Wednesday, April 25, 2007, 02:58
One Thing After Another. . .
As I tossed the forkful of hay over the fence for Kajun, I heard it.
Crrrrrrrunch!
"Shoot," I said.
Our brand new rain gauge fell to the ground from the post where it had been hanging.
I bent to pick it up.
"Great," I said.
Our new rain gauge, which had been up on the fencepost for only a few weeks, now had a hole in the bottom and the part where it hung from the fencepost was also broken off.
The reason I was tossing a forkful of hay over the fence is because I have only a few bales of hay left in the barn. And I can't move those bales right now. Little Sister has tunneled in between them to make a nest, and I am pretty sure that any day she is going to be having her kittens.
So, over the weekend, we got a 1,200 pound round bale from a friend of ours. The big bale of hay is sitting by the fence in between Kajun and Isabelle's pasture. It's lovely hay. A nice grass and alfalfa mixture. And it smells delightful. Like a warm summer day when hay is drying out in a field. It even has some alfalfa blossoms in it, and the blossoms have not lost any of their color.
As soon as the bale arrived Saturday, I took some of the string off it and fed some of the hay to the horses. I believe they pretty much ate nonstop from Saturday afternoon until Sunday morning. By Sunday morning, I think they were officially full.
Anyway, that's why I was throwing a forkful of hay over the fence for Kajun -- and that's how I succeeded in breaking the rain gauge.
I went into the house to call Randy.
"While you're at Menards after work," I said, "you might as well get a rain gauge. Oh, yeah, and a telephone."
For those of you who are not familiar with it, Menards is a general "do it yourself" type store with plumbing supplies, flooring, windows, lumber, that sort of thing.
I explained what had happened to Randy. He agreed to get a rain gauge while he was there.
The reason Randy was going to Menards, by the way, is that Sunday evening while he was washing a sinkful of dishes, water began pooling up on the floor by his feet.
I was waiting for some dishes that I could dry and had gone into my office to check my e-mail. In a few moments, I heard Randy come pounding down the hall, dash into the bedroom, and then run back out to the kitchen.
"What's wrong?" I said, following him.
"Water!" he gasped, pointing to the floor. "With suds in it."
"Water? With suds?" I said.
He yanked open the cupboard door beneath the sink and began shining the flashlight around.
Pretty soon, he discovered the problem. A hole in the drain pipe that you could put your finger through.
After 32 years of service, the pipe had corroded away.
A little while later, Randy went to the local Farmer's Union hardware store six miles away. He returned with some PVC pipe, but it wasn't going to work with the what was left of the drain pipe on the other side of the sink.
So, after work on Monday, he planned to go to the Menards store.
As for the telephone I asked Randy to get, we needed a hand-held. The buttons on the second V-tech telephone that we had gotten in the last few months stopped working. When the buttons stopped working on the first phone, we figured maybe it was just a faulty phone. We'd only had it for a few months, too, so it could not have been worn out. The buttons on the second V-tech phone also stopped working in only a few weeks.
We decided we would give up on V-tech phones.
Monday evening, Randy brought home the PVC pipe, rain gauge and telephone.
He fixed the sink in no-time flat and set up the telephone.
So far, so good.
I haven't put up the rain gauge yet, though. But when I do, I will have to keep reminding myself to watch what I'm doing with the pitchfork. Just like I have to keep reminding myself to kick the hay before I dig in with the pitchfork.
Feeding hay off a round bale is like peeling off the layers of a cinnamon roll. When one layer starts unraveling, it folds over down around the base of the bale. The other day when I was outside getting ready to feed hay, I just happened to notice my black tom cat Rocky crawling in under the "overhang" of hay. When he was inside completely, I couldn't see him at all. Not even the tip of his tail. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, April 23, 2007, 14:17
A Good Day for Planting Trees
Talk about fortuitous. It started raining Sunday evening. And all together we got three-tenths of an inch. Not a huge amount of rain by any stretch of the imagination. But better than nothing.
The reason the rain was fortuitous is because Sunday afternoon, Randy and I transplanted four small red cedar trees. Three of them were growing by the power pole underneath the oak tree where the Cedar Waxwings sit after they have been eating juniper berries from the big tree by the house. The fourth cedar tree was growing along the side of the road.
We knew the ones by the power pole would never amount to much because there were other trees and brush around them, and they didn't have room to grow. The cedar tree by the road was in danger of getting chopped off by the township's boom mower or getting ground into green fragments if it got run over by the grader.
Three of the trees we moved to the area between the road and the horse pasture fence. The fourth tree we planted in the yard. We watered all four of them when we planted them, but I was glad to see it start raining in the evening.
When we dug holes for the trees, the ground was quite dry on top. And that's out of the ordinary for early spring. Usually the ground is wet in the spring. But not this year. There was moisture down a ways, but I would have expected the ground to be wet all the way to the top. The rain will help our little trees. And it will help all the other trees and plants and bushes that are starting to grow now.
It might be kind of dumb, but I'm partial to those cedar trees. They are all the children of the cedar tree my dad and I planted right after I got out of high school. We found the tree growing in the fenceline along the cow pasture, dug it up and transplanted it here. The big cedar tree looks a little tough now. Half of it broke off after a spring snowstorm years ago when the snow was heavy and wet. But so far, it has been struggling on valiantly.
Unfortunately, my old Morgan-Arab cross, Kajun, was not so thrilled about the rain. Unsettled weather makes him jumpy, and when I walked into the barn with the flashlight Sunday evening, he almost jumped out of his skin. I have tried explaining to him that I can't see very well in the dark, but he has not been able to comprehend that too well.
I managed to put hay out for Kajun and to check the kitty food and water without him stomping all over Charlie, who always comes down to the barn with me at night, or without him stomping all over an unsuspecting barn cat. He's been jumpy about flashlights ever since he colicked a few years ago at night, and we had to use a flashlight when the vet was out here. So between the rain pounding on the barn roof and the flashlight, the poor old horse was practically beside himself.
Isabelle, on the other hand, doesn't let things like that bother her. She was thrilled to discover I had put hay inside her shelter for her so she could eat and stay out of the rain, whether or not I was carrying the flashlight. She's not crazy about getting wet. When we first brought her here almost two years ago, I watched her to try to sink from beneath the rain the first time it rained. It was kind of funny. She was almost walking on her knees before she realized it wasn't helping. She prefers to stand out of the rain, if at all possible.
Not that I blame Isabelle. I prefer to stay out of the rain if I can, too. As my dad used to say, "I'm so sweet I might melt, you know." (Right.) Except in Isabelle's case it could be true. She has an awfully sweet temperament. Bless her little equine heart.
At any rate, our newly transplanted cedar trees got a little drink Sunday night. This morning the sun is shining, and there's a strong wind out of the north chasing puffy white clouds ahead of it. I think that means it's done raining now.
LeAnn R. Ralph