Posts Tagged ‘Wintervale’
More Rain
This morning, it is raining, …again. But that is okay. We got smart. We figured out a way to appreciate the excessive wetness. Yesterday we planted grass on the two scars left by the recent work in our yards. On the back hill, we are covering the dirt left from the geothermal project, and in the front, it was the septic drain lines that were dug up and repaired.
Let it rain.
It doesn’t seem to make any difference to the area down by the barn, because it has just stayed wet, no matter what. If it is already wet, I am losing my ability to care if it gets any wetter. For as soggy as it remains down there, I’m thinking we won’t be able to have the fence work done until fall. I honestly don’t know what to expect. Yesterday, before the current precipitation moved in, there was still standing water on the driveway in front of the barn.
The fence crew cannot bring in their equipment to do the work without creating a disaster of mud and ruts. We’ve already got enough of those ruts. We will wait. What else can we do?
The only problem with today’s band of precipitation moving across the state is that it is soaking and chilling my friends on the bike ride. This is obviously not the reason I didn’t go on the ride this year, but I will admit that it is one aspect of that adventure that I am very happy to be missing.
My friends have been generous in sharing photos from the trip, giving me the opportunity to see some of the smiling faces of a few of the wonderful people who I only get to see this one time of year. They are looking great, and it gives me good energy to see them, even if only through pictures.
They ride north out of Ashby, MN, this morning, pedaling through the rain to Frazee, which isn’t far from Detroit Lakes, MN, just east of Fargo, ND.
Since the precipitation appears to be moving from south-to-north, maybe the wind is at their backs.
Some Days
Some days, you eat the bear, some days, the bear eats you. I am growing weary of the wetness that has ground our projects to a halt, and have noticed a sense of dread settling in. That bugs me, that sense of dread, because it is so familiar that it carries with it a feeling of being “right,” even though, now I know better. I don’t like how comfortable I am with that feeling of doom and gloom. That is where I spent a good part of my life, so it is not a surprise that my simply deciding to think and act differently, hasn’t immediately erased the years of memory.
There has been some added stress at the day-job, which is pressuring me to the extreme, and looks like it may continue for an unknown duration. The ‘not knowing’ feeds into my stress, partly because it is putting other plans at risk. I was supposed to leave for a week of biking this coming Friday. I have no idea how that is going to work.
Yesterday, after having driven to the city to work on a Saturday, I got home and found Cyndie had accomplished a lot of mowing. That eases my mind a bit. She wasn’t able to get to it all, but at least the place doesn’t look entirely neglected. We can’t make it look as good as we’d like because there are so many obstacles hindering the job. She has to navigate areas of standing water, huge divots from heavy equipment driven on the property, lumber piles, dirt piles, ditches, posts and ropes holding trees up, and the little flags marking where utilities are buried. We’ve lived with those dang flags for almost as long as we’ve been here, back in October. That’s how long our projects have been underway.
This long duration of things being in disarray is one of the stresses that drives me batty. I just want to turn the corner where we can start putting the things we have made a mess of, back in order again.
I found Cyndie working on the back hill when I pulled up to the house. She was working on the dirt scar left by the geothermal boring project. I changed clothes and headed out to help. It struck me that this was just one of a variety of things we have in mind to work on. Last weekend, it was the labyrinth that was on her mind. We didn’t make great progress on that, and the weather was lousy, so we switched to the landscape pond. Now, instead of returning to the labyrinth, we are on the back hill. We just chip away on whatever wins our attention at any given moment.
It all needs to be done, but my concrete-sequential mindset drives me to want to work in order. Cyndie’s tendency toward random, like the way she mows the lawn, allows her to be comfortable working on anything at any time. It is a good exercise for me to just go along with her.
The work on the dirt of the back hill turned out to be grueling. It is far from dry, and we were getting sprinkled on as we worked, eventually turning into a steady rain. The majority of what has been exposed is clay. The first goal was to just break up and rake out the ruts of the tire tracks left by their equipment. Then she wants to plant grass again. I think we are going to want to bring in some black dirt. The clay was just brutal, and stuck to our tools, turning them into useless heavy clubs every few minutes.
I gave up, when it turned from sprinkles to rain, but Cyndie kept at it, and finished the last section before coming in to wash off the mud and get dry.
What a long way we have come from the extreme drought conditions that prevailed when we arrived here last fall.
Cat Attacks
After 4 months of what appeared to be a relatively equal feline partnership in our home back at the end of March, our two cats, Pequenita and Mozyr, entered into a mode of battling for position and control. At the time, I wrote a poem about the night the new conflict materialized. It surprised and frustrated us, bringing discord where there had previously been none. At the rescue organization from which we adopted them, they had been together in a room housing multiple cats, so we surmised they would already know each other. We brought home one female and one male, spayed and neutered. They are not biologically related, but we refer to them as siblings. They are “adopted” siblings.
Mozyr, the male, took a long time to warm up to us and his surroundings, finding solace as far under our bed as he could get. Pequenita was immediately friendly and craved as much petting and scratching attention as we could provide. There didn’t appear to be any conflict between them.
In a very short time, they were both curling up on the end of our bed, sleeping nights with us. Since Mozyr was almost always keeping himself at arm’s length, having him showing comfort in being next to us on the bed brought us a lot of satisfaction.
My limited experience living with cats left me clueless about the conflict that suddenly erupted. Both Cyndie and I wanted to intercede and bring things back to the way they were during the early months after they arrived here. We have since done some reading and learned that what they are demonstrating now is classic feline behavior. We are begrudgingly working toward accepting the odd hierarchy they seem to be establishing.
What bums us the most is that Pequenita has claimed our bedroom as her solitary turf. Mozyr is absolutely not welcome, and the majority of time he respects that, laying down on the rug outside the door.
Pequenita is smaller than him, but she has been the aggressor every time I have witnessed a conflict occur. Maybe it is because she is smaller than him. She controls the engagements, and takes it to him almost anywhere in the house, …until meal time.
We have two separate bowls for wet food, and they each dive in as soon as it is served. After a few gobbles, Mozyr will walk over to the other bowl, and take over eating where his sister started. She always backs off, appearing very timid, and walks over to finish eating in the bowl he just left. He shows her that he can eat whatever he wants, wherever he wants.
When dinner is over, she is back in charge. He will be totally innocent, snoozing on a chair beside us, and she will pounce up and swat him. He doesn’t fight back. He just takes off running, usually retreating under the dining table.
I keep hoping he will get fed up and bop her back one of these days, but he seems too much of a gentle cat for that. I feel sorry for him, and want to admonish her for being such a brute, but now we know better. They are cats. They’ll behave the way cats behave with each other.
We are just their servants. Our place is to observe and respect them.
As Planned
photo by Elysa Hays
With rain threatening for most of the morning, we stuck to our plan and started the day focusing on the landscape pond. We rearranged a lot of rocks, placed the pump, built a waterfall, and then stacked stones around the plastic tubes to make them less conspicuous.
Cyndie had purchased supplies to help keep the water clear, and set about tending to that. Elysa served as my consultant, giving me feedback on how my placement of stones looked from afar. Elysa also took a turn at capturing photos, and pruning dead growth from the few perennials growing out of the water.
Since we are experiencing problematic wetness around the property this spring, it feels nice to finally embrace water for once, as opposed to frowning over it, longing to see it gone. Cyndie wrapped the water line and power cord from the pump with some vine leaves, and after topping off the overall level with a bit of fresh water from the hose, we declared the pond complete and ready for the season.
We are lucky to have had the help of Elysa and Anne all weekend on the variety of things we chose to do. We didn’t make it to the work weekend up at the lake place, but having them here made it feel like a special weekend, and their efforts provided great gains and priceless company on the first Memorial “work-weekend” at Wintervale.
Stunted Progress
Despite our lofty intentions, the number of things that we filled our day with yesterday, were but a small portion of what is awaiting attention. Time just slips away. It is our normal mode of operation, it seems.
It was overcast and chilly in the morning, and Cyndie asked for a fire in the fireplace. Elysa and her friend, Anne, had spent the night, and Cyndie and Elysa were visiting in the kitchen, drinking Guatemalan coffee and chocolate. I noticed we hadn’t burned any wood since the power outage of the great snow storm of May 2nd, and the fireplace doors needed cleaning and the box was full of ash.
By the time I finished all the clean-up and preparation, the focus of activity had moved on to other things, so we dropped the plan of having a fire. Before making a visit to the local Ford dealership, to test drive a pickup truck, Cyndie said she was going to vacuum her car, in case it became a part of potential negotiations. That became a much more involved project than anticipated
If there was ever any doubt that Cyndie deserved to be driving a truck, instead of her little red Audi convertible, the sight of her back seats provided an excellent argument. I rushed to take a picture, and missed the focus, but maybe that softens the impact of how bad it looked. It was going to take more than a little vacuuming to spruce up her car. Cyndie has the ability to get the maximum use out of whatever she drives.
Our morning visit to the dealership for a test drive didn’t happen until around the time they close on Saturdays, in the early afternoon. As often happens with me, that visit left us with more questions than answers. We will be pondering our options for Cyndie’s future vehicle a while longer.
Before we finally ran out of day, the goal of working on the labyrinth became the next objective. I really want to position boulders in the middle to start the project, and Cyndie is anxious to begin planting some things she recently purchased (and hauled in the back seat of her car), to begin defining the pattern of the path. We decided to try bringing down the diesel tractor to see if we could figure out how to move big rocks using the loader bucket and hydraulic power.
The results of that experiment left us with one pinched finger on Cyndie’s hand, and some muddy ruts in the ground. It is still too wet to be able to drive around down there. We finished the day by hand-raking the area to groom it. I tried to fill in the muddy divots left by the tractor, with limited success.
We didn’t get any grass mowed on the rest of the property, so if the rain holds off, that is high on the list of priorities today. I’m hoping Cyndie is in the mood to play around on the tractor. I want her to be having fun, if I steal some time to get out on my bicycle to put in miles in preparation for the annual bike week that is only 12 days away.
Intermediate States
We have arrived at the U.S. holiday weekend of “Memorial Day.” For us, this usually means a trip to the vacation getaway of Cyndie’s family, in Hayward, WI, for “Work Weekend.” This is the time when the property gets a major cleaning, the beach gets raked, toys and floatation devices pulled from storage, and boats get scrubbed and hauled down to the lake. The work culminates in a spectacular community feast at the main lodge.
We aren’t there this year. It feels strange.
We have our new property to tend to this spring, and have been granted a pass from contributing our labor to the lake place.
It feels as though everything at our place is hanging in an intermediate state right now. The two biggest projects, the hay shed and paddock fencing, have been stuck in limbo for weeks, waiting for conditions to dry.
I think the geothermal furnace installation looks complete, but I don’t know the status of whether or not it is fully operational. Almost all the work of installation occurred while we weren’t home. Each day last week, I would check progress when I arrived home from the day-job, trying to discern what had been done, and why, and how. As of last night, it looks like everything is wired and plumbed, but we found no indication of the status, nor instructions on operation. They did leave manuals out. I suppose I could do some reading.
We finished digging up the drain line from the septic tank. It looks like the distribution box is disintegrating. It also looks like there are a lot of illogical twists and turns in the plumbing. I have no idea why they originally chose to do it the way they did, but it did work fine, as far as we can tell, for almost 25 years, so we won’t redo the whole thing. The septic professional I have been consulting has located a replacement distribution box, and will also replace the section of cast iron pipe originally used. It being a holiday weekend, that work will not happen until next week some time, weather permitting.
We need to do a lot of cutting of grass, as the growth is so rapid this time of year, it gets long on one end of the property before you finish cutting the other. Julian helped us greatly last weekend, by doing the first cut of the season, but he wasn’t able to mow the back hill, due to geothermal installation that was in process. It had time to grow doubly long, and we knew rain was coming, so we jumped on that chore late yesterday, before it could get any worse. I am happy to report that Cyndie was eager to have a lesson on the operation of the tractor, and then looked to be having so much fun, I might get away with doing a lot less of the grass cutting around here than I previously anticipated.
In a classic demonstration of our different modes of operation, Cyndie took off with glee, mowing around a tree and then wheeling off in any direction, haphazardly picking off areas of long grass wherever it appeared in her view. I am inclined to mow in a line, back and forth, very methodically. I am a bit more timid. She boldly devoured areas that deserved to be cut, but that I would have been hesitant to try with that mower. I was thinking it would require the brush hog attached to the large tractor. She demonstrated otherwise.
Cyndie and I are a great combination. She spotted some mushrooms growing under a dead pine tree in our front yard. I told her they tasted funny and she got all riled up, exclaiming that I shouldn’t eat them until I know what they are. I was teasing her, of course. Comparing images we found online, we are very confident that these are the very popular and definitely edible morel mushrooms.
We started tending to our little landscape pond with waterfall, but finally came to the full realization that they didn’t leave a pump behind when they moved out, so that project is awaiting a purchase. One more thing hanging in limbo. We also may try to test drive a pickup truck this weekend, a task we have been talking about accomplishing for months.
One last thing that has us feeling unsettled is how much we miss our friends, Alane, Dunia, and Marco. Cyndie has been working with Alane and Dunia for much of her Epona apprenticeship training. I met them and Marco last weekend, and in that short time, developed a deep feeling of connection with all of them. We feel a deep longing to have them here with us, and, in turn, they have indicated a desire to have us visit them in Guatemala and Australia. Long distance relationships can be hard, but we truly hope to make these connections flourish.
Our projects may hang in an intermediate state, but our friendships are definitely established.
Dug In
I did some trenching after I got home from work yesterday. To my surprise, I learned that the drain does not run in a straight line. I’m not sure why they did it this way, but one guess is to improve the position to the drain field.
So far, everything looks fine. I was looking for the junction where it splits and heads to the drain field, but I was running out of time, and the pipe was getting deeper and deeper. When I reached a joint that was covered by some sort of fabric, I stopped for the night. I suspect that is the spot I’m looking for, and will need to open up a larger area around it, to be able to adequately inspect it.
It struck me, as I was working, how much attention we put into assuring both our furnace and septic system were inspected and in working order when we made our offer to buy this place, eight months ago. Now we are totally replacing the furnace and digging up a portion of the septic drain system.
At the time, we were meaning to be diligent about pertinent details; prudently thorough about such a significant purchasing decision. Seems like maybe that wasn’t as important as it seemed to be.
We are getting this place ready for the long haul, and we have dug in with the intention of staying here for the rest of our lives. These things are just small steps toward the achievement of our overall goals of living with horses in this magical place we now call home.
Matched Set
It feels a little odd to be so pleased with my back yard being torn up, but it has me just tickled to see. The loop field is actually out to the left of this image, underneath the trees of that front section of forest. It is the ideal location, I have learned, as the tree roots draw moisture up, enhancing the effectiveness of the geothermal transfer.
Everything that grows green is bursting forth with gusto right now. I took a short walk in our woods, searching to see if we have any trillium growing, and hardly recognized our trail. I need to be careful about getting lost in there! Unfortunately, I spotted no trillium.
What I did find was, standing water in the ruts of the trail. I don’t think I’ll be driving through the woods for quite a while around here. It is wet, wet, wet.
Inside the house, they got the old furnace ripped out, and already replaced by the backup unit that will function for our new system. Today, they plan to pour the concrete to patch the floor where the lines come up from the loop manifold out in the back yard, and then set the heat pump and other unit side by side on top of that spot.
Meanwhile, I have received counsel on my septic situation that has me pondering doing the digging, myself, to expose the suspected problem area. If I can get it dug up, the guy that pumps it out told me he could make the repairs. The target zone is about 10 feet from the tank, along the pipe that leads to the drain field.
I’m not sure my back will be all that happy with me taking on that chore, but I won’t know until I try. I’ll be working slow, since there is a propane line buried in the area, so I don’t think over-exertion will be a problem.
When that gets completed, we should end up having matching dug-up front and back yards!
New Dilemma
We are now at the middle of May and our place is finally beginning to show signs of greening up. The weather has moved very quickly from chilly temperatures, to a day with a heat advisory being issued. The grass is wasting no time. The lawn beckons to be mowed, especially if we are to keep pace with all the other property owners in the vicinity. Everyone around us seems to have leaped into that task with gusto. Don’t they have more important things to do first?
I still haven’t figured out which areas I want to continue to mow in the manner they were previously tended, and which areas I can turn over to nature’s whimsy. As it is now, areas around the driveway and barn are going to be hard to mow, because of the disruption caused by the projects underway.
Speaking of projects, one more thing demanding immediate attention made an unwelcome appearance yesterday. I was running a load of laundry, in preparation to pack and leave for Arizona, and while I was out discussing the location of our planned backup generator with a contractor, we witnessed some water flow out of the lid of our septic tank!
That’s not right!
Especially, based on the fact that it was pumped out and inspected about 8 months ago when we made our offer on the place. Based on only 2 people living here now, that is way too soon for the tank to need to be pumped again.
It seems a little ironic to me that the whole time our property was soaked through like a wet sponge, there were no signs of trouble from the septic system. Now, just as things are finally drying out, the problem shows up. And, of course, it happens just as I am headed out of town.
So, today, while I am at work, and then headed to the airport, there will be a drilling crew setting up at the house for few days of work, and a septic company pumping our tank. I hope they all get along fine with each other, …and without me.
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I’ve got no posts prepared in advance, so we’ll see what the next few days brings, while I am in Arizona. Cyndie tells me I will have access. Hopefully, I will be able to provide some up-to-date stories and images from our adventures over the coming weekend.
And, hopefully, there’ll be no more new dilemmas popping up for some time.
Good Wet
Of all the days for the new geothermal furnace installation project to start, they picked the day when I leave to join Cyndie in Arizona. Isn’t that just the way things go?
But, hey, that’s progress, and any progress is good progress, as far as I’m concerned this spring. Yesterday, at the house, I was able to meet with the lead person on the boring crew for the fluid lines that will go underground. He said that if all goes well, that part of the job will be done in two days, and thus, completed by the time we get home. It was good to meet him and talk, because as he was leaving, he commented that I may never see him again.
He offered to take some pictures of the process for me, which will be fabulous, because burying the lines is the most dramatic part of the project, I think. The rest is just units in the utility room in the basement, which is about the same as the installation of a conventional furnace, as far as I’m concerned.
Interesting note about our soil, which is the big question regarding whether the boring goes well for them, or not, is that he said, “The wetter, the better.”
Well, we’ve got wet here, that’s for sure!
He also said that clay would be good to go through, so I’m hoping they will benefit from the very thing that has been a big nuisance for the people trying to put up fences for us. The geothermal guys will be happy to find clay and wet soil.
‘Being happy’ sure is a switch from what we’ve been hearing for quite some time now, from the fence contractor.
Relative Something 