Happy Birthday, Brother

Today is my next younger brother's birthday. Being Irish twins so to speak we will be the same age for the next few days. 

He enjoyed this way too much when we were kids. Thank goodness for our nation's birthday, when I get to jump ahead again. Whew.....oh, wait a minute...we are so old now, it isn't so hot being eleven months older.

Anyhow.....

Happy Birthday, Michael. Hope you have a wonderful day!

Links and Life at the Bottom of the River

First of all my dear sis-in-law shared some pics of where my brother and our son are working and have been the whole month of February. Nothing like life inside a cold coffer dam right in the teeth of the river wind. It's pretty nasty up here on the hill, but better them than me down in that ice sluice. 

Then this week's Farm Side research, or at least some of it. Some weeks I feel like a kid with a paper due, instead of an old fogey with a piece due for the paper. 

Dairy Farming Facts and Figures

2012 Census of Agriculture

3% of Dairies Produce 51% of Milk

Young Farmers Growing Fast in NY

Cuomo Announces NY Back in Third Place in Dairy

OSHA Withdraws Memo on Small Farm Inspections

Tour de Cure...Stop Diabetes

I am especially blessed in the brother department. I have two and I wouldn't trade either of them for a whole case of presidents, or kings, or famous athletes, or even a gross of rock stars on the hoof. Good guys, both of them.


Every year the next younger one cycles for the Tour de Cure/Stop Diabetes. 


You can see his page and maybe even sponsor his efforts here. I hope you will be able to help with this important cause and thanks in advance.....


Republishing so we remember!

Honey, You're not Sparking

The girls went out to pasture yesterday; not much grass, but they enjoyed what there was. Old Heather, Liz's retired show Jersey, led them out and brought them in. You gotta love a lead cow... It was nice to see them out there although it would have been better if they were at least ankle-deep in nice and green.


In between working on the big fence and getting them turned out Alan did some diagnostics on the Blue Bomber, which has been running kinda rough......(ya think?) He brought that spark plug in for show and tell and the main question we had was how and why it was running at all.


And then there's honey. The same boy with that nifty spark plug has been pestering me to make beef stir fry. I had a couple steaks left over from our last beefer, which was much better than the current one, so I sliced them up into thin slabs, fried them up fast and and added fresh broccoli, diced garlic, chopped walking onion tops and lots of sliced carrots.


However, I was at a loss for a sauce....bare cupboards and all. But there is always ketchup...which with added honey, spices, and vinegar can become almost anything. 


I have several different sorts of honey. I love the stuff. It keeps forever and is good for so many things that it is a staple for us. Whenever I meet a local beekeeper at a fair or something I try to buy some. Younger brother sent down a jar from his own bees a while back and we hadn't opened it yet. It was the least crystalline of the bunch so I spooned out a bit to nuke and put in the sauce.


And a good cook has to taste. So I tasted the honey. (Have I mentioned that I love honey?) Holy cow! That is the best honey ever! Orange blossom, which is super good, and basswood (my previous favorite) move right on over. It tasted of spice and flowers and zingy sweetness that was simply incredible. It was like standing in a meadow full of wildflowers with the breeze and the bees buzzing around you and the sun shining down...plus cinnamon. How I wish you could taste just a little too, because it is totally amazing! Like the great outdoors in a spoon. Thanks bro...

Waited a Long Time

To get up nerve enough to ask my brother to let me post a video of him singing and playing. He was kind enough to say yes, so here he is at yesterday's family get together. 

A Request

Today is my younger brother, Matthew's, birthday. His job as a driller has taken him to North Carolina for weeks on end....far from his family and the small farm they run here in Upstate NY where we all live. If you were to go here and leave him a birthday greeting, I think it would be a terrific surprise for him. He likes to get updates from home on his wife, Lisa's, blog.

He is the nicest guy you could want to meet. Years in the Midwest instilled in him and his family that western hospitality and kindness that is not so common here on this coast. I don't think he has ever met a stranger....

Anyhow, Happy Birthday Matt, hope you have as good a day as you can so very far from home...love you!

Happy Birthday to my Other Handsome Brother

(I have a brace of them, fine men both and much beloved).

I can remember when Mappy was born...sleeping at Grandma's house and hearing about the new brother. Now he and his family are among the finest parts of my life.

Love you brother. Hope the heat isn't treating you too cruelly these days. Welcome to decade five where the rest of us have been flitting around for quite some time now!.Love you little brother.

Happy Birthday Handsome Brother

For Michael

Hope your day is spectacular and that you enjoy being the same age as I am (ancient) for a few days..... before I once again pull ahead in the race to antiquity (I am not quite old enough to serve as the subject of my own Sunday Stills entry this week, but I am working at it. Thus you aren't old enough for me to run down and photograph you either but....you will get there grasshopper, you will get there....lol)

Anyhow we love you and hope the finest of music flows through your life like cool, clear water through a secret canyon, deep in the heart of the wild.

We love you!

Your non-big-sister for about nine days anyhow...

A Good Man; A Good Cause

Once again, my handsome, wonderful, slightly younger brother is riding in the Tour de Cure. It is a terrific cause...I hope you will support him if you can.
Thanks!

Each mile I ride, each dollar I raise will be used in the fight to
prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people
affected by diabetes.

No matter how small or large, your generous gift will help improve the
lives of the more than 20 million Americans who suffer from diabetes,
in the hope that future generations can live in a world without this
disease. Together, we can all make a difference!

Things from Florida

A person from the exclusive, two member, best brother in the world clan and his lovely wife sent us oranges this week....the real kind. The ones that taste of sunshine, sharp and tangy and yet fulsomely sweet. They were so welcome. I was literally wishing for fruit, nibbling leaves off the indoor lettuce and wishing for fruit...when the boss came over from the barn with them. (For some reason known only to themselves UPS left them on the milkhouse step.)
Paradise..that is all there is to it.....thanks bro!



And as I was watching the feeder yesterday I realized that among the white-throated and field sparrows there were a couple of white-crowned sparrows. A few minutes later I heard part of their distinctive call. Usually they are here for a week or two in April and then are gone. Nice to see them.

Our Bird Count Totals, Day of the Jay

No "ooh-ah" birds this year, although I guess team Mayfield South counted the only horned larks. There was a neat little flock of them feeding in the up and down way they have near a horse pasture we passed.

We saw:

1 sharp-shinned hawk
7 Red-tailed hawks
1 Unidentified hawk species...see below




4 Downy woodpeckers
1 Hairy woodpecker
6 White-breasted nuthatches

6 American goldfinches
1 House finch
1 Northern cardinal

1 Mallard duck
4 Unidentified duck species...probably more mallards, but they got behind a tree in high speed flight
134 Rock pigeons

7 Ring-billed gulls
167 Starlings
14 Tufted titmice

157 Common crows
19 Dark-eyed juncos
14 House sparrows (Sassenachs)

4 Tree sparrows
137 Black-capped chickadees
55 Mourning doves

24 American Turkeys
25 horned larks
And 97 Blue Jays

I doubt that 97 is the highest count we have had with jays, but it is certainly the most in a while. They were everywhere in flocks of as many as 25 at a time. Guess they have recovered from West Nile and are having a good year.

It was certainly a weird day. We have been counting MFS for a very long time, probably over twenty years. In that much time you learn where the birds are likely to be, droves of chickadees on Maloney Road, lots of everything good on Ashler Road if it is passable, etc. Yesterday, the good spots were virtually all bereft of birds. Instead we found them in weird places, like a large mixed feeding flock in the parking lot of a tractor trailer place where we have never seen a single bird before. Strange...also strange is not seeing a single Canada goose. There are still hundreds of them down here on the river just a few miles from our territory.

As always it is fun to get out with the family and count the birds. The brothers and I are the second generation to work this territory and we all three of us have kids that will probably keep up the tradition in the future. I for one am grateful for those sharp young eyes when they ride out with us.

What Do You Give

BEFORE the storm yesterday

The girl who has everything....except enough feed to go through the winter?

It has been such a bad year here. The boss was still haying two weeks ago as we had rain almost continuously since last May....and still there isn't enough out there in the ag bags...now we have snow and there will be no more.

So my dear younger brother and his kind wife bought...and delivered...eleven huge bales of baleage for us yesterday. It was snowing and then freezing, soaking rain, and Lisa is sick with a nasty cold...but they still worked out in the weather to get that feed to us. They also took the time to drive back home...and they don't live close by any means...to pick up Matt's homemade, but really cool three-point-hitch fork lift attachment when our skid steer proved unequal to the task of unloading. So Alan got them off Matt's friend's trailer after a while....

Last night Liz and Alan and I tore open a bale and unwound it and fed a couple of wheelbarrows to the girls.

They devoured it. I went around after milking and fed an armful to each of the high producers and they devoured that too.
I was happy to know that they had that good stuff to fill them up.

Thanks guys! What you did was well and above and beyond the call of duty. I am very thankful and so are our ladies. That went right to the top of the list of the best Christmas presents ever!

Salt Rising Bread

How many of you western NY folks are familiar with it?

Do you like it?

Around here if you have Montgomery blood having someone bring back a loaf (or two) from Hornell is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July rolled into one.
And one of those wonderful brothers I have and his lovely wife, did just that day before yesterday.
After a brief meeting at the bottom of our washed out canyon of a driveway, Alan conveyed the precious loaves to the kitchen where we looked on in wonder.

We have had salt rising bread for breakfast
Supper
Snacks
General occasions of irresistibilty.
There is still some left......maybe I should hide it.

Yesterday in the Mountains

One of those very special brothers of mine offered to help us out with the challenge of getting Becky home from Potsdam for break. He was kind enough to take time from his work and home life and choir practice and all to drive for over nine hours up mountains and down, across night and day, so a college kid could come home and see her family for the first time since the 28th of August.



As always the Adirondacks offered up their best and shiningest as a reward for the long distance drive.



The trees lay across the mountains like the tawny pelt of some large wild thing, rocky, granite bones jutting up through golden browness. They seemed to shrug off a few leaves here and there as we passed like a lion shrugging off flies as it lay licking its paws on the Savannah.




All the colors of a lion swirled across them, turned luminescent by bright, thin sun. There were trees the color of pumpkins, lanterns,and oranges, with crimson cardinal flags from the swamp maples, and russet, gold and cinnamon from the many scattered oaks. Hickories splayed leafy brown and green fingers over swift, and silent waters, lakes and rivers turned blue jay blue where the sun hit, and liquid ink in the deepened shade.

Sacandaga River, Raquette River, sleek lakes by the dozen, I don't think I have ever seen them lovelier. The Sacandaga was showing its teeth after all the rain, with whitened fangs piercing the smooth indigo of its flow wherever a rock was hidden. Beck was in class when we arrived, and not answering her phone. We were looking for a coffee stop when I glanced across the road, across the campus, across a dozen others, and spotted her as instantly as one heart recognizes another. It was a grand moment I will tell you.





As we returned home and dusk fell, along about Lake Durant the catch-light waters let go their hold on the sinking sun and closed their shining mirrors for the day.

I love the Adirondacks. A trip across them is as much a treat as any theme park or holiday party. More in fact. Much more.

Thanks brother for the joy and the music and the good talk of old memories while we made new ones too.
And thanks for the special reward at the end of the day...the whole family together again, at least for a little while.....we love you muchly.

***I must also thank those who stayed at home and kept the work moving along, so thanks guys and especially, thanks Liz....hope old Mando gets it in gear and has that calf real soon.

*****I must also question. What is with the corner yard with bathroom fittings (you know, the most important ones) set at regular intervals with sunflower planted behind each of them? In downtown Potsdam that is? The traffic was just too heavy to get a picture, but we sure were puzzled.

Sunday Stills....Sound

I tried all week, in between college trips and rain storms and cows and such to find something to take a picture of for sound. I shot the cats meowing...just as they closed their mouths...and so it went all week. So here is a pic of one of the best sounds there is...from the archives....My brother's hands...playing music for us.

For more Sunday Stills....

If You Have To

Drive 171 miles to drop off one of your babies, far, far away.
This is the way to do it.....

Chicks...Coming and Going

Our middle chick is leaving the nest today, so perhaps it is fitting that this little guy and a small black one showed up yesterday.

Hopefully our big chickie will learn a lot, make wonderful friends, have a great time....and remember where home is. And with any luck I will have some pics of the 'Dacks for you tomorrow, because if we take the route Alan has planned we will be driving right through the Adirondack State Park. KoTF anyone?

Rana Day

Happy Birthday, Mappy!!

Wonders of Home Weaving

My talented sister-in-law hand wove this wonderful blanket for my especially special younger brother. It is patterned on an antique blanket my parents have had since I was a kid. The original came into the antique shop where we all grew up some long, long time ago. (Growing up in an antique and book store was an experience that had to be lived to be imagined. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and dusty all year round. We read the merchandise and took for granted being able to play in three seat cutters with tiger and horse head lap robes to keep us warm. Thus I have read all of the original Tarzans, Roy Chapman Andrews, Osa Johnson and a vast array of other books that not too many people have had the opportunity to peruse. I didn't appreciate the history surrounding us then but these many years later I surely do.)

(That is a tall brother there, so you can tell it is a BIG blanket)

Matt and Lisa were kind enough to take this photo for me and allow me to post it for you. It looks wonderful to me.
It looks warm too....(which also looks wonderful to me). She made me a blanket a couple of years ago and that puppy doesn't want to wander far from my Sunday chair, else heads will roll. Even in the summer I keep it handy....just in case!

Happy Birthday, Baby Brother

Birthday barter

Matt, Thanks for the chickens both warm and breathing and frozen solid. Hope all the plants grow and thrive, especially Grandpa Lachmayer's rhubarb....

For reference, they are snow in summer, borage, pink and/or white sedum, bee balm, wall pepper, ultra-sweet tomato, cobweb hens and chicks, water lettuce, hornwort and, of course, the rhubarb. Love you kid



****Update, my mama just sent me this lovely old photo of the bouncing baby boy himself. Can you guess what he is doing?