Relative Something

By the time I pushed my tired legs up the driveway toward the house, the sun was already below the horizon. It had been a very long day of unplanned effort, starting with the discovery of a huge tangle in Mix’s tail.

While Mix was eating from her feed bin, Cyndie worked to detangle the dreadlocked knot. I stood and watched for a while but eventually couldn’t resist reaching out to grab a portion and comb away snarls with my fingers.

I was very impressed with how Mix tolerated all the tugging on strands of her tail without complaint. It was easy to interpret this as her understanding we were working to remedy the problem in her tail.

We spent so much time on that tail that Asher was able to set a new record for digging after rodent tunnels in the dirt floor of the barn. This triggered an unplanned goal of moving accumulated debris being stored in there and putting dirt back from where it had been dug.

The project had no formal boundary, so we found ourselves progressing to layers that hadn’t been touched in probably a decade. Once you’ve gone that far, may as well continue to the bitter end.

We pulled out the shop vac and cleaned dusty cobwebs off the walls. I began to worry that all the crap that had been dragged outside created a new dilemma about what to do with it. I didn’t want it all getting piled back inside again.

In the middle of all this, I received a message that my gutter downspout was ready for pickup in Hudson. That was an opportunity I didn’t want to delay and ultimately provided the highlight of my day.

I was hoping to also purchase a piece of angle iron for our fireplace while I was out. The staff at the home improvement store moved my query up three levels of people with knowledge on the subject. Ultimately, I was sent off with ideas but no iron.

Since it didn’t seem like I could buy exactly what I was after from a store like theirs, I decided to act on a whim. There is a very industrial-looking little shop on the highway out of River Falls called “Steel Towne.” I’d driven past this place twice a day during my years commuting to the day-job and always wondered who their customers were.

Found out they serve walk-ins. I pulled in and described the problem I was trying to solve. Five minutes later, I was handed a two-foot piece that cost me $3.00. I left with a whopping sense of elation.

Cyndie had worked non-stop to keep cleaning while I was gone, so I jumped right back into the barn project we didn’t know we were going to do when we woke up that morning.

There are some things that simply got moved to storage in the hay shed or the shop garage, but we agreed to throw out a fair amount of other stuff.

We were getting wobbly-legged at the end and did move several objects back into the middle of the barn temporarily so we could close things up for the night.

As I shuffled toward the house and enjoyed the orange glow in the western sky, I contemplated the gutter downspout project and the fireplace fix, which are actually planned work that is on the agenda for today.

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