Posts Tagged ‘winterizing’
Sail Down
Since we seem to be on a roll lately of preparing in advance for the coming winter, we decided to take down the shade sail yesterday. By saying, “in advance,” I am referring to how we have been taking care of things while the weather is pleasant instead of waiting until it starts getting nasty outside and we are forced to do it without delay.
I’m relieved that we barely had any wind to deal with because when a slight breeze occurred, the loosened sail suddenly pulled with surprising force. I can’t imagine trying to take the sail down every time the wind appeared to be getting too strong. Luckily, Mix showed up to hold the ladder for me when I started spinning the first turnbuckle.
When I moved the ladder to the opposite corner, Mia joined us to see if she could help, too.
It’s rewarding to see the horses remain calm while we are behaving in unusual ways. Yesterday, it was our working with the ladder and gathering up the large sail in our arms right in their midst. They showed a healthy curiosity, but didn’t startle over our strange activity.
For winter storage, I decided to hang the sail by its corners inside the barn, like I had done in the beginning, before the posts and framing were in place in the paddock.
I tightened the turnbuckles up to suspend it out of the way over our heads. It helps that Cyndie and I are both short people.
Without the sail, the framing still looks pretty good to me. It’s got character.
The extended weather forecast currently mentions a 30% possibility of a frozen mix of precipitation on Saturday. Having the sail taken down frees us from any concerns about how it will fare if that happens. It also allows us to keep our attention on how the horses will be coping in the event of cold, wet, and freezing conditions.
This time, they may be getting blankets instead of the rain sheets if it’s going to get as cold as is being predicted. The high temperature on Sunday may not even rise above freezing.
Oh my, that’s almost like the normal November weather of the good old days! Bring it on. This year, we are about as ready for winter weather as we’ve ever been. It’s kind of a reverse psychology thing. If we prepare for the worst, then maybe it won’t happen.
Especially since we also always hope for the best.
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Good Life
We woke yesterday morning with a glee hangover from our amazing David Byrne show Monday night, and it lingered throughout the day. Blessed with a fabulous climate-warmed summery-feeling November morning, we danced our way through the woods with Asher before approaching the barn to feed the horses.
We found the mares luxuriating in the emerging sunlight and mellow as ever. It got me thinking about how they stand so stoically to endure the miserable conditions when the weather is gruesome, as if they are aware that it never lasts, and that there will eventually be rewarding days like this as compensation.
Lately, mornings as nice as this one was –when the horses are calmly munching their feed and the natural world is as peaceful as ever– serve as a balm, soothing and comforting us. Coming on the heels of our evening of super special entertainment, it felt like we were getting a double dose of feel-good medicine.
Asher seemed to be enjoying the unusually nice weather as well, and it had him romping playfully all over the place. When I decided to try raking some leaves, he behaved like I was making piles for him to race through and kick all over the place.
For what I hope is the last time this year (never say never), I got out the riding mower to mulch the leaves in the backyard grass. Most of the trees that drop leaves have finished doing that, so it seemed like a reasonable time to finish tending to the grass in back.
When I put the mower back in the garage, I moved the ATV to the front and parked the mower behind it, a symbolic gesture in anticipation of the change from mowing season to snowplowing season.
After that, I started picking off little nuisance tasks that had been nagging at me for a while. I drove my car to the shop garage to put air in the tires. Then I brought our three most-used wheelbarrows up from the barn to inflate tires on those. I attached a recently purchased battery manager to the diesel tractor battery. It instantly kicked into “charging” mode. That tractor doesn’t get driven enough to keep the battery charged.
Cyndie cleaned and mended horse blankets. I moved a fresh batch of hay bales from the shed into the barn. We moved her picnic “door table” and chairs from beneath the big oak tree in the woods into the barn for winter storage.
Working outdoors felt like we’d been given a gift to accomplish all these things on such a pleasant weather day. With all of our animals showing irrepressible joy and contentment, it felt like we were living the (really) good life.
If only I could train my brain to retain the sense of this goodness with more weight than it does with the challenging days of harsh weather and difficult problems, I would be ever so grateful. That would be living an even better life.
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That’s October
Now, this is more like it. Although that doesn’t mean we are necessarily enjoying it. Remember how much griping I was doing about the hot weather extending well into September and October this year? There has been a change.
That is what October is expected to look like. It is chilly, rainy, blustery, and miserably dreary-looking outside. That leads to cold and wet animals, as well as the people who need to be outdoors caring for them. Just the way it should be in the tenth month of the year up here in the Northland.
We have successfully completed our most essential winterization steps while it was still comfortable outside, making days like yesterday much easier to endure. The pump was removed from our landscape pond on Monday, and the water line down to the labyrinth was drained and blown out with my air compressor.
The horses all have on rain shells to give them a thin bit of added protection from the battering wind-blown rain showers. There is little that we find sadder than a sopping wet, shivering horse. The rain shells do prevent that result, at the very least.
This blast of real October weather has allowed me to become more sloth-like than usual, and I am taking full advantage of it by doing little to nothing that could be construed as useful or productive unless one considers napping in a recliner as being useful.
At this age, I find that doing nothing produces less guilt than it did when being responsible for raising children or working for someone who was paying for my time. I’m sure that Cyndie would rather I stay as busy as she is every day, but since she sets such a high bar of comparison, I long ago proved my methods fall far short of the examples she sets.
If there are two ways to do anything in this world, Cyndie and I will always choose opposite methods. It makes it all the more special when we succeed at things as a couple. We rely on the magic (flexible) thread of love to keep us together after banging heads trying to execute any version of a metaphoric two-person lift.
The end goal always tends to be the same for both of us, so that helps.
Thirteen years after moving here, our end goal has blurred a bit. Wintervale never became an income generator that could help us cover expenses like we originally envisioned. October has a way of feeling like our beginning, but it also always ushers in the end of so many things growing outdoors.
It’s hard to think about ourselves and the big picture of another year at Wintervale when videos keep surfacing of masked thugs uncontestedly kidnapping people in broad daylight in US cities, while portions of the White House are being demolished by heavy machinery. Rather symbolic of a very scary future for our country.
I wonder how business is going at the inflatable frog costume factory these days. If Cyndie and I were going out for Halloween, we’d probably dress as a masked thug with a military vest handcuffed to an inflatable frog.
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Serious Frost
There have been a handful of mornings recently when there was a hint of frost on blades of grass in low areas, but yesterday morning, we stepped out to find a serious frost on everything. If there is any sense to be found in this world, this should finally mark the end of our growing season.
The air was dead calm, and I got the impression the cold snap had triggered trees to jettison leaves in a spectacular cascade. They were falling like raindrops and sounded a bit like them, too.
I eventually pulled out the mower to (hopefully) make the last grass cut down by the road and along our driveway.
Since it has been so dry for many weeks, I’d not bothered to cut several areas where most of the grass had gone dormant. However, in that amount of time, the swaths where the grass was growing got pretty tall. It feels good to now have it all cleaned up and ready for winter.
It was a day or two later than probably should have been done, but I also hauled the compressor over to blow out the buried water line that runs from the house down to the labyrinth. As long as I was taking care of winterizing chores, I pulled the ATV out from the back of the garage and parked the riding mower in its place.
The Grizzly is now parked front and center and ready to have the plow blade mounted for when it will be needed.
Of course, having done all this because of that heavy overnight frost, now the next six days are forecast to be in the 60s to mid-70s(F) for highs and the 50s for lows.
I just hope another warm spell won’t be enough to inspire grass blades to have one more growth spurt.
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Pond Down
Despite the promising prediction that our daytime temperatures will warm considerably next weekend, the near-term prognosis suggests we will experience a couple of overnight hard freezes. Our last required act of preparation was shutting down the landscape pond yesterday.
We pulled the pump and associated plumbing and then Cyndie trimmed back the Sweet Flag pond grass and picked out handfuls of pine needles and leaves. We have come to the realization that a pine tree is a bad choice to have around a landscape pond.
The final step of winter preparation for the pond was the netting we drape across it to capture the continuing assault of fallen leaves that blow in all throughout the off-season months.
Mission accomplished.
What’s next? I don’t know about you but I’m feeling ready for a day when it is snowy and cold and there is no reason to do anything but lounge by the fireplace and read or work on a jigsaw puzzle for hours on end. Maybe with a cup of hot chocolate.
I shouldn’t get greedy. I spent a few hours on the couch yesterday watching the NFL Minnesota Vikings achieve their fifth victory of the season. I tried to swear off the NFL some years back but that was a goal I failed to achieve. There are just a bit too many of my impressionable years immersed in the games and the characters involved, not to mention my father’s fanaticism, which still runs in my blood. I watch games now somewhat begrudgingly.
Keeping a distraction handy when things aren’t going my team’s way helps me avoid getting sucked into a funk. Yesterday, I tried searching the internet for a live performance of a song I once had on a VHS tape and haven’t seen for decades. After a few iterations with increasing promise, I stumbled on more than I hoped to find.
I recognized the look of the first image that appeared. Not only was it the right artist in the right venue, I had discovered a full 26-minute segment of the 1991 show broadcast on our local public television station. I let it play while simultaneously following the ever-improving circumstances of the Vikings football game.
Unfortunately, only one of the two versions of entertainment turned out the way I wanted. The Vikings won!
When the 26-minute performance had ended, the song I was waiting for had never shown up. It had been left out of this version.
This afternoon, we have a scheduled appointment for the final step of getting hooked up to high speed broadband internet. One of the first things I hope to do when it is connected is deepen my search for that song performance, using what I discovered yesterday.
Greg Brown with Pat Donohue performing “Good Morning Coffee” on Twin Cities PBS program called, “Showcase,” air date 12/1/91.
Why that song isn’t included in the 26:55 available minutes of the version on TPT’s web site is a mystery to me.
Seems like a good project now that we’ve got the pond down and it’ll be freezing outside for a couple of days.
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Selective Attentiveness
What we pay attention to matters because the influence of what we let occupy our minds goes deeper into our unconsciousness than is easily noticeable. We are what we consume, or we are becoming what we consume.
Conversely, my selective attentiveness means I was too focused on my immediate predicament to notice Cyndie was hoping for my assistance to open a door. I have a tendency toward tunnel vision sometimes. Rarely when I am functioning at my best.
Yesterday, I found myself immersed in a design and build project that became an obsession after returning from the lake Sunday and two hours easily slipped away without my notice.
While I was shopping for lumber at my stash of old deck boards stacked in our hay shed, I took a moment to pay attention to what the horses were doing behind me.
It was nap time. The peacefulness was deliciously infectious.
After that, I worked for what I expected would be maybe an hour before I was jolted to reality by Cyndie pointing out it was after 2:00. This didn’t leave as much time as I planned for the afternoon winterizing projects we had on our list, but somehow we ticked off more line items than expected.
Window covers are installed on the chicken coop, the pump is pulled from the landscape pond and a leaf cover installed, and a bonus accomplishment, all our deck furniture has been stowed for the season.
I feel like we are paying more attention to timely preparedness for winter this year. Something tells me (I do have a pessimistic streak) this might mean we won’t end up needing it.
As it is, there are sections of grass that really deserve to be mowed another time, even as the morning frost should be signalling the end of our growing season. It’s hard to know what kind of weather the changing climate is going to deliver these days.
Even when we try to pay specific attention to it.
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Temperature Driven
Some chores don’t wait for a time when I actually feel like doing them. Draining hoses is one of those chores. Of course, who decides to coil up their garden hoses when it is warm and sunny outside? Not me.
It would be a treat to do it while the hoses were still pliable. That’s never been my experience. More often than not, I let the chore wait until the forecast suddenly predicts sub-freezing temperatures for the coming night.
Yesterday, that led to my needing to wrestle stiff coils in the damp and chilly fading daylight after I got home from work and tended to the animals.
Can you say, long day?
Delilah was very patient and stayed out with me while I worked, even though it pushed back her dinner to a later than normal hour. It demonstrates how much she treasures being out with us on a task. It is distinctly different from going for a walk.
She totally understands we are ‘working’ on something. We walked to the different locations where the hoses were being used, and after dragging each one back to the shop, she would look up at me to determine if it was time to go in the house, or if we were setting out after another hose.
After letting her in the house to have dinner, I stepped back out before it got dark to bring the air compressor up so I could blow out the buried water line that runs down to the spigot at the labyrinth garden.
With that chore accomplished, the only task left in preparation for serious freezing temperatures is to pull the pump and filter out of the landscape pond. I’m not worried about that for this first freeze tonight, because that water is moving and is unlikely to lock up with this first, brief dip below 32°(F).
For this night, we are now prepared to experience the possible freeze worry-free.
I think I’ll be a little disappointed if it doesn’t end up actually happening.
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Rusty Hue
The changing season has taken a very noticeable shift in a short span of days, from brilliant to subdued, in terms of color palette. Last week, the color was electric, but yesterday the landscape looked like someone had unplugged the power and all the trees have begun to rust.
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Those pictures were taken just four days apart. Our forest is quickly becoming transparent, as you can see.
It kinda gives the impression that winter is on the way, which is mind-bending because yesterday the temperature was so summer-like. How it looked, and how it felt were not quite in alignment.
Naturally, I base my perception of what kind of weather to expect, on what I’ve experienced in the past, but the planet hasn’t been itself lately. With all that humans have done to muck up the natural order, we’ve made the art of prediction less predictable.
It has me trying to reclaim the naiveté of my youth, when I didn’t have a clue about weather and seasons. Each day was just something to be explored. I’m sure it was magical. I don’t actually recall. Though, of course, I didn’t need to plan and prepare for what would come next.
This has me longing for the benefits of childhood freedom from needing to be concerned about preparing property for the freeze and clearing snow, having enough fuel, getting vehicles winterized.
Oh, to just wake up one morning and exclaim, “Snow!” with pure joy about going outside to play in it.
That is, if it still gets cold enough for snow in coming days.
It’s getting hard to predict.
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Relative Something 