How Do You Take a Pig to a Parade?

Why, in the back of a pick up truck of course

A hitch of fancy Clydesdales

A mistake, but I liked it

Pair O' Percherons

Passel O' Pipers

And other scenes from the fair.

Going to the Fair Today?

Stop by the dairy booth and say hi.

Fair Week

Liz, Alan and the boss went to the tractor pull last night. I stayed home, listened to the roar of the big engines, just across the river and talked to Becky on the phone and on Facebook. (Speaking of which, I would love to "friend" any of you folks if you are Facebookers. If you don't know my real name....just ask in the comments...or check over there in the sidebar.)

Anyhow, we milked early so they could get over there on time. Having milked early for the cable guy in the morning it was fine for the cows. We got Road Runner yesterday, mostly because they offered a cheaper deal than Frontier, which we had used for the past two years. I am not thrilled. It is hard to work the TV (not that I watch it, but I do hear the whining from the other room.) and this computer is not any faster...maybe not even as fast...as before.
And I couldn't install all the fancy-schmancy stuff because it says I don't have IE8 and SP2...except that I do...have both that is. Dag Nab It! However, we will save a few bucks a month for the next year so...

Because of all the early-milkin', tractor-pullin' shenanigans I was in the house by 5:30 ish, with laundry done, supper (which no one ate) cooked, a fresh crumb-topped apple pie on the counter (made by Liz. stole the pic from her too). It was so quiet (except for every ten minutes or so when another tractor went off over at the pull) that I felt like I was in the wrong house. I had a piece of pie for supper, read a good book, took doggies out and brought doggies in and went to bed early.

And they brought me home Hall's fudge......what could be more perfect?

Entries

Liz and I went over yesterday noon to make our fair entries, expecting as usual to stand in line for a goodly time. Amazingly there was almost no one there and getting entered was a snap. Same at the photo kiosk at Wally World. We printed up our photos and picked up some appropriate frames in no time. (I went with the silhouettes and frogs, along with some landscapes from Pecks. Liz chose rodeo pics.) Now I just have to choose between a chicken and the frog head close up for my 8x10. I printed both just in case. Took some Italian sausage soup to mom and dad while we were out and ran the other errands as well.

We had kinda, sorta decided not to enter Blitz in the fair. Lotta work and all. However, while standing in line I looked at the stack of parking permits. Hmmmm....cows at the fair means exhibitor parking. No cows at the fair means best of luck getting a place close to the barns. And after all, cows or no cows, the barns is where it is all happening.

I asked Liz, "How much extra just to enter one cow?"

She replied, " I don't know...it can't be much."

She knew all the particulars like sire, dam and DOB, so quick like bunnies, she made out the entry form right there in line. It ended up costing fifty-five extra cents to enter her big cow. We have to scare up a few bales of decent straw and get her trucked over (a whole mile) but looks like Maqua-Kil Blitz Mendocino is headed to the fair this fall.

Country of Origin Labeling

Is the subject of this week's Farm Side.

So here is an oldie for you while I work on that.

As I was dragging yet another snarl of tangled, soapy hair out of the drain in the bathroom sink I wondered. What do you suppose would happen if I went on strike and never again did any of the taken for granted nasty jobs that fall to mothers? I’d call it Momstrike, and what a fascinating notion it could be. You see I am blessed by not one, but two, long haired daughters who would never contemplate such a bizarre act as cleaning out the drain. I am also confounded by a long haired son, whose housekeeping proclivities are much overshadowed by those of his female siblings. He has a dandelion mane of yellow hair that gets pretty outrageous sometimes. He calls it his “’Fro”. (I wonder where he got the idea that pouffy blond curls could ever constitute a ‘fro.) Their combined efforts at shedding are worse than a dozen border collies. Supposing I stopped cleaning out that dratted drain whenever I noticed that it needed it. Would they clean it themselves? Or would a hairball form in the sink that would rival the sort of bezoar an African bull elephant would develop if elephants groomed like barn cats? Or would they think that it was a rampant opossum and call the dogs?

And then there’s the wastebasket under that selfsame sink. If I didn’t empty it every now and then would little cardboard tubes and puffs of bedraggled tissue mount toward the ceiling until they spilled over to form a paper mache carpet in the puddles around the tub? Or would someone else do it? How about the other appliances and furnishings in that particular room? What would happen to them if I struck?

You can see that it would be an interesting experiment to go on Momstrike. Obviously I can’t give up milking my share of the cows every twelve or so hours. Calves must eat; shovels must shove and bills must be paid in a timely fashion, but what would happen if nobody carted out the paper plates from the TV tables in the living room? Would they just pile up until they cascaded to the floor and the dogs chewed them up? Would the accompanying forks and spoons snuggle together to create a free-form metal sculpture, or would someone get stabbed in the toe and bleed all over the carpet? Would they notice that since the carpet is bright red? Would anyone but the stick-ee even care?

How about the dishes? If nobody did them for a week or so, would anyone care when they ran out of silverware? Would they spelunk that same living room carpet in order to find the missing pieces among the scattered plates and injured family members? Would they offer triage to the folks dancing around the living room with forks sticking out of their feet? Or would they merely dig around the cupboard under the cereal and find the plastic ones we use for camp?

Laundry is another ignore-it-and-maybe-it-will-go-away nuisance. Liz does hers. Everyone else doesn’t. If I just walked past the socks huddling around Alan’s chair, with my nose in the air (way, way in the air in fact) would he pick them up and wash them? Or would they coalesce into a funky sort of dog bed and offer Mike an odoriferous but comfortable lounging spot? (Then he wouldn’t have to pull the Afghan off the couch to curl up in front of the TV on it.) And all those jeans and sweatshirts draped so gracefully on the furniture and floor. Would they turn out to be a new art form that the kids could sell to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art? Or would the Guinness Book of World Records arrive with measuring tapes and scales and offer us a mega bucks prize for the mostest messiest motleyest house?

I dunno, but I think I will try it. I will spend all my sink cleaning, laundry round-up, dish rodeo, housework, time either planting bulbs for next spring or reading a nice trashy novel. For a week. All you other hairy-sink-plagued moms out there want to join me? Do you think anyone will notice if we join forces and strike?

What a fickle fall this has been. After weeks of weather that felt like August we had that extraordinary rainy spell. Then a warm, soft period arrived. Imagine, even here along the river, not having the inaugural frost of autumn until the first week in November. Fall colors have been subdued indeed, but we have enjoyed an exceptionally long spell of their blushing beauty. Last Saturday I sat out on the swing in the side yard throwing the roof of a plastic birdhouse for Mike and Gael. (It made a perfect Frisbee and was handy.) I had a cup of warm, sweet coffee and a good book to fill in the spaces when the old dogs got too tired to tear down the driveway after their improvised toy. The temperature was nearly seventy. The sun was comforting and the air as fragrant as June. Across the river a lone maple, with leaves as red as a summer sunset, tossed its branches above a grove of dull green pines as if shouting, “Hey, look at me.” I like that little tree and look for it every day when I go outside. Most of the other maples around the area are just a drab sort of yellow.

The valley reverberated to the rumble of trains across the river and small planes crisscrossed the sky. At the water garden the frogs were out. They are half hibernating and look like they had a rough night when they claw their way through the vegetation to lie in the sun. Summery weather is not normal for November but I will take all I can get. By the weekend it is supposed to be cold and dreary again. I guess that is to be expected in the next to the last month of the year.

****I wish the old dogs still had the gumption to chase things like the roof of an old birdhouse. Mike couldn't even see it any more and Gael has just lost interest.

Another busy day ahead

Farm Side deadline.

Farm Progress Days
Corn
More corn.

So here are a couple of shots I took for a few of you while we were over at the fair last week.

For Steve
(The White is no more, having taken a one way ride on a large flatbed just yesterday. Its spot in the line up has been taken by an actual honest to gosh JOHN DEERE! I have always wanted one.)

For Nita
I loved this calf instantly and asked the girl attending them about her. She was born a week before the cut off for one of the show groups but they were honest enough not to change her birth date. We don't change them either (witness the August 30th calf named Trent) and we get a lot of flack for it. Believe it or not this beautiful baby was sired by a herd bull used for clean up! There were more Guernseys at the show than I have ever seen before and they were really, really good ones. Lots of strength and exceptional depth and correctness. This is not exactly Guernsey country and it was good to see them.

For FC

For anyone who can spell and likes a good laugh

For Teri

End 'O Fair

Thanks to the incredible generosity of certain dear family members and friends last night I was able to stay home with my feet up rather than trundle over to the fair to truck out cows and decorations and such. Only if you show cattle will you know just how sweet that was.

Anyhow I missed some potentially troublesome excitement. An especially valuable heifer, calf of a costly clone cow, disappeared. Just vanished. She was tied to the side of the huge double-decker trailer that was to haul her home one minute and nowhere to be found the next.

Panic, quite understandably, ensued. Security was summoned. Even Becky was sharply questioned, until someone who knows her well pointed out that she was one of us and they had just helped the kids and the boss load the trailer with only our own cows. I could have told them that she is about as likely to snaffle up an extra cow as she would be to run barefoot through a freshly spread field....Josh Bernstein maybe, but certainly not a cow. Not exactly a fan of the bovine our girl.

It was a worrisome situation and I hope by now the missing calf has been found. Most folks thought that in the hustle and shuffle of trying to load dozens of cows and get them out of there as fast as possible she was probably stuck somewhere in that huge trailer in the wrong compartment or with the wrong family's cattle. Several groups were being loaded at once and it was very dark. Later in the morning I will call the folks who own the farm where she is housed and find out whether they found her or not...

When the boss was just a kid of 15 or so and won junior champion with a calf he bought for fifty dollars, a number of calves at the fair were stolen in the night. He doesn't think the owners ever recovered. I hope this story has a better ending

***Update...the lost is found. Somebody had loaded her on the trailer. Right trailer, wrong section....she was in with another family's cows.

Still another day

Does anyone know this guy?

Cows did terrible...worst show ever. Fonda has always been a tough show, but wow, the judge sure hated our cows. At least Hazel won her class. Ouch.....we still love them though.And after all, we do this for fun, right?

Thursday

I finally managed to make it around the fair.

Fonda Fair Day Two

I never made it over...so much to do with all the kids gone. I did housework and laundry and built a good hot fire so everyone can have hot showers. Fed all the calves and heifers except the pen calves in the barn. Fed Pecan who stays in the barn because once we let her out we can't get her back inside. And milked. And cleaned calf stalls.

Liz had some problems when someone's kid punched poor November in the eye and refused to stop hitting and leave the barn. Everyone had gone to dinner or something and she couldn't find anyone to help her, but finally repeated threats to get security got them to go...but not until they had given her a good dose of verbal abuse. They saw nothing wrong with hitting the poor calf. It is a rare occurrence to have fair visitors act in such a manner but it happens...and it always seems to happen when you are alone. Years ago we took a small baby that had no chance of wining, but loved people and was cute as a button, over to the fair just for fun. She was Becky's and Beck was small too and needed something little and easy to lead. She loved people so we tied her on the end of the string so kids could pet her. One night Ralph stayed to watch all the cows while there was a meeting up in the main barn and the same exact thing happened. He is a burly, rugged, intimidating-looking guy (nobody ever budges in line in front of him) but I guess the folks had been in the beer tent or something. Poor little Juniper Heart! It was years ago and it still gravels me that some rotten little brat would beat on her and his parents stick up for him and think it was fine.

Frontier Net was down a lot yesterday so things are kind of behindish...sorry about that.

Fonda Fair Day One

Veterans, Mandy and Lemonade

The cows are in, vet checked, every little ear tag read and recorded. They are washed and full of second cutting hay. The babies were funny at first. They have never been off the farm before and were terrified of everything.

Been there, done that....Hazel

Everything.

Other cows. Kids wanting to pet them. Wheel barrows. Announcements on the loud speaker. Us. Each other.
Even food when we tossed them hay.

About an hour after we got them there, while the boss and Liz went home for the big cows, and I stayed to keep an eye on things, they began to tentatively nibble single stems of hay.

By noon they were brave enough to lie down unless kids tried to pet them. By three they were looking for me to bring them new hay every little while and not kicking when I cleaned up behind them. By the time we went home last night they were settled in like veterans, ignoring the commotion around them and sucking up the bovine life of Riley like it was their due.

Mmmmkay, guess this isn't so awful after all....Neon Moon

Wait a minute, I guess it is.

Meanwhile, as soon as Hazel, Lemonade, Mandy and Blitz came off the trailer, they sauntered into the barn, stepped up into the stalls and began to gobble that yummy hay. No opening day jitters for them. They are veterans and they love shows.....and after a long day of tending to their every whim and picking up every drop of cow poo almost before it hit the floor, I can see why.

The view from where I await the cows' commands

Fonda Fair Day Minus One

Setting up the decorations and bedding up the stalls. Liz, the boss and I went over today to work on that and I took my photos over and put them in. I don't expect to win at all. The competition is extremely vigorous....but I needed a pass and I had to enter somethings. Cows will be trucked over tomorrow.

College starts today

The fair starts tomorrow. No zucchini so I will be skipping that class. I don't think I am going to cut down my giant sunflowers either......so I guess I will be just taking over some photographs....of frogs and toads, amazingly enough.

Hoping to get time to help Liz get her decorations up today. She was out in the barn until about 10:30 last night clipping heifers.....guess she is done with them anyhow. Figuring on missing Becky and Alan a lot today, but I guess I have to get used to it.

And all I have for you is this little sneaky snake Beck caught yesterday. I have never seen as many garter snakes as we have this summer. This one is slimmer than a pencil and about as long as the worn off stubs of them that I keep finding in Alan's pockets when school is in session. As little as they are they will hiss and spit and strike at you just as if they had something to back it up with. (The snakes, not the pencil stubs...the latter just make a lot of noise in the washing machine if I miss them.)

Fair time marks the end of summer

Mandy is all clipped and shined up.
On show day she will be bagged too, but in this shot her udder is pretty empty
as she was milked a few hours before.

This year it also means that the last of my babies is off to college. Liz has graduated and is staying home to work with us, which is truly sweet. The other two start Monday and for some reason it is bothering the heck out of me. I can barely sleep nights, even though they are both commuting as there is an excellent state college about 25 miles from here. Becky will be continuing her studies majoring in anthropology and Alan will begin in fisheries and wildlife.


Their schedules are just plain nasty, with many days that they will leave at 7 AM and not return until 10 PM. Becky has been the calf raiser this year. Liz and I will be doing that now so it means an extra job. Alan has worked as hard as any man helping his dad and milking with me. We will miss their help for sure. However what I am going to miss most is the comedy and camaraderie we normally take for granted. We have a lot of fun no two ways about it. NapoleON and his appendi and the excellent discussions of all the latest reading material will be sadly lacking in the barn this fall. I am sad, even so far as to feel kind of crushed about it all. I know babies are supposed to grow up and leave, but who knew I was going to like them so much?


On the plus side Liz and I will have lots of good long cow talks and that is a very satisfying passtime. We can talk about cows and feeding and fitting and showing and making advantageous matings all day and half the night if we get a chance. I am sure glad I will still have that.....and weekends.

We love our cows

We went to the fair

With the camera....and took pictures of jaws.




And of the new Miracle of Birth center...I also interviewed Dr. Lyman for this week's Farm Side

Chickies hatching

The fair sits in a circle of mountains.

Another show girl

Potential summer yearling class heifer, Maqua-kil Blitz Neon Moon, sister to Blitz, daughter of Mandy. For her first birthday yesterday she got her first bath of the 2008 show season. She isn't looking too pulled together yet, but some practice leading will bring that along.
Summer yearling is an awkward class. Heifers rarely look their best at just that age. Moon herself has looked better than this in the past and probably will again in the future. At least she isn't dragging Liz around. Any time she has gotten loose in the barn she has towed the boss or me around like a barge with a dingy.

So it begins

The first show calf of the season gets her first bath and leading session with a trip to the house as a reward for getting kind of cold and wet. Don't worry, she was warm and fluffy in just a few minutes.




This is redneck graduation present calf, November

Fun with French Fries

Note to boss...never bet against the cheap help (who are the same folks who spend the week at the fair with the show calves every year).

Yesterday Liz just had one of those feelings....something wrong with the heifers and dry cows. She went out to the pasture where they are stationed and sure enough River had had a calf and had pushed him down in our deepest ravine (which has a creek at the bottom.) Liz got them both out and came on down to report. Calf was a week early, tiny (you can pick it up under one arm) and a bull. Oh well.

Anyhow, while we were bringing him and his mama in to the barn we decided to bring all the close up dries in too and get them up to speed on grain feeding. (We have a serious selenium deficiency in the soil in this area and they can get some in the cow grain we feed. Selenium is a major aid to successful calving and the passing of the placenta afterward.)

After that nifty little rodeo concluded we were admiring last year's show heifer, Blink, who was running with them. Liz and I were joking about how she probably could walk right up to her and feed her French Fries. She loved them SO much last summer. The boss thought we were nuts and bet that she couldn't.

Well, now, it just so happened that we had French fries with our party dinner the night before. And it just so happened that we didn't eat them all., So....nothing would do, but Liz run over to the house and grab a handful to test the theory.

Blink was a little hawky after running wild since last fall. She let Liz get semi, sorta, kinda close and then stretched her neck out very, very long to sniff.....very long, giraffe neck...standing on tippy hoofs, ready to bolt away with her tail up.

And then she scented the French fries. Out came the tongue, down went the heels, and she gobbled them all up like the fair was yesterday instead of last year.
We roared with laughter.
Too bad we didn't put any meaningful stakes on our bet though.

More Tales from the Key Drive

First and foremost, Happy Birthday to Paintsmh, our especially wonderful Lizzie person! Yay, Liz, have a great one kiddo!

This one is from '06

Getting ready for the fair in some ways resembles a landslide on a jagged mountainside. It starts with a single pebble click, click, clicking as it falls. It is hard to believe that it will soon obliterate every other aspect of farm life, taking on the semblance of an all-consuming pile of quicksand.

The earliest event in the fair-ward journey is no more earth shaking than that first pebble. While we are milking, someone asks, “Which do you think looks better, Medina or Mendocino?”

A discussion of the relative merits of two calves begins. It is not too heated as it is long before the fair; no one needs to decide anything. Yet.

A totally irrelevant picture

Then as the weeks roll by the rumbling of the avalanche grows ever louder as fair preparations threaten to take over our lives.

The trucker must be called and decorations planned, purchased and assembled. Once chosen, calves must be trained to lead, bathed and clipped. Oh, and hopefully registered in time for the papers to be back before the show. In the case of Mendocino, who was selected over Medina based on pedigree (daughter of Fustead Emory Blitz, bovine equivalent of Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp rolled into one), greater height and sharpness, wider chest floor and the all-important fact that her mother is Lizzie’s favorite show cow, bathing takes on epic magnitude.

She is nearly pure white, not an auspicious color for a show calf. And not to put too fine a point on it, she is a hawg. Show her something brown and she will lie in it. She will dabble her tail in it too and paint her sides as far north as it will reach. (Of course she has a long tail.) If she can’t find something brown to lie in, she is a determined do it yourselfer. So every day, I say to the calf washer, “Throw that Blitz on the wash rack and let her soak while you’re clipping the other calves. And give her some bedding for Pete’s sake.”

This is futile as she eats any and all bedding, then looks around for more.

There is an intense competition between proponents of the little brown cow and fans of the big black and white ones here at Northview too. And of course sibling rivalry must contribute to the thunder of the developing landslide. Thus Alan snidely calls to Liz as she scrubs on Hazel, this year’s Jersey junior heifer calf, “Rub harder, maybe you can get all that brown off.”

He also takes me aside and suggests (quite loudly of course), “I know just what to do for Liz for Christmas this year. We’ll get some black and white paint and paint all her Jerseys. Then at least they will look like real cows instead of pasture lice.”

I shake my head and wonder at the wisdom of a lad who insults his sister’s favorite cattle while she has a fully charged water hose in her hand. Especially in light of the fact that the fair starts next week and she has a driver’s license and he doesn’t.

Ah well, as the number of days between now and truck-in day decrease, the spirit of cooperation increases, out of dire necessity if nothing else. There had been a vociferous battle, with many verbal stones thrown, over whether Alan’s two-year-old heifer, Bayberry, would go to the show or not. Like many boys he has sometimes used the necessity for him to go to the fair to care for his critters as an excuse to hit the midway with his buddies. This leaves big sister with his cow to work with along with her own. Not a popular phenomenon. Threats and imprecations are uttered on this topic.

Then terrible weather intervenes. There is no way Alan can go to the fair every day to pamper a cow. He can get over there for show night but otherwise he is needed at home to make hay. If the sun shines.

His sister has the choice of taking Bay herself or not having enough milking entries to qualify for Premier Exhibitor or Master Breeder.

Bayberry is going. Liz even rubs liniment on her sore stifle every day. (Poor thing slipped and fell a couple of weeks ago.)

As fair time approaches even the house begins to show the effects of the uproar. There are artificial maple leaves, fake wheat and a bunch of other funky stuff sticking up out of the mismatched sock basket and surging up from the cushions of the couch as if growing there. A crisis emerges when it is noticed that the stall sign for Liz’s Jersey aged cow, Dreamroad Extreme Heather, reads Dreamroad Extreme Heater. However appropriate that might be this summer it must be changed.

Of course an ever-helpful sibling suggests taking off both “H’s” and calling her Dreamroad Extreme Eater.

At least this year Liz is clipping at home, where it is quiet and the electrical outlets work. She was raving today about how nice it is to have the calves all done except for their ears (had to make a trip to town to get new ear clippers yesterday). I point out that I have been suggesting that she do them at home for at least ten years now. She doesn’t want to hear it.

A new dilemma arises. It has rained three days out of the last week. The oats that have been carefully saved in the field to provide bedding for fair stalls are still standing. It is too wet to mow, let alone bale them. Ditto the special second cutting field set aside for show cows. And the first cutting.

Frantic discussion of where enough bedding for ten head and good stuff to feed them can be found before next Monday ensues.

As piles of sand and gravel from the clattering landslide rise high enough to cover my ears, I pray for sunny days. Soon. Oh, and a little extra patience wouldn’t hurt either.

Yet another, equally irrelevant picture, taken at the same time.

*******Thankfully, our first fair isn't until August this year. Neither Bay or Heather are in the running to go. Bay's not bred and Heather lost a quarter.

As per request

****** Tomorrow I will tell you about actually getting to meet another blogger...first time ever and way too cool!

Will they do it?

Are the three women of Northview brave enough to hop in the car and go here to see this (scroll to the bottom to see what is on tomorrow afternoon)?
I am not sure but things are leaning that way.