Sunday, March 5, 2017

March 5, 2017

I am lying here in bed freezing as the wind is whistling around outside. My phone says the real-feel temperature outside is -20C. I love the way the wind chill is expressed in Nova Scotia - when I lived in Winnipeg where the temperature was often -30 or -40C and stayed there for days and weeks at a time, the wind chill was never added to the temperature (or subtracted!) like that. Wind chill was expressed as a separate number - so 1600 was a pretty stiff wind and 1800 meant something like exposed skin would freeze in two minutes or three minutes or whatever. I guess if the numbers were given out there as they are here no one would leave their homes. I asked someone when I first moved there in September how they coped with such cold weather and the response I received was that 'you just didn't stay outside for very long'. And indeed almost every home has a garage for their car and shopping malls have indoor parking designed so you spend very little time getting inside and the downtown was full of heated walkways either above or below ground that connected many of the buildings.

A whole paragraph about why my fingers are so cold and I am neglecting to write what I actually got up to jot down because I couldn't get back to sleep while these thoughts were swimming around in my brain. I have to start getting ready for work in about 20 minutes.

I wanted to note for the record a few other things that Nick claims this Chris person is responsible for. Our riding arena was is very good condition when we moved here, it was very well made by the previous owners and was very well maintained by them. I have mentioned that the electric fencing for the calves is now down all over the ground and broken in places, but I don't remember if I have said that all of the electric fencing that was in place when we moved in is now down. And a lot of it is still lying on the ground here and there. A lot of the wooden fence rails and posts are down and were never replaced over the past 4 years but Nick has put barbed wire in these places, usually only after a horse has gotten loose. I walked the fence lines last week and found a spot where 3 posts in a row were on the ground and I reported this to Nick. This portion of the field is currently not accessible to the horses and that is because it includes the calves' enclosure and the calves were roaming around after their fence was pulled down and they wandered off of our property twice before we put them in the barn. It was the middle of winter and I was happy with this.

So, to the point, the riding arena has electric fencing which is still intact and so Nick began putting our first stallion up there after he broke out of his pasture one day and got one of our mares pregnant, and our current stallion was there for many months until we sold one of the horses which allowed the stallion to be moved from the riding arena to a pasture behind the house.
As a result of a stallion being kept in the arena the sand along one side is all worn down where the horse paced back and forth all day - this is the side that faces the other horses and the barn. Of course this makes it unsuitable for riding in that area and there is also the problem of manure that has accumulated there over the approximately 3 years that horses have been kept there on a daily basis.
Nick has this story that the Chris guy and/or one of his friends came onto the property one day about 3 years ago and took a lot of the sand from this riding arena. It is right in full view of the highway and he says that our neighbour across the street saw this and verified to Nick who she thought she could recognize. When I said I was going over to chat with her myself, Nick told me that she wouldn't admit this to me because she didn't want to get involved for the reasons that she had to live in the same small community as these folks and that she was afraid of repercussions. I know from an incident that occurred with my neighbour at my previous home that Nick said someone said something which was later checked and proved not to be the truth at all. The person he said he spoke to had moved to another continent but Nick didn't know that the two former neighbours of mine had become good friends and communicated regularly by email. So I am sure that nobody saw anybody doing anything at all.

I am coming to the realization that part of Nick's 'procedure' is to blame others for things he is responsible for. And he also finds a reason to blame this person or persons for preventing him from doing repairs or stuff around the house and barn and animals that he should be doing. It is now to the point of negligence and none of it is Nick's fault. It is usually the fault of the Chris guy. I guess which actually really makes it my fault. Because I am the one who supposedly gives Chris permission to do all these things and it is I who somehow provides the keys to things to him. I'm not sure how I do that because I don't have keys to these things myself - my own choice. Nick said the other night for his daughter's benefit that I had snuck into his room while he was sleeping and removed the key to the tractor out of his pocket. I think it was the tractor key, don't quote me on that. He claims that Chris took the tractor in the late spring or early summer of last year and that he had to take the chains off of the back tires to drive on the road. Apparently when he replaced the chains he used a much smaller clasp to hook the two ends together than the one required to hold the chains securely to the tire. As a result the chains were now floppy and had too much slack in them. Nick has been telling me this for months and each time he tells me he makes a big deal of the point that Chris thinks he knows what  he is doing but actually has no idea. Nick probably had that clasp off for some reason and set it down somewhere, and then couldn't find it when he wanted to put it back on. At any rate he did know the chains had too much play in them and he failed to fix them himself. I feel anyone who wanted to take good care of a 70,000.00 tractor that was only 3 years old would have replaced the undersized clasp. But Nick didn't and the chains caught the door and ripped it off.
He also claims that the hydraulics have been damaged somehow by Chris and that the front part of the main frame has been twisted by Chris. It is impossible it is anyone else's fault. Not Nick's, nor the owner of our boarded horse and certainly not Nick's daughter's boyfriend who have both driven the tractor on more than one occasion. It is far more likely that I crept into Nick's room in the middle of the night, removed the tractor key from the pocket of his jeans, and gave it to Chris so he could steal the tractor. The part I have trouble with is what key Nick drove the tractor with if Chris had the key. It also seems very unlikely that Chris would have been able to take the tractor off of the property, use it for whatever job he needed it for and then return it without anyone noticing it was physically missing.