Halloween Came Early

The house looked like a sneaky old jack o'lantern last night when I came in from evening milking. Bright orange windows like eyes, nose, and toothy smile; dark outline looming large against a starry sky like a creepy, hulking beastie crouching by the driveway... waiting to pounce on me and gobble me up.

Just to add to the atmosphere a black cat twined around my feet .

A little, yellow crescent moon was grinning down from the west and the Big Dipper was holding water rather than dumping it on us.

It was a bright, pretty night for all the spooky stuff to be going on. I liked it fine.

Would have been nice if there had been good weather for the tractor pull, this weekend but Ma Nature hasn't been so very kindly to farm folk this year.....

When I was younger Halloween was my favorite holiday....costumes, spooky decorations, scary stories, things that go bump in the night, candy and apples and popcorn balls. Now that I am much too grown up to trick or treat I guess I like Thanksgiving better, but there is something about the 31st of October that still holds a mysterious appeal.

Happy Halloween!

Charity Tractor Pull is

Still on, never mind the weather. Head on over to the fair grounds for the day. The sun is going to shine and folks are waiting to show you a good time and some thundering metal monsters dueling it out in front of the grandstands.

Too Cold And Miserable

To write or play. Will get back to this when we get enough heat to make typing a reasonable activity. Take care.

Kittens

Over the past few weeks I have written of the perils of Athena's three kittens getting stuck in the wall etc.

Well that was nothing on what happened when they got big enough to run out among the cows when they came in and out of the barn. They are the dumbest ost adventuresome kittens I have ever come across.

It was heart wrenching to watch them getting stomped and rolled down the barn alley every day. Liz wanted to bring them over to the horse barn, which is near the house. "Bringing things to the horse barn" is a euphemism for bringing them to the house for mom to deal with.

Despite their cuteness I respectfully declined. I already have every single barn cat but one coming to the house to cadge food from me and I really didn't want three more.

Then yesterday the boss called me when he was going out for afternoon work, "Get your camera, you have to see this."

He was right.

That green bowl is a plant dish that somehow became the back porch cat food dish, used to offer sustenance to all those "barn" cats.

I think Athena is trying to tell me something don't you? She had to lug or lead that baby through half an acre of boot-top deep mud and muck to get it here......

Ah, well, I know when I'm licked. By evening chore time she had one of the other ones over here too, and I am sure there will soon be three......

Winter Storm Watch

Classic example of red neck engine repair

Noon today, yep the global is definitely warming and fall is lasting longer and ending later......not.....I should have known when everybody got crazy wanting to bake that bad weather was sure to follow. We aren't much different than wild animals when it comes to that, gather in the nuts, fluff up the nest and get ready for the bad news.

And so the scurry to get the barn ready begins. Big job and it is about two weeks earlier than we like it to be. I watched a weather demon yesterday all wink, wink, nudge, nudge about the weather and wanted to take out the TV...(He couldn't say whether it would be mildly cloudy or we would get a foot of snow. Dang, talk about a job where you can be wrong every day and still get paid. They should all run for Congress.)

I didn't though because the guys enjoy it, although how they can is beyond me. I just asked the boss to bring me up a skid steer bucket of driveway sand to bed the stalls with. It is really comfy for the cows, stays where I put it and gives them good traction to get up and down.

At least yesterday was gorgeous. The cows dried out and were fluffy....or fluffy-ish at least. Brought in the last of the water cannas. I was going to let them freeze, and indeed the tops did freeze down to the roots, but when push came to frosting, I didn't have the heart. Thus my kitchen is awash in huge pots of cannas, water cannas and grown-from-seed amaryllis.

It is like a jungle in here....a particularly favorite old friend stopped by for a short chat the other day (is there anything on earth more enjoyable than one of those friends you can not see for months or even years and pick right up where you left off) and remarked at the amount of greenery.

I can't help it. I love plants...and animals....and rocks.....herptiles....birds...I think I would curl up and blow away if I had to live in a city separated from living and growing things. Spent fifteen years in a small town once and it about drove me crazy. And even there I had gardens and flowers and dogs and cats. I think maybe I was born to be a farmer....even though I was born in the city.

Another Farm Side Freebie

A pair of gratuitous Yaks for your Friday enjoyment....the things you see around Upstate NY

You can read it without paying again this week, right here.

Snow Before Halloween

Becky won this yesterday.

To say she was happy is to seriously understate the situation.

So Alan and I saw to it that there was a balanced meal for a celebratory dinner. Above, see the fruit and grain serving, made by ma

The brother providing the vegetable

and dairy section of a good meal (pumpkin bars)

For Becky's big day. We also enjoyed hearty homemade beef stew....actually I will admit the truth here. We didn't even know that she had made employee of the month until evening, but it poured cold rain and then switched to snow all day. The kitchen with the oven going was the best place on the entire farm so everyone spent all the time that they could there. Baking and/or stirring a bubbling cauldron (no eye of newt or toe of dog though) provided a fine excuse to do so).

We kept the cows in the barn last night, so I spent most of last night's milking getting their automatic water bowls working. Some of the cows choose not to drink indoors all summer, so their bowls get pretty gritty. It is a nasty job but someone has to do it....someone is usually me.

The cows were confused at being in, oddly enough. Usually they are delighted to stay inside when the weather gets bad, but last night they were bawling to go back out. It was snowing hard, flakes the size of saucers and sticking to the ground. Dunno what was up with that, but they can go back outside for some exercise today. Maybe that will make them happy.

Time to go to the barn and see what mayhem they have gotten up to in the night. Have a good one.

Old

Photo shamelessly stolen from Liz's blog

Liz had the vet in for her 30-ish years old horse, Tyler, yesterday. It was good to get the old boy looked over thoroughly and make sure that she was doing everything right with his care. Been hard to keep the weight on him.

It was decided that his teeth are excellent, no major systemic problems, getting all the good care that he needs, etc. etc.

He is just old.

The conclusion was that there isn't a thing wrong with him that being young wouldn't cure.

Guess you could say the same thing about me. ...probably about a lot of us.

Both horses got rabies boosters too. The darned fox was in the barn with them, in fact in the stall with Tyler the other night, and Tyler must have kicked him and broke his jaw. So better safe than sorry, although after getting a good look at him we think he was just young and mangy.

Never a dull moment around here.

Pulling for Flood Victims

Here is the latest on on the big benefit tractor pull coming up on the 29th and 30th at the Fonda Fair Grounds. I am praying for good weather for this unprecedented event. It is going to be amazing with pullers coming from as far as Texas.

Our first thought was

A mix of red and black Angus too...but what are they crossed with that gives them those dangly things on their chests?

They feed baleage from the wagons....just put that pic in to show you how many they have although they have a lot more than are in the photo.

Thanks everyone!

West Comes East

The kids stumbled upon a large and prosperous looking beef farm a couple of hours from here. Saturday they took me to see.

Miles of fences, hundreds of animals, an impressive array of feeder wagons. All you knowledgeable ranchers out there, what on earth are these cow? And what are those things? Dairy farmers everywhere want to know.

Sunday Stills...Rocks

Rose quartz on the grave of Mike, my best dog ever

A nice stone wall across the road from the NFO convention

Feldspar from the same mine as the mica below

Mica or Isinglass,

they used to make wood stove windows from this mineral.

We collected this though

Herkimer Diamonds

A cool round rock I dragged down from the field

Our native limestone foundation

This rock and the two below are ones the boss brought me as gifts.

Some girls like diamonds, but I am found of large field stones.

My folks have been serious mineral collectors for quite some while, so some of the rocks around here are really more in the line of minerals. Then there are the other ones, which we pick up from the fields.

For more Sunday Stills

Toast

My computer is. Typing this on Becky's laptop with much difficulty. I think my hard drive is croaking, not quite entirely gone, just mostly, so I got most of my photos backed up and shut it down. Not sure what to do about my music but......

Posting may be light and lame until I save up enough to replace the old girl. Found just the one I would like on the Walmart site, an HP with lots of memory and all, but it will be a while.

Amazingly over the course of several computers since the first little AST, I have never had a hardware failure before. We have only purchased new computers when they became too slow for newer applications. The AST actually still runs as do all the HPs in between. They just won't run today's Internet.

Guess we have been lucky....up until yesterday.

Farm Side Freebie

Every now and then you don't have to pay to read it.

Right here.

And the Winner Is

Sinopa, out on the hills with the cows

Joated, who suggested Corolla. Thanks for all the great names! I still like this baby, although she is a stubborn and flighty as her mother, Camry, and her older sister, Calypso, a daughter of SWD Valiant. It takes a while to calm the ones who are just born wild, but it is worth the effort...after five or six lactations or so.......

Saved from Stupidity

By the Senate. And three cheers for them. Just what this country needs is a regulation limiting the vegetables kids eat. Not.

Word Verification

The topic of the day. Seems everyone hates it. I prefer not to bother with it myself, although I do type in those absurd letters when needed because spam comments are a hassle for me. I figure that they probably are for other blog authors as well. (I mean, I don't even HAVE one of those, so why would I want to extend it? And I wish I could help every Haitian orphan and I'm glad you passed my rhubarb leaf bird bath post on to your esteemed colleagues and all, but some things are just outside my frame of reference....)

However, this is about your enjoyment more than mine, and I hope you keep visiting and sharing your thoughts, so I shut the silly things off.....for a while at least....

No more alphabet soup, just type and enter .

That being said, I have sometimes saved the best ones that I have stumbled on, just because of the sheer serendipitous-ness of the words. Some of them seem too appropriate to be truly random.

Anyhow, have a good one. Your visits are valuable to me...especially the comments.

Now I know

Seems last year's grey foxes have moved on.

How the fox ears look. From very close. Much too close. This week's Farm Side, should you choose to read it on Friday, deals with a visiting....or maybe permanent resident....red fox. He ate my yellow rooster, incidentally my favorite alarm clock, just the other day.

I had no more than finished the column and gone about other work when there he was again. Same place, next to the old horse trailer.

Different day.

He was gone as quickly as he appeared, but later when I went prowling with the camera, I heard the pea fowl alarming. They can only see outdoors through a window under the woodshed so I crept up there.

Quieter than I thought I could because I walked right up to the darned fox. Maybe six feet away.

He was snuggled down between Liz's bales of straw, staring at my poor beauties and making them honk. I raised the camera to take a shot (wishing that I had shells for my .22 and had brought that instead) but before I could click he was gone.

Bold bugger coming out in daylight like that.

Light as a puff of wind. Thistledown. Feather fluff. Air.

I am not pleased with him although I don't think he can get into the coop. No wonder the last old hen is being so careful when she comes out of wherever she is hiding.

Meanwhile, Nick, who was loose in the house, along with the cat, and who had come in for some bragging in the same column because of his general good behavior, had just cleaned the litter box for me.

What a lovely dog! I am all in favor of a working dog keeping busy but......damn, just damn

By the way, fox ears are fuzzy, black and gold, with little white spots to break up the outline.

What to Say on a Gloomy Day

One of our life goals, elusive, and hard to brew

Not much. Cold, damp, muddy. Cows ditto and not liking it much. Leaves left, or mostly. Trees black with the heaviest crop of riverbank grape I believe I have ever seen. You could make wine I'll bet, tasting of summer and bittersweet fall, sunshine versus moonshine, fine, dark, blackbird wine. They surely like them anyhow and set up a din as they pick and squabble.

One of these days the men are going to limb some branches off the Winesap tree so the repair truck can get in to deal with our non-functional furnace. Then maybe I will get the tame grapes for jelly, oh so far above my head even with our tallest ladder. I am thinking about maybe adding in some of those wild riverbank critters for just a spark of different.

Meanwhile, it is cold, indoors and outdoors. Alan is attempting to build an outdoor boiler contraption that will heat just a little water to send through the pipes to make just a little warm in here. I am eagerly cheering him on.

On the bright side, it is warm in the barn, thanks to the cows' hearty metabolism. Five minutes after they crowd through the door it is toasty, and by the time the grain is gobbled, we are shedding polar fleece and rolling up our sleeves.

Is it time to milk yet, I wonder?

Name That Calf

Been a while since we did one of these, but we have a very special calf for you to name. I am excited about this baby. She is a daughter of one of my favorite cows, Camry, a daughter of Ocean-View Extra Special out of our old Butternut cow. The newbie's sire is Juniper Rotate Jed.

Butternut was one of five full sisters by Mansion Valley Delaware, out of a cow we had that would not conceive to any other bull. She had five heifers in a row and they did really well for us. Two of them, Birch and Balsam, even won really tough heifer classes. Balsam took junior heifer calf at Altamont and Birch won intermediate heifer at both Fonda and Altamont. She was a February calf and to win against animals so much older than she, at a fair like Fonda, was a big deal to us.

Balsam was born on the 29th of February, so she is young cow in birthdays, but a bovine senior citizen in real life. She is the only one of the sisters still with us, but her family is thriving, with Bayberry, my beautiful Broadway, Rosie, and many others descended from her still standing in the barn. This new baby has a lot of promise and I have real high hopes for her.

If you've been here a while, you know how the name the calf contest goes. You folks are clever, we are unable to come up with a name, so we ask you to offer suggestions. We write them on slips of paper, toss them in a hat and pull out a winner.

Asaki is one example of a cow named this way, as is Bama Breeze. Both still live with us and are still called and registered under their contest names. And that is the prize....your choice of names bestowed upon our new little black girl, printed on her registration paper, and should she reach the show ring, on her sign.

Skies

The view from the porch

During this year long adventure in Hell weather, or really, even longer than that, one constant has been the drama of the skies.

Poplar tree or Ferris wheel?

Crazy clouds, wild winds whipping them around, rainbows, sun dogs, you name it, we look up a lot. These occurred last Friday in between sets of soggy storms. It looked a lot like this back on the tornado day, but I didn't get good pics then.

I'm not sure if you can see it but this little rainbow was caused by the sun shining through a gap in the clouds.

Sunday Stills...Focusing on the Foreground

This was a toughie...which is good. For more Sunday Stills......

Windy

Over the river to view the woods

Even the frogs are snuggling down

Kite flying weather this day. I swear the big old moon was bobbing around in it when I came down the stairs this morning. Said wind and moon were quite a surprise as we retired to the tune of still more rain. Glad it stopped.

Thanks to the rain we are back to routine catch up jobs and buttoning up for winter, until the fields dry enough to get back on them. We pulled Scotty out of the pen she was in with some other heifers and gave her a nice big stall as she is going to calve pretty soon. She was plenty tame and gentle when she went into the pen. Nowadays, not so much. She is only half Jersey, the other half being milking shorthorn and Holstein in equal parts, but the side she shows the public is that stubborn Jersey bit.

You wouldn't think a little bitty cow like her could be that adverse to cooperation but she surely was. Of course Liz needed to get done early, which was probably why she put up such a discussion.....they KNOW when you need to get done and react accordingly. The CO in cow is not synonymous with the CO in cooperate.

Growing Tomatoes Indoors

Maybe. Started this plant specifically to bring in and kept it on the porch all summer. It is doing quite well so far. My biggest concern is pollinating future flowers. Back when I was in college (when they were first inventing dirt) we had a little patio tomato where I lived and we pollinated it with a paint brush. I tried that with the first two blossoms this one set and failed. Hoping for better luck next time. Meanwhile I am going to have a nice tomato sandwich for breakfast today at least.

After the Flood

Here is a long, but informative article, which offers some conclusions on what happened during the recent floods, including where some fingers of blame might be pointed. (Suddenly some reasons why this flood was so much more horrific than any before have ever been become clear).

It also offers some predictions of future disaster if changes aren't made. It doesn't look as if certain government entities have any intention of making those changes though....let the houses wash away, they have to protect the precious stream beds (!) As mentioned, it is long, but really worth a read.

Speaking of storms, that little tornado that formed right out behind the barn....the boss went out there the other day and there were sheets of roofing steel thirty feet up on the trees right outside the back windows. Thank you again to all the folks who called with the tornado warning. It really was there! Right there! It was just small enough not to do much. Wow.

Thurwood Thursday

Charles Thurwood was a farmer up around Fort Plain, NY. In 1874 he was of an age with Alan, who is 21, and working with his folks pretty much like Alan does today, except there were no tractors. He kept a diary, something like this diary, of what he and his family did each day and how their lives were back in that other century.

Every now and then I take a look back at that diary and think about our parallels.

And there are many.

Yesterday's entry:

"Cloudy and windy and cold and we picked apples and father went over to Mr. Bujer and bought a horse for $110 dollars. Eleven years old and in the afternoon father went to Fort Plain."

And yesterday here in modern NY, just a handful of miles east of Fort Plain, Alan might have written: "Cloudy but pleasant, not much breeze, and I chopped alfalfa and put it in the ag bag and father worked on the driveway and mother saw a mangy red fox in the house yard. No wonder the chickens were raising Cain all morning."

There is quite an almanac in the front of Charles' little leather-bound book. The states and territories of the time are listed there. No Colorado or Idaho on that list. NY State had a population of 4,380,759 back then. I have no idea how accurate those figures are, but I think we have a few more folks living here now.

Pretty soon it will be time to pick the Winesap apples for jelly too, but we sure won't be buy a horse any time soon, no matter what the price or age.

Soldiers, Saddles and Sabers

The folks will be at the afternoon portion of this event on Saturday. Sounds like a lot of fun. Stop by and see them if you go.

Another Dairy Blog

Happened upon this dairy blog from the land down under and read and read and read. Great stuff!