Fairgrounds

This is the fair grounds, where the rides are set up, and parking for Fonda Speedway. We could joke about having jet ski races this Saturday in place of the usual stock cars, but the situation is just too serious to laugh about.

Flooded Mohawk Valley

Park Street in Fonda

More flooding

We are finally back in the modern world after 36 hours stranded by closed roads and no power. There is a street under this water, as well as a playground and two parking areas. As bad as it is here, there are many places who had much worse damage.

The river and its clone

This is the Mohawk River at Fonda. The trees you see in the center of the two channels are not an island. They are the northern bank of the river. The second "river" was a corn field yesterday with some of the best corn in the county growing on it. Now, well..... it is not.

Emergency helicopters are flying over and the police prevented our feed rep from getting here. At least the milk tanker finally made it in.

So much rain last night

Fire whistles are wailing an eerie harmony across the river and down in town. I don’t know how many villages are represented, but more than one for sure. Trains are still running at least as I hear one banging down the tracks right now.

I fear for Gilboa. The Mohawk was more than bank full yesterday and laced with whirlpools. Everywhere else there are drought and fires; here we have relentless rain that is washing the whole valley away. It is the worst I have seen it so far this year.


When it is like this I am afraid to leave the farm. If Gilboa goes there will be a darned near Biblical flood and we will not be able to get back home to the cows. At least we are high on the hill. I shudder to think what would happen to friends, neighbors, indeed whole comunities around us.


There goes the whistle again.


Update: We took Liz's four-wheel drive and tried to go to town for some groceries. However, we are pretty much isolated by flooded roads and bridges that are under water or deemed impassable by local authorities. (Water is up to the bottom of the bridge between Fonda and Fultonville) One can escape to the east and south, but there is nowhere to buy anything to the south and east is straight into Gilboa Dam flood plain territory. I just don't want to go there. The interstate is completely closed, trains aren't running and there are chunks of telephone pole in the middle of the road just down the way. Not good.


Also not good is that the sheiff went by with the airboat on a trailer with about five patrol cars flying low behind them about half an hour ago. TV is out and there is little coverage on the radio so we are pretty much cut off except for phone and Internet. We will just have to wait to find out what happened.

More rain tonight and tomorrow.

Wheep!

After the big rain yesterday we were sitting around waiting for it to be dry enough to go out and get something done, when a loud sound like a smoke detector with a low battery pierced the air. It seemed to be emanating from the front porch. It was a sort of whistled, "wheep............. wheep," in that exact tantalizing rythym that makes it so hard to figure out which smoke detector is doing the beeping.

Since there are no smoke detectors on the porch I knew it had to be a bird. A number of them have discovered that if they sing or call from that porch or the cedar trees beside it, the two story front hall amplifies them nicely when the front door is open. They sound like really loud, big, dangerous birds that way, and impress all comers.


This call was one I had heard before, although never as clearly, and had never identified. I stalked the porch with great care, tiptoeing through the entryway and out the door, but the singer was concealed in the trees. Although it continued to yell, “wheep!”, even when I was on the porch I never saw it. However, through the wonders of a Google search for “bird call wheep” I soon discovered that our smoke detector imitator is a great crested flycatcher. You can see one and hear the call here.


Now if only I could see the actual bird out there, instead of just looking up every few minutes because that, "time to change the batteries", sound is such an important and ingrained signal to my brain.

Oxygen please

You have surely heard the phrase, “under the weather’, as in, “He was feeling a bit under the weather yesterday and stayed home from school.”

Well that about describes life in the great Northeast in recent weeks (although we only wish we could stay home and make it all better). We have wavered between constant cold, clammy rain, a few blazing days of 90-degree temps and sticky, humid misery or the stuff we have right now, that is living inside a low-lying cloud of thick, scummy air reminiscent of Los Angeles at its worst, only with no sunshine.

As I sit at this computer gasping for oxygen and dreading the barn, where said already scarce oxygen is going to be shared by 54 cows and few million flies, (which adore sticky airless weather) reaching hard for weighty words that will inspire you to comment freely, all I can come up with is ARRGGGHHHHHH………..

Yeah, we are under the weather all right.

These are some of my dad's woodcarvings, although he has done many, many more.

Frieland Zander Foolish (born on April Fool's Day) and Liz. Foolish is all clipped for the show, except for her head, so she looks a little silly.

The catbird seat where he sings just outside the front door. I missed the catbird though.

More NAIS

The government of our fine nation is frantically attempting to get a national animal identification program into place, allegedly in part because we are at risk for BSE or mad cow disease. They are cramming the whole concept down our throats as if will actually change anything rather than costing farmers a lot of money for the privilege of being further inspected and regulated and getting to do a lot of pointless paper work.

Canada already has such a program up and running.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency just released the results of their investigation into a case that surfaced there in April of this year.
(From the Cattle Network), “The investigation, conducted in line with international guidelines, identified 148 animals, including the affected animal’s herdmates and recent offspring. From this group, 22 live animals were located and all tested negative for BSE. One additional animal, which is currently pregnant, has been placed under quarantine and will be tested once it has calved. Of the remaining animals investigated, 77 had died or been slaughtered, 15 were exported to the United States and 33 were untraceable.”

They blame the age of the animals for the lack of traceability, but notice that only twenty-some animals that they did locate were found alive. 92 were long since eaten or disposed of so they couldn’t be tested. What good did the tracking system do?

Not much by my measurements. Except for 23 animals still at the farm, which were negative anyhow, it was much too late to prevent disease from entering the food chain if was ever going to. NAIS is just a feel good program for the government to point to and say, “Look what we are doing for you.”

Farmers can say, "Look what you are doing to us," instead.


[NAIS]

Dad

Master of anything you have ever attempted.

Antique dealer. Gun collector and expert on them. Master cabinetmaker. Artifact finder. Mineral collector, stone cutter and wonderful jewelry craftsman. Silversmith. Award winning wood carver and painter. Bibliophile. Book dealer. Teacher of fishing and bird watching and citizenship. Book binder. Blacksmith, the forging kind, not the horseshoeing kind. Fly tier. Historian. Gardener. And so very much more….forgive me for anything I forgot.

The man who blanched but didn’t holler when I dropped his station wagon into park while driving down Main Street in Fonda, when he told me to stop. (Well I DID stop didn't I?"

Happy Father’s Day Dad. You have always been the greatest!

Stealth frog

The boss of something

Every border collie needs to be the boss of SOMETHING. Ours have each invented their own little job to help keep order around the place. They have lots of time on their paws and control their little behavioral fiefdoms relentlessly.

Nick hates cats and thinks it is his place to eat them all. We frown on that since we just happen to like them, but sometimes the strength of his desire overwhelms his good manners and he nails a cat. He starts with a wide mouthed grab at the head, not too hard, just to see if he can get away with it. He never does. I think he would swallow them whole if no one was watching.

Mike considers himself cat protector in chief. When Nick bites a cat; Mike bites Nick. At any other time there would be an instant dogfight, but Nick knows he is wrong. In fact he is just testing. He slinks away with his tail tucked under.
Surprisingly Mike is especially protective of my favorite cat, Deetzie. Border collies are so expert at reading body language that I am sure he realizes that I like her best.

Gael has chosen to be the receptionist for the family business. She runs to the door barking at every variation in the wind, each woof from Wally, the blue heeler who lives outdoors, every siren, clap of thunder or extra loud moo from an amorous heifer. She makes sure that we never miss anything, whether we want to know about it or not. She answers the phone too or barks dramatically at anyone who does. So helpful! It is delightful to converse with your banker or veterinarian with a dog barking six inches from your ear.
However, Nick has figured out for himself that I holler at Gael every time she barks at the phone. He darts out from under the table where he likes to lurk and bites HER on the scruff of the neck whenever it rings. She is his mother and will not put up with such stuff from a mere whelp, so she turns around and bites him back. Now, instead of a dog barking at the phone we have a dogfight under our feet. Thank God for the answering machine!

Three dogs; three very important goals in life. And to think we got them to herd cows.

Sunrise

Three Collies

Gael, Nick, Mike

Gypsy moth

The grass glows like a carpet of emerald here, with the sun shining after all that rain. (Especially since I could finally get at least the part around the pond mowed. In other sections the grass is so tall that Nick went in through the open garden gate this morning and then couldn’t find the gate again to get out. I could have used side commands to talk either of the other two dogs out, but he doesn’t know his “sides”- "come bye" and "away to me" that is. He had to find his own way out. Pretty tall grass when you can lose a full-sized border collie in it!)

The trees echo the same bright summer color, but you only have to drive a few miles either north or south to find all the branches bare and black and ugly. It doesn’t smell too good either. There are no birds, no leaves, no color, nothing but a twisted desert of disaster. The gypsy moth is having a high point in its cycle and the caterpillars are devastating the woods both in Fulton and Schoharie Counties. It is the worst I have ever seen. I think I will do some research today and write the Farm Side about the mess. I haven't seen any mention in the paper anywhere else and it needs to be noticed. I heard that the state cut funding to control the critters and I am wondering what the story is there.

Shameless Bunny

It's been a while so I guess it's time for another shameless bunny picture.
This is Pegasus

So now we worry

We just turned on the news while we get ready to go out to milk the cows and heard that a 15-yr. old died driving a go-cart out into the road just above the school. The odds that it will be one of the kid’s friends are very high. Alan is after all 16 and knows kids who own go-carts who live on that road. It is a small rural road.

It is the next to the last day of regular school and our gang is looking forward to getting the regents exams behind them and getting on with whatever summer the weather is going to allot us this year. It is not going to be much of a summer for some folks near here though. So sad.

Beautiful Becky

Bad, Bad, LeRoy (or in this case Jack) the cat

I want a cat like this.
Tip of the hat to Jeff at Tazaret.

Global warming?

It is 50 degrees at the airport and probably a lot colder outside town. That is over twenty degrees colder than normal.

The furnace is running.


The windows are closed.


The winter clothes that I sorted out to take upstairs and put away have been placed in a pile in the back room where they are handy, since we still need them every day.

In June, no less.


I usually keep a couple of sweatshirts out for everyone, as you can expect some cool mornings, but this “summer” there are still as many heavy (not to mention muddy) boots by the kitchen door and big, thick coats and shirts piled on the chair there as if it were still January.
And rain! 26 out the past 30 days it has rained. We are supposed to POSSIBLY get two nice days before it rains again.

We have no corn planted. It should have been finished weeks ago. This may actually be a good thing, as at least one farmer of our acquaintance is going to be forced to replant all their land because of the rain. We don’t have any, but at least we don’t have to pay for it twice.


The guys are only able to chop green grass for the cows (which is what we feed them in the summer) by towing the tractor on the chopper with the 2-105 four-wheel drive. This means double the man-hours, double the fuel and the field is turning into a disaster area. Three-foot deep ruts fill with running water before they have gone ten feet. The field will be ruined and have to be plowed for corn, which it is according to the government too late to plant. If this doesn’t stop soon they will have to hit another field the same way.


The corn fields were all ready to plant when this weather struck. They just sit there bare and muddy. Don’t know what we are going to feed the cows this winter.


Or this summer for that matter. We can’t make hay either. The old saying about doing that task while the sun shines is true. You have no choice in that matter.

The only heartening aspect of this true slow-moving weather disaster is that when you go to a farm meeting, the farmers are still joking, although you can see the fear behind their eyes.

“The drought is over,” they say.

Photo failure

Is anyone else finding it impossible to post pictures to blogger using picasa?
Or is it just me?

The sign........revisited Northview style

Al-Zarqawi

We are getting ready to go out to milk the cows and Fox news is muttering in the background. According to news sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by coalition forces in a safe house in Northern Iraq. Despite this having been a major coalition goal, as he was blamed for inciting much of the insurgent violence that has slowed the effort to build a new government in Iraq, the news folks are falling all over themselves trying to find some reason that this is a bad thing, or at least not a good one. They so hate the Bush administration that they deny them even this. Al-Zarqawi is blamed for beheadings of foreign captives and hundreds of roadside bombings. Whether the press likes it or not, he won’t be missed.

Now what?

We are a quivering lump of collective disappointment around here today.


Becky is our second one to graduate from high school here at Northview Farm. When Liz finished her school career, we took out a funny ad in the yearbook, sending her a congratulatory message from a long list of her favorite cows. It gave us all a happy chuckle at an emotional time in her life passage.

Therefore, back in early January I composed a somewhat similar, but appropriately different, ad for Becky. Hers said something along the lines of “Emerson Drive rules, we love you Becky etc.”, as she is a great fan of that country band. I sent my check for thirty-five bucks and assumed that all was well, since the school cashed it. Beck spent six months badgering me about the text of her ad, as I kept secret what I wrote. We had a lot of fun with it.
Then yesterday the yearbooks came out.

No ad.

Nothing.

Oh, all the ads for the school board member’s kids were there. The teachers’ kids. The jocks.
But no ad for my Beck who has been waiting so eagerly for so long.

This is a one-time thing. She will never have another high school yearbook or another chance to see how proud we are of her in print in front of all her classmates, who have given her plenty of misery for being an opinionated bookworm, who has never been afraid to have an unpopular opinion or to speak out against conventional thought.

I am angry and I strongly suspect that I will have a lot of trouble even getting my money back. We went through this before with some magazine subscriptions I bought from the school, paid for, never received and never got my money back, no matter what I did.

What to do? What to do? First step is to call and complain this morning. Then what? Hmmm. I think I know what Friday’s Farm Side will be about.


And we do love you Becky, and we are very proud of your sharp mind and incisive thinking. And the 17th (when we have tickets for a real, genuine, live Emerson Drive concert) will be here before you know it.

Update: I talked to the teacher in charge. She was quite nice about it, said that they are going to improve the oversight of the program and send me back my money. We were not the only ones to end up in the same situation and I had the feeling there had been a lot of flak flying around before my call, so I took it easy on her. Too late to fix it anyhow. It is a disappointment, but I guess there are worse things.

Some things don't mind all the rain quite as much as we do.

Montana terrorist hunter

Here is a story that Sarpy Sam featured on Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere. It is a bit long and is printed in the notorious WP, but it just fascinated me. Imagine an ordinary American woman taking the time to learn Arabic after 9-1-1, and running eight computers all night long, luring would be terrorists out of the woodwork, in order to turn them over to our intelligence agencies. Imagine being brave enough to testify against some of those crazies in court. Impressive.

We are not having nice weather

Normally this is a six-inch deep, clear trickle over pretty stones.

Lucky me

I sometimes complain about the challenges of farm life, probably more often than readers would prefer. It can be a hard life, and it is comforting to whine. However, there are some rewards we don’t often think about that can make a day very pleasant indeed. Such as taking your 18-yr. old to get new glasses and pick up the wonderful dress grandma made her for the Senior Ball.(Thanks, Mom, she looks so beautiful in it.)

And coming out of the store to find a young man with a big box of yellow kittens free for the taking.

And being able to take as many as you can carry right home with you.

Oh, it was a job to push my cart loaded with a big pile of stuff, including fifty pounds of dog food, out to the car, all the while juggling two little golden live wires. (Thank God for elbows.) However, I was more than repaid in excited smiles when Becky finished her shopping and I gave her one, and when we got home with the other one for Liz.

Lucky me, yellow cats! If I had more arms I would have taken them all.

"Come on now, hold still, for a second."
Maqua-kil Blitz Mendocino