the rain that was falling in prelude to the snow.
We weren’t entirely surprised to receive a phone call from the vet’s office checking to see if we wanted to reschedule. We weren’t the ones doing the driving, so we definitely wanted this appointment to happen, if the vet didn’t mind navigating the icy roads.
Cyndie headed down to our barns at the appointed time, to find the vet already inside, making her own introductions to our 4 horses. She really loved “our gray,” Legacy, saying he was “cute.” 
As the rain began to change over to snow, the vet stepped into each stall to listen to heart beats and lung sounds, feel their teeth, and do an overall survey of their condition.
The horses had blood samples drawn, and received a vaccination shot and dose of deworming paste. There were two valuable things we learned. First, we can begin to cut back on their feed rations. With the cold temperatures we have been facing this winter, we have been making sure they were well fed. The vet said our horses are not overweight, but we don’t want them to get any bigger. We can change the feed we are giving them to one that provides just essentials and nothing more.
She instructed us to be very careful about the transition back to grazing fresh grass. We cannot allow them uncontrolled access to the fields. They need to be restricted to the sacrifice area of our paddocks, with brief, but increasing visits to the grass.
The second thing the vet discovered is that the latest bale of hay we have been serving has too much foxtail grass in it. The awn, that stiff bristle at the top of the stem, can become embedded in their cheeks and tongue and create ulcers. Three of our horses showed some signs of sensitivity or ulcerations in their mouths.
We invited her to look at our remaining bales to give us her opinion of what we have on hand. From her review, we think it will be okay to just work around the worst bale and pick and mix from the remaining two batches of bales we have.
Next fall we will make another appointment to have the vet “float their teeth,” which is what they call it when they file down any sharp points that develop. With that, her visit was done and she drove off into the wicked weather. We are relieved to know our horses are doing well and that the two things deserving attention are well within our ability to manage.
That is a really good thing right now, because it allows our attention to get back to being all-consumed by the tonnage of snow that remains to be removed from our driveway and barn paths today. Yesterday I heard Cyndie wondering out loud about seeing if George Walker might want to bring his Belgian draft horses over to teach us how to drive the team while clearing snow with them. That’s not such a bad idea, because the way “horse power” is measured, he has a lot more in his team of horses than I have with my 44hp Ford New Holland 3415 tractor.
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Too Much?
Aaah winter. We enjoyed a little thaw yesterday. It inspired me to try to scrape the driveway up by the house. No good deed goes unpunished. The cable that lifts the plow blade on the Grizzly broke. But I’m not complaining. It was a wonderfully warm day for fixing that kind of problem.
I’m very happy to report that the roof of my wood shed is working just the way I hoped. The snow slides off and sunlight shines through.
I haven’t made it down to the labyrinth since the last 3 accumulations of snow, and I think it is going to be difficult to make out the path now.
Complicating that further, the prediction from my favorite weather blog says: “Winter resumes with a vengeance Thursday as the next winter storm smacks eastern Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin.”
Another weather site forecast shows an 80% chance of 3-5″ of heavy, wet snow combined with strong wind. Oh joy. It is a good thing I like winter, but we all know that it is possible to get too much of a good thing.
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Remember Winter?
This year reminds me of what winters were like when I was a kid. When the snow season arrived, it stayed all year. None of this melting to the point you could see grass in the middle of January or February, or one measly cold spell when it dipped below zero and that was it.
This morning we woke to teens below zero and it is no big deal. It’s funny how you get used to it. At first, it seems like serious cold, but after days and weeks of it, with times when it dips well into the twenties below and involves wind that drives the impact into danger zones for exposed flesh, well, you grow weary of focusing on how cold the temperature is and just deal with it. Life goes on.
Unfortunately, details of daily life activity that you are trying to just get on with start to get complicated after weeks of accumulating snow continues to pile up. Driving gets difficult because sight lines become obscured by mountains of plowed snow that get piled up where ever there is a place to pile it. Shoveling driveways and walkways become epic efforts, tossing the snow ever higher to get it over the mound created by the previous six times you just did this.
It took me until yesterday to finally finish clearing all the new accumulation that fell last Thursday. I had tried making my way out to the wood shed for a load of firewood and in one trip exhausted all my energy by trying to forge my way through the deep snow. I realized this passageway should be added to the queue of areas needing to be cleared after every snowfall. It is no longer sufficient to just trod the route to create a path.
It reminds me of what it was like as a kid. I thought maybe it just seemed like there was more snow back then because I had shorter legs, but with the return of a winter like days of old, with uninterrupted snow and cold, I’m finding it just as difficult with longer legs.
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Photo Essay
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winter snow sunlight afternoon shadows at Wintervale
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Winter Sunset
They’re all good, the sunsets, but on a crisp winter evening when you have a chance to be outside at the precise moment it drops below the horizon, it feels like it’s the best one ever seen. It was particularly nice having the tall grass soak up the low sunlight as it bent over in the wind. Fierce as this winter has been thus far, we haven’t gone completely without a few occasional precious days.
A pleasant day amid a rash of harsh weather becomes all the more precious.
It’s funny how our perspective changes when the reference point is shifted. Compared to the dramatic extremes of polar vortex winds and temperatures, a day in the 20s(F) without a lot of wind becomes a remarkably nice day.
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Cyndie’s Day
When I saw my wife coming up the driveway in our truck late yesterday afternoon, I steadied myself for what I anticipated would be a days-worth of angst. Her text to me was typically understated: “It’s been a really crummy day.”
Both Cyndie and I have come to see that there are often specific lessons for us in the challenges that unexpectedly entangle and derail our daily affairs. Sometimes we don’t know the impact or lessons these challenges offer for the other people involved in the events, but we believe each individual has something equally specific available to them, whether they recognize it or not. If nothing else, like getting results from taking a placebo, looking at it that way helps us to embrace the angst of our challenges as having purpose.
photo provided by Cyndie
When I came inside after clearing the drifted snow from our front steps and walkway, Cyndie was preparing comfort-food for dinner. I prepared myself to hear about her day. I was pleasantly surprised. On one of the most dangerous of cold days, her car suffered a flat tire –a shredded tire, really– miles from any commerce. It is the very reason travel is not recommended, and many schools around the state call off classes, in these weather conditions: you don’t want to get stuck while trying to travel to your destination. Yet, there she was, alone in the severe wind-chill with a tire that needed to be changed, and her car perched dangerously on the edge of traffic.
As I dove into the dinner she set before me, Cyndie began to describe the number of good things that seemed to come out of a situation that completely destroyed her plans for the day and will ultimately involve costly repairs. First, I heard about the number of people, citizens and law enforcement, who stopped to check on her welfare and offer help while she waited several hours for the tow truck to arrive. Then there was the tow truck driver who safely executed the near impossible task of changing that tire in the dangerously cold wind. Finally, her discovering the auto repair business I referred her to, that I had found in a hasty online search for something close to our home.
Courtesy Auto Repair is not only conveniently located, it sounds like it will be the perfect resource for us. The owner provided double the service, first guiding Cyndie through all the factors involved with her tire failure, (diagnosing brake issues that are likely contributing to the early failure of her tires –another tire was also splitting apart), then also helping get our truck fixed up, too.
Cyndie had first tried the truck in the morning before setting out in her car, but it failed to start. Later, when she got her car to the repair shop on a spare tire, he asked if she had other transportation. When he learned about the truck, he offered to have one of his employees give her a ride home, and then check the battery. They jump-started the truck and the driver followed Cyndie as she drove it back to the shop so they could give it a complete inspection.
photo provided by Cyndie
After she parked it at the shop, it already needed to be jumped again. The battery was shot. After doing a multi-point inspection, the technician mentioned the windshield washer nozzle was frozen up. The owner insisted that the tech flush the lines and drain all the questionable washer solution out, refilling it with a fresh solution. This guy is thorough.
Cyndie was able to leave with the truck in good working condition and with parts on order for her car. If she just focused on how the flat tire in dangerous conditions had wrecked her plan for the day, it would be a lot worse than just “crummy.” As it is, there were enough good things happening that we are almost glad for the hassles she experienced yesterday. We are extremely pleased that for all the undesirable outcomes that could have resulted from the risks of the ailing brakes and failing tires, she was able to pull over with the relatively minor incident of one flat.
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Rescue Effort
It is just a little cold here this morning. Minus 21°F on the thermometer, don’t know what the wind chill is. It actually looks pretty calm outside, compared to yesterday afternoon when we were experiencing some intense gusts and a heavy, steady wind. It created frequent mini-tornadoes of snow.
We stayed up later than usual last night to take in the Grammy Awards broadcast. For some reason, Delilah decided to wake us up earlier than usual. Nothing like a bad night’s sleep to make you feel less than your best self in the morning. On top of that, I spent the afternoon clearing snow –which felt like a bit of a doomed task with the wind beginning to blow and fill in everything I had just plowed– and once again I got the ATV stuck, which required extra shoveling effort to dig out, so most of the muscles and joints of my body are in ‘complain mode.’
Growing old is not for sissies. If it’s this tough for me now, what’s it going to be like when I get old?
At one point yesterday, when we were lounging around the warmth of the fireplace before I ventured outside to work, from my perch on the couch I spotted Delilah fix her gaze on some prize up the spiral staircase. It must be a cat, I thought, and off she went, seeking closer inspection. She seems to desperately want to make contact, probably as much as the cats would fervently prefer to have her not. As she headed up, I tried alerting Cyndie, who had disappeared into the basement in search of a cookbook, and I pondered aloud whether it was Pequenita or Mozyr up in the loft.
As the scrambling and hissing commenced up there, I spotted Pequenita emerge from the safe zone of our bedroom and start up the stairs. That meant it was Mozyr who Delilah was engaged with and had cornered up there.
Mozyr has been behaving more and more like his old self recently. On days last week when I was working, and Delilah would be out in the kennel, both cats were taking advantage of the dog’s absence when I got home, wandering around the house and snitching some dog food from her bowl. Mozyr has become our bathroom pal again, hopping up by the sink, and sitting on the edge of the bathtub when I shower. I take it as a good sign that he chose to venture out from the confines of the bedroom and climb the stairs to the loft when Delilah was around. It gave him a chance to act out toward her and express how he feels about having a dog sibling forced upon his world.
When the commotion settled down and we were able to bring Delilah back down the stairs, it occurred to me that Pequenita’s behavior could be interpreted as coming to Mozyr’s rescue. When she heard the confrontation, she came running and put herself in harms way by diverting Delilah’s attention, smartly doing so with a convenient escape route back to safety. In fact, that helped our effort to convince Delilah to leave Mozyr alone and come back down with us, as Pequenita sprinted her way down and to the other side of the gate.
The brave cat to the rescue, once again, and Moz seems no worse for the wear.
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Making Room
When the weather is nasty cold outside, and hours of daylight are short, one way to deal with it is to work on indoor projects. We have a project waiting for us in our basement that is finally seeing some progress. Interestingly, that progress came as a result of the fracturing of the triangular window beside our stone chimney.
In order to raise the level of interest for a builder to travel to our home to replace the broken window, we tossed in the construction of a storage room in our basement as added incentive. It worked. The replacement window is now on order and when it comes, the builder expects to be available to work on creating a walk-in storage room with built-in shelves in the space where the entertainment center once was.
When we moved in, I did some initial demolition in that corner, taking out the shelving to open up the angled space as much as possible for temporary storage. The only parts left were studs with drywall attached to them. Cyndie masterfully stowed a roomful of stuff into the small space of that corner and then hung curtains across the front to cover the cut-out spaces once filled by a television and speakers.
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In preparation of the builder taking down the studs and putting up new walls to make a more functional storage space, I pulled off the drywall and removed all the screws from the studs. Friday night, Cyndie and I removed all the stuff that was stacked behind that wall and piled it up around the basement. It is a real optical illusion of space to see that little corner empty, but the contents now appearing to consume the entire rest of the room.
We need to rearrange things now to create a clear working space for the builder, with a path for him to bring in materials, and then we will be ready when that window shows up and our project reaches the top in his queue of work.
That done, I guess it’s time to go back outside and play in the snow! How nasty can it really be out there?
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Good Timing
The almost whimsical decision we made to commit a large percentage of our limited cash reserves toward a geothermal furnace after our first winter has turned out to be an extra blessing this year. The extreme cold this winter, combined with the current multi-state shortage of propane has driven the fuel price up dramatically.
Last year at this time it seemed as though the old furnace was gulping down the propane. The co-op came by to fill our tank several times last winter. When they showed up a few weeks ago, we didn’t really need any, but I suppose the driver decided to top it off anyway. Now I don’t think we will need another delivery until next year.
Factoring in the inflated price of propane that we would have had to pay this year, our estimated payback time on the new geothermal system is now even shorter than we first calculated. Even though the up-front costs are substantial, the comfort of mind and reduced fuel costs are immediate. Knowing we will have accomplished savings that offset the expense after just a short number of years provides its own dose of warm feelings.
Every year that you wait to make energy-saving improvements is time you lose toward accumulating the benefits. I am extremely grateful that we were able to find a way to take the plunge for a new geothermal heating and cooling system soon after we moved here. The subsequent propane shortage this winter has made that decision all the sweeter. Definitely, good timing for us.
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Relative Something 