• Tag Archives fence

  • At Peace

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                                                    Waxing Last Frost Moon

    Woke up this morning feeling the week past.  Intellectually and physically tired.  Gonna take a day off to play, sleep.  Maybe go to the Walker, which I haven’t visited in far too long.

    We have a large truck gate in the front section of our 6 foot high chain link fence.  It opens to ten feet wide to allow delivery trucks, mobile lawn mowers and other wide things into the back where the orchard and the garden are.  It’s open today because we’re having five cubic yards of mulch delivered.  To open it, because it’s used infrequently, I had to dig out the accumulated soil in front of the two panels that create the gate, just so they could swing out.

    Being tired, in a good way, with things done, matters accomplished gives me a feeling of peace.  I like it.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Garden 📎and tagged

  • Rigel. Again.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                             New (Back to School) Moon

    The partisans of summer have begun to moan its passing here in the north country.  Those of us who love the fall and the winter have only begun to savor the cooler nights, the lower humidity and the reduction in thunderstorms.  The harvest has begun, though much lies ahead.

    Rigel, again.  So, I got up early this morning, took my peavy and my swede saw, and trudged, a bit bleary eyed, back to the fence and the fallen down tree.  The peavy was no help, as I suspected it might not be, because there was no way to achieve leverage with it.  The tree balanced on the fence above the ground.  Nothing for it then but to use the swede saw.  After some huffing and puffing, the trunk broke in two and fell away from the fence on both sides.  I put the electric fence back in place, then walked the entire perimeter to be sure I hadn’t missed anything.  All this before my morning tea.

    Got inside, the tea on its way and cereal in the bowl when I noticed a flash out of my eye and saw Vega looking down into the perennial garden.  I got up to find Rigel just on the other side of the gate.  She had pulled herself over it.  Sigh.  This time Kate and I decided what we needed to do and since Kate was on her way to pick up meds and money for my trip she went to her favorite store, Home Depot.

    We let Rigel out to eat and I watched her.  She started to pull herself over again.  I went and said, NO.  She moved away from the gate, ate some food, went off in the yard to romp with Vega.  Not five minutes later I saw a blur on the deck.  She had launched herself over the gate from a full run.  Geez.  Kate, the front door.  I’m going after her.  Rigel went into the front yard, ignoring me.  Kate came out and called her.  Rigel ran, not toward Kate, but toward the front door to the house.

    She is now in her crate as we seal off yet one more escape route.  She tests our ingenuity.  Regularly.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs 📎and tagged

  • Doing Stuff

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                      Flowering Moon

    The netaphim ruined last year by dogs Rigel and Vega has repairs.  The repairs sit safely inside fences that Rigel has shown either no interest or no capability to penetrate.  They should last.

    The bees will wait until a less breezy tomorrow.  Wind blows the smoke around and I have to perform a reversal, hive check and clean off the bottom board.  The reversal of the top 2 hive boxes encourages the queen to move into the top box and lay eggs there to create an ovoid shape of larva outside of which the nursery bees will complete a ring of pollen and a ring of honey.  This makes the planned colony split on May 15th assured of one hive box full of larva, hopefully the top one with new larvae and therefore newly born nursery bees.  Nursery bees take more kindly to moving around than the older worker bees.

    Irrigation folks have scheduled Tuesday to come out and turn on the irrigation system.  A good thing.  They usually wait until the second week of May since our average last frost date is around May 15th.  I imagine that’s moved up closer to the first week of May on average, but a frost outside the average is still a frost so most planning still accommodates the old date.

    Tomorrow the bees and soil amending, that is, putting in composted manure and humus on the raised beds and adding some sphagnum moss (some more) to the blueberry beds.  The outdoor season with sun.  The great wheel turns.  Again.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Fencing

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Fall                                          Waxing Dark Moon

    Dan the fence guy came and measured the fenceline for our garden.  He hopes to finish by tomorrow and I hope he does.  Rigel will then be relegated to digging holes in the woods and the backyard rather than the garden and the orchard.  This home’s most expensive dog greeted Dan with a lot of energy.

    Kate’s doing a bit more each day, though she still tires easily.  She walks without her walker for short distances and stood up for a good bit last night to cook the Danish pancakes.  Her recovery is a testimony to Viking pillaging genes, I think.  No Viking would let a bad back stop them from raiding a monastery or sacking a castle.

    Dan has had back troubles, too.  In fact, he goes in to see the top spine surgeon at the U on Monday.  He had surgery on L-5/S-1 twelve years ago and now has trouble there again and in his neck.  He keeps telling Jake, his cousin, that he can have the fence business, but that he needs to protect his back.

    After burning through the majority of the new toys I bought yesterday, Rigel and Vega seem enchanted with the frozen peanut butter Kongs.  A good sign.

    Here’s a link to a fascinating Scientific American article on economics titled Does Economic Violate the Laws of Physics? It raises issues I would put in the conceptual arena of the commons.  It makes a ton of sense to me.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs GeekWorld Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • More Fence.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                      Waning Blood Moon

    Dan the fence guy came out again.  This time we’re fencing in the vegetable garden, a five foot high fence and a taut wire to run along the top of the orchard fence.  Rigel is an expensive dog.  Really expensive.  A sweetheart, yes, but a major league nuisance, too.  The electric fence, I’m proud to say, has done its job.  No more escapes since it went up.

    Kate and I reupholstered the couch this afternoon, the seat cushion.  In the process I thought back over growing up and could not remember a single thing Dad ever fixed.  I’m sure he must have fixed something, but I don’t recall what it was.  Anyhow, fixing stuff ratchets up my annoyed level to unpleasant proportions because I always struggle.  The outcome does not match the effort for me.  Kate, when able, has a different ratio of effort to outcome and has a much better time.

    A good run with no trips into the city.  That makes getting things done here much easier.

    Kate’s in the calm before the storm, but it isn’t very calm, at least from a pain stand point.  This kind of pain, constant and intense, exacts a psychological toll as well as a physical one.  The pain requires, demands attention.  That is, after all, the point of pain.  Hey.  You.  Pay.  Attention. Now.  That attention adds a level of stress to all daily activities.  Also, at 65 any infirmity at all raises questions of mortality, of fitness for life as we’ve known it.

    This is the right decision at the right time after two + years of exhausting less drastic and nominally invasive procedures.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Family 📎and tagged

  • Fences

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                              Waxing Harvest Moon

    Good fences make good neighbors.  The folks that live diagonally across the road from us, their house fronts on Round Lake Blvd., have two dogs.  These dogs like to visit our dogs.  Note that this means their dogs do not have an enclosure to keep them at home.  When the neighbor dogs come calling, our dogs bark and bark and bark and bark.  Really annoying.  To amplify the annoyance Vega and Rigel (remember them?) have discovered a variety of ways to penetrate the fence and go play with the visitors.

    All understandable, especially when you have two strong, determined puppies (8 months old now and 86.6 pounds and 74.6 respectively, Vega and Rigel), but not acceptable because there is a busy highway nearby. It is also always possible that the lure of things far away could grip these two star-named dogs and they could wander.  Not good.

    What to do?  A fence.  We now have a chain-link fence that surrounds all our 2.5 acres except for the area immediately around the house.  We also have a fence around the orchard since Vega ate the netaphim.  We used to have a fence around the vegetable garden, but I dismantled it three years ago.  So, we have a lot of fence.

    Even so, I have begun installation of one more.  This one I will create from old snow fence and a plastic snow fence, using fence posts made from bamboo and old wooden stakes.  The purpose of this fence will be to create a 50 foot or so setback from the chain-link fence line.  This will separate our dogs from the neighbors by a good distance and should lower the volume and decrease the escape attempts.  I hope.

    That’s what I spent the morning building.  It’s not quite done, since I have to create a gate that can open and close to admit the truck and lawn mower, but I think I have that figured out.  I’m not sure whether this will be permanent or not.  If it is, then I’ll have to use better looking material, for now, though, I only want to see if it solves or substantially ameliorates the problem.


    📂This entry was posted in Dogs Our Land and Home 📎and tagged