California is basking in reasonable temperatures and even sun.  It did freeze last night but warmed right up. 
Yesterday's chore was to "groom" the arena.  This required taking the tractor down from the house, a distance of about 2 miles in the chilly morning air.  Before hooking up the drag I made a faint effort to move some sand from the south side of the arena where the sand is thick, to the middle where there are some dips that become pools when it rains. I did get some sand moved we will see if it did any good in the next good rainstorm. Got the whole thing dragged, fluffing up the sand and hopefully killing all the grass that had germinated.  Took about four passes over each square foot of sand in a 140 x 250 ft rectangle.  With that done I got out the sprayer and sprayed the edges for the second time this year.  I suspect there will be a third time as well. There was spray leftover to use on the weeds in the pastures. Almost all the plants I target are mustard, dock and fiddleneck.  Horses don't eat any of them unless starving. Dock and mustard can take over a pasture, reducing the area that can be grazed dramatically.  Both plants are perennial in this climate. Mustard at least has the advantage of fixing nitrogen in the soil, but that isn't enough for me to want it in the pastures. 
Today's chores involved  paperwork and a trip to town to take iris starts to a lady, plus grocery shopping.  
Rain tomorrow, the first rain since Jan 8th.  Apparently a one day wonder before it goes back to being reasonably warm and sunny. 

Russel and his wife Karen called and came out this morning to cut wood. They are such nice people!  I showed them several options including a huge tree that is down right next to the road. 
There is a lot of grass trying desperately to go to seed in my garden. Grass is supposed to start in Nov-Dec, grow only a little until early March and go to seed in late April or May. Instead there is grass 2 feet tall now, in January. A lot of grass has already been pulled out of the garden and added to the compost.  All that nice high-nitrogen grass has brought the compost up to a toasty 130F.  At that temperature there are millions of little microscopic organisms happily chomping away at the pile, aided and abetted by fungi. 
I went down to Winter Quarters today, got Firefly and gave her a good grooming.  We had a short ride in the arena to review leg and weight aids. Afterward, back in Winter Quarters, I stopped to chat with Glenn who was there to exercise two horses. Such a nice person! Firefly had a little lesson in standing around waiting for me to finish talking. She is getting ever so much more patient.  Before I let her loose I gave her a dose of worm medicine, it is past time to do so. The wormer was apple flavored which helped a little (horses often object quite forcefully to having nasty paste squirted into their mouth). Firefly barely put up any resistance.  All the other horses on the place are getting their doses as well.  Throughout everything Firefly was really good.  She even stood quietly next to the fence as I crawled on her. (For non-horse riders: horses are smart. If they decide they don't want to be ridden they will step away from the fence or mounting block until trained to stand  by it quietly. Horses that are ridden with kindness and sensitivity learn that they don't need to dislike being ridden - it might be nice or even fun!)
Tomorrow the plan is to take the tractor down and groom the arena. Also spray the edges again.  Once that is done it will be time to hook up the post hole digger and see if it will dig some holes for me.  Some places may be fine, others may have too much rock for the auger to work.  
Finger seems to be healing nicely so far. In this case the no-antibiotics approach appears to have worked well.  The nurse at the hospital cleaned the wound with a stream of saline solution, about 3 cups of it. The stitches were top dressed with a dab of Neosporin and a bandaid.  So much better than automatically giving a week's worth of oral antibiotics to absolutely everyone.  

Yesterday I got in the car and went to San Francisco.  Donald and I sorted through clothes, and boxes from closets.  We loaded lumber, boxes and a small amount of clothing into the car.  We had some lunch and I headed home. Total driving time about 5 hours.
As a treat I stopped at Dharma Trading Company and purchased a few dyes we were short on for tye-dying, and some other supplies. 
Eventually I got back home. While fixing some salad as a late dinner the knife I was drying (having washed it) slipped and cut me across the top of my left index finger. It bled a lot.  So at 9:45 I got ready with a bit of extra coffee and water; and headed to the emergency room for a few stitches.  I truly do not trust the hospital in Ukiah, and my insurance is through Kaiser in Santa Rosa.  I arrived just before 11.  It took 3 hours to be seen, which I kind of expected. I was very low on the priority list.  Turned out that the cut was nowhere near as bad as I feared. In fact it was borderline for needing stitching. Since I'm so active the (very nice) doctor put 3 stitches in it.  I got home at 3 am and had to be up at 6:30 to feed the horses. 
Pretty slow moving today.

A couple of photos from a foggy morning, with some geese serenely sailing by. You can better see the scrum of ducks in the next photo, gathered around the aerator. We can only assume that it's the best place to get algae from, maybe it pulls it to the surface?

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Still chugging away at the tie-dye project.  The whole tie-dye kit looked exactly like what it was: the end result of someone who was doing small scale commercial tie-dye who stopped suddenly. She had all kinds of poorly labeled stuff, things she had purchased from other people at a very low cost, and stuff that a single person doing the dying would know, but not an outsider.  Huge bottles of dye with the label almost completely washed off, application bottles that were not washed out with two or three names on the bottle. Dyes in dozens of identical containers with only the tiny print on the front to identify them.  Dyes for which there were no swatches and swatches which there were no dyes.  I can't function very well in that kind of chaos.  I'm methodically cleaning everything, labeling things with easy to read labels, making swatches for the colors that are missing them, and so on.  I may do a couple more shirts, mostly for M, to use up the dye I have mixed.  When I'm done everything will be clean, labeled and sorted into boxes by color family. 
It is cold today and overcast after a string of beautiful sunny days. Tomorrow isn't going to be much warmer, but the sun is supposed to be out. I plan to go down and groom the arena to kill all the tiny grass plants that are trying to come up in it.  While I'm there with the tractor I'll hook up the post hole digger and try to put in a couple of posts on the new fence line at Winter Quarters. 
My burn permit finally arrived. Sadly today is not a burn day.  I'd like to dispose of the brush from that tree we cut up a couple of days ago. 

Last month I was rereading one of Alaric Albertsson's books( think it was 'To Walk a Pagan Path') and there was a chapter on creating a calendar meaningful to where you actually live...so I decided that this was going to be one of my projects for this yr.
It's pretty simple; just Journal what happens each month in the natural world around you. I live presently in E Tennessee and actually, the Solstices and Equinoxes pretty well "map" here in Loudon County but we can fine tune things.
This yr, of course, had to be anomalous;>! Normally, within a couple weeks of Winter Solstice we get temps in the high teens. This yr until last week it had actually got to 70F! Now, it's "seasonal" with today in the 40's.Due to the warmth my neighbor's early Daffs budded up and right now they don't look like they'd recover. Me? Mine are breaking ground and at least one Snowdrop has buds, though most are just breaking ground a well.
We've also got Canadian Geese, Ducks and at least one Heron here on the inlet....a BIT early.
Preliminary name for 1st month; "Frikkn Freezing Moon";>!
Cheers,
Pat

I got M's two shirts done in the colors he requested.  ( Read more... )

Mark O. came up today to "help". He has been one of my deer hunters for 25 years and is a really nice guy who is very helpful indeed.  At random I chose to work on the tree below the garden. Back in July of 25 several of us cut down a really big blue oak that had been mutilated by PG&E tree crews.  We got the tree on the ground and just left it there. A few weeks later I spent a couple of hours cutting off some of the smaller limbs and chopping up some firewood.  It barely made a dent.  Today Mark piled brush and loaded rounds into the Gator while I cut.  I started out using my little Stihl 250 (Belin) which works great for limbing things up but isn't powerful enough to chop up bigger diameter limbs.  When the branches got to about a 1ft diameter I switched to Rosie the big 391 with a 25 inch bar.  I'm always impressed with that saw's power. It just chewed through that oak like it was nothing.  The saw doesn't do anything fancy it just chops down through wood in a straight line.  I chopped up limbs until even Rosie was slowing down a bit. Here is Chena very unhappily sitting on the log.  There was some critter hiding from her down there...( Read more... )

My favorite photo from my trip home during the holidays.

Phoebe came over on Friday.  We spent several hours pulling her tye-dye tubs off the shelves in the carport and going through them. They were all jumbled up.  Phoebe sold tie-dye for a while and had lots of odds and ends that needed to be sorted.  Ultimately she took three large tubs of stuff away.  The rest of the stuff is pretty well organized and labeled. We were planning to do some dying that day, but decided to put it off to the morning. 
Saturday morning I dumped old dye bottles and rinsed them out. Shirts, handkerchiefs and a couple of sweatshirts went into the soda bath.  M picked out some colors and Phoebe and I began mixing powdered dye with water and urea.  Before we could actually start applying dye Dave and Kim arrived.  We had a nice, social lunch together which was just perfect. 
Then we got back to dying.  I got 2 shirts done for M before quitting.  Donald got a long sleeved shirt tied up in a mandela pattern and dyed.  Phoebe, who had more time, got four shirts and one sweatshirt done. 
Today we washed out yesterday's shirts and I did 5 more.  Hope we like them!  Donald's shirt came out great. Pics tomorrow.
My obstacle day for next month is filling up already, which is very encouraging.