Tuesday, March 06, 2007, 22:25
Making Tracks
It's snowing again today -- an Alberta Clipper that is supposed to drop only a little light snow.
It started snowing this morning, and at mid-afternoon, it's still snowing. I think we've gotten between 1 and 2 inches. It might be enough that I will have to shovel the driveways again. The exercise is good for me, though.
Even by late this morning it had snowed enough so that when I took Pixie and Charlie out for a walk, as soon as I got to the "Y" with the dirt road just down the hill from the house, I saw them.
Turkey tracks.
Three sets of wild turkey tracks.
Three sets of wild turkey tracks headed right up the very middle of the dirt road.
"I wonder where they're going?" I said to the dogs.
Because it's cold and snowy, the tracks must not have had much scent because our Springer Spaniel didn't pay any attention to the turkey tracks.
Usually, if he smells a wild turkey, he is in Springer Spaniel Heaven. Wild turkeys must smell very good to Charlie. He runs around, back and forth, following his nose, whining deep in his throat just for the sheer joy of smelling wild turkeys.
But Charlie apparently did not smell them today.
As we walked up the road, I kept an eye on the tracks. They were still headed right up the middle of the road and never varied to the left or to the right.
I continued following the tracks for a quarter of a mile.
All at once, as soon as we drew even with the neighbor's driveway, the turkey tracks turned, all three right in a row, as if they were marching in step, and went right up the driveway toward the neighbor's cow pasture. (Talk about marching to the beat of a different drummer!)
I suppose the wild turkeys were interested in finding something to eat and figured they knew exactly where to find it.
I wish I could have watched those three turkeys walking right up the middle of the dirt road for a quarter of a mile. The tracks were all pretty much the same size, and they looked to be fairly large turkeys.
In not too long, in another six weeks to two months, when the snow is gone and the grass is starting to turn green, the wild Tom turkeys are going to start gobbling. Sometimes a Tom will spend all day, traipsing back and forth along the neighbor's ridge up in the woods, gobbling. I know he's traipsing because at one point he sounds louder and then fainter and fainter and then louder and louder, fainter and fainter, louder and fainter. You would think they'd wear themselves out with all the walking around and gobbling, but they don't appear to get tired.
Seems funny to think the Tom turkeys will be gobbling soon when it looks so very much like winter outside now.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Monday, March 05, 2007, 13:11
After the Snowstorm. . .
By the time it was finished snowing Friday night, we got a total of 17 inches out of the latest storm. Between the two storms, in a week, we got a total of nearly 30 inches of snow.
That's more snow in a week than we've had in years. I would have to check back in my weather records, but that's probably more snow in a week than we've gotten in the last 10 years.
Randy made it out of here about 10 a..m. Friday morning to leave for "ice fishing weekend" a his mom and dad's place. I didn't realize it at the time, but he had taken the digital camera with him. If I had known that, I would have taken pictures while all the snow was still clinging to the trees. It was still snowing then Friday morning, but road crews had a few hours by then to work on the highways. He wondered about starting the snowblower to do the driveways before he left, but I said, "Don't worry about that. I can do the driveways."
That was my mistake, of course.
During the snowstorm last week on February 24-25, the tractor decided it did not want to run very well. It acts like it's not getting enough gasoline. Either the fuel line is frozen or it's plugged up with junk of some sort. Or it's possible it needs new spark plugs too, I guess.
So that left the snowblower for the latest snowstorm. Randy had used it Thursday to clear some of the snow from the driveway. More snow fell overnight and on into Friday morning.
The snow blower, I discovered, is not running very well either. It will start. And it will run for a little while. But it won't run if I shut off the choke. And it does not respond to the throttle. I think it might need a new throttle cable, or a connection to the throttle cable -- and maybe a bunch of other things, too.
I managed to clear the path next to the horse pasture fence with the snow blower. But when I got back around to the lower driveway, the snow blower quit. I got it started a bunch of times. But it simply would not run for very long.
You might know the snow blower would be at the *end* of the driveway at that point.
I muscled the thing back to the basement and put it inside.
Now what was I going to do. The tractor wasn't running. And the snow blower wasn't running.
That only left one thing. Me and the snow shovel.
If I wanted to get out at all for the rest of the weekend, I would have to shovel the lower driveway. It's about 75 feet from the garage out to the road. So I started shoveling. It took me 3 hours all together to shovel the lower driveway and my paths around the house and down to the barn. It kept snowing all the while, too. Sometimes it was like a blizzard outside Friday afternoon. At other times, the snow would let up, and I would think it was going to stop. But it didn't. The worst part of the whole job was the snow that the snowplow had rolled across the end of the driveway. I finally finished it, though!
Saturday morning dawned bright and clear and sunny. All things considered, I wasn't moving too badly. My legs ached from bending them to pick up the shovels of snow, but that other than that, I wasn't in too bad a shape.
That's when I decided to shovel the 50 feet of the upper driveway as well. If I could get the upper driveway shoveled, both driveways would be finished.
Once again, the driveway itself wasn't so bad. It was the snow the snowplow had rolled across the end of the driveway. I ended up getting the spade shovel from the barn to break up the boulders of snow at the end of the upper driveway. I didn't want to crack the snow shovel, after all.
Sunday morning the temperature had dropped to an even 0 degrees Fahrenheit. I got up and took care of the dogs and horses and headed off to church. When I arrived home later in the morning, I went out to carry fresh buckets of water to the horses. I had only broken the ice out first thing in the morning. After the horses were squared away, I knew I had to lie down for a little while if I was going to make it through the Sing Thing in the afternoon.
At 1 p.m. I headed to town to the parsonage for a quick choir practice before the Sing Thing started at 2 p.m. It was so hot in the church that hosted the Sing Thing, by the time we got up to sing, my throat was so dried out that my voice cracked all over the place. Oh, well.
I was back home again at 4 p.m. The message light was blinking on the answering machine. It was my nephew, wondering if I would watch my great-nephew, Eli, while his mom and dad went for a snowmobile ride. Since we haven't had snow like this in years, and since it is supposed to warm up this week, which means the snow will settle and will probably start melting, I figured I ought to babysit for them.
I called Randy on his cell phone to tell him where I would be. I knew he had left in the afternoon to come home from ice-fishing weekend, but I didn't know what time he had left. He said he was about 45 minutes from home.
Eli and I spent 15 minutes together before his grandma and grandpa arrived (my sister-in-law and my brother). My nephew said he didn't know where to find them earlier in the afternoon, which is why he had called me.
A little while later, Randy arrived, so we all sat and had a good visit.
Eli is crawling now! When I had walked into the house, he crawled over to see who had arrived. He's got a little electronic play phone that plays music when you press the buttons, and when you press the zero it says "Bye-bye."
That's how I learned that Eli knows bye-bye, too!
And he knows "grrrr!" The kind of "grrrr" a lion makes. His grandma found a book for me to read to him, and as you go through the story, you're supposed to press buttons along the bottom of the book so it makes the appropriate noises. I got to the part about the lion, pressed the lion, the lion said "grrrr" and a few moments later, Eli said "grrrr" too. It wasn't a very fierce sounding "grrrr." And it wasn't a loud "grrrrr" -- but it was a "grrrr" nonetheless. It was just the cutest thing.
By the time we arrived home from my nephew's, it was a little after 7 p.m. And the horses still needed to be fed and the dogs needed a walk. We needed supper, too. It was 9:30 p.m. by the time we finished eating supper.
It would be somewhat of an understatement to say I was pretty pooped. Which is why I decided to send out Rural Route 2 News on Monday morning.
As far as I know, we don't have another snowstorm predicted for this week. We'll get a few flurries toward the middle of the week, they say, and then the weather is supposed to turn warmer.
I still can't quite get over it, though -- 2 old-fashioned snowstorms back to back. March is generally our snowiest month, too. And it has only just begun. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph