Danger

My parents' next door neighbor was tragically killed by a car a couple of weeks ago. Shock waves rippled through the area....he was a fixture...someone everyone knew and liked and his kids were best friends with my younger brother when we were young. We all visited a lot when we were kids and played backyard football and all and ran in and out of each other's houses tame. The accident was horrible and made worse by some pretty tasteless newspaper coverage.

There were phrases like "pedestrian error" and such bandied about, but those of us who visit that area or grew up on that awful road know better. Cars fly along that straightaway like they were climbing the curves at a speedway.

Just getting the mail at my folks' house or pulling out of their driveway is an exercise in fear (yeah, all right I AM kind of timid but still....)

Now this happened to the very house where my folks' neighbor lived. And the house is not real near the road or anything.There are rumors of drag racing.

I think it's time for some folks in uniforms to enforce the speed laws out there....just sayin'.

With the Sun

Come pictures

That Ain't Chicken Feed

"This is my own tiny kitteh bed....to you it may be a paper towel,

but to me it is special..."

Photo by Alan

A representative of a local fish and game club brought me some bird seed today...read the Farm Side late in summer about the shortage of high price of sunflower seeds...and just brought me some seed. Isn't that the sweetest thing?

When the Going Gets Cold

Mappy in Shadow

The cold go shopping. It was just miserable here yesterday. Atmosphere and temperature both. So Liz took Beck and me shopping for a turkey and everything that goes with it.

It was warm in the store. People were remarkably friendly and smiley and nice.

And it was warm. I have never enjoyed shopping more.

Now there are yams in the oven and celery and onions on the stove and it at least smells warm in here.

Hope you all have a terrific day tomorrow.

PS a certain grumpy someone just came home with an itty bitty electric heater. Maybe I should smile at him.

This Week's Farm Side

Can't link to it this time, not on the freebie pages. However it is about one of my favorite authors, Ralph Moody.

And story (or storey) poles, both farmer version and government version. Gotta love the contrast. (be sure and scroll down on the latter to see the photos.)

Awakened

Got mud?

Yup...snow too, this AM

By a certain individual who has to arise at three to milk someone else's cows. Good that you are making money, but the rest of us don't need to get up at that hour ....just sayin....

I am actually comfortable though. Hot water bottle (two liter soda bottle heated in the microwave) in the back of my chair. Blankets in the chair too...nice and cozy. Oven on for about ten minutes with a pan of hot water inside (scented with cloves and cinnamon of course). Ran the shower for a minute to let out a bit of steam. Amazing how fast you get used to the cold. I worry about my house plants though.

Eerie

What am I?

Strange sky this morning. Despite thick clouds the moon was so bright that everything kind of glowed. Then, where the sun was coming up, little slits in the clouds let in thready rays of spooky, white light.

It was as if the sky was torn and leaking.

Sort of Martian.

At least it isn't raining yet. The dog barometer was dry when he came in, always a good sign. And Simon, AKA Seismo, the seismological cat, (due to his twenty-poundage and thunderhooves) flung himself in through the door for a dish of cat food, then flounced back out after he ate, with all his many furry, fat, belly folds flopping. Guess he has solved the problem of winter care and feeding for us.

If you know what the "who am I" bird is, please let me know. There are so many exotic LBBs around this fall that it is driving me crazy! There were several of these flitting around the roof eating something...probably spiders or box elder bugs. They are so fast that even though I took several pics, this is the best I could do. Help with ID would be much appreciated. I know it looks a bit house finch-ish, but I am pretty sure that it is not.

Cool Stuff from other Folks

Jinglebob posted this link on the real result of letting folks exercise their Second Amendment rights.

A good friend participated in this Guinness Book record collection of boats in Inlet NY.

Take into account that Inlet, a tiny town in the Adirondack Mountains, has a population of well under 500, yet beat out Pittsburgh, PA for the record. The event raised money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research and was called One Square Mile of Hope. (Record is not yet official but surely will be.)

Change 'O Plans

They happen to the best of us. Woke up full of hope for a harvest day. The guys got some sorghum chopped yesterday and changed fields to go after some better stuff. Were planning on more of the same for today. Walked out of the bedroom and heard rain thundering on the steel porch roof (for some reason you can rarely hear it rain in our room).

Well, dang, so much for sorghum. During drier years they might be able to chop the same day as rain if it cleared up by noon, but it is so soggy, it will be at least a day before they can move.

Normally this would plunge me into despair. Enough already, and I wish the forecasters would get it right once in a while. We were supposed to get one more nice day before the gunk set in.

However, today there is just going to be a change of plans. If I can pull it together the boy and I are going visiting and to the store. I am going to finally see folks who have been too long neglected, deliver some tomatoes and beef and books (of which we have a plethora) and then hit the store for dog food, DVDs and ammo. Getting to be that time of year and the big bucks and big Toms are making themselves known. And I am going to put a few thousand photos on DVDs and maybe speed up this tired old computer a bit. Maybe.

There. I am all cheered up at least for today. Hope you have a good one too.

Here are some links that may help.

I have been at meetings where this guy spoke and always thought he was pretty darned good for the community, but now I am downright proud of him. Man on a Mission

A small but interesting positive carved out when the flood waters revealed bits of history in Fort Hunter. Can you imagine the possibilities from this discovery? A church probably attended by Sir William Johnson before the Revolutionary War? Wow....

****Update, please go read this story about a modern day crime fighting hero. You simply can't make stuff like this up!

Away From the Blog Right Now

Discussion on the merits....of Ford vs Dodge

Threecollie is away from her blog right now. She may be outside hanging up laundry and picking tomatoes.

Or possibly corralled in the office with a long pile of bills and a short pile of milk check.

Or she may just be playing hooky because it is so darned nice.

Anyhow, leave a message after the tone and she will get back to you tomorrow. Thanks!

B-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-P........

More on the Texas Drought

While working on the Farm Side yesterday I came upon this article.

Well worth your time to read this man's perspective on the drought and on mega-droughts in centuries gone by

He points out that one drought, documented through archaeological evidence, lasted nearly a hundred years and is thought to have contributed to the downfall of the Mayan civilization.

Times are hard in the West these days. As the author of the article states, about all that can be done is to pray for rain to fall in all the right places.

******Which means, NOT HERE please*******

The Birds

Heard this godawful screeching yesterday, like thousands of finger nails on dozens of chalkboards. Went out to see what was up and discovered a massive flock of starlings congregated in the honey locust.

There were so many that it was literally raining feathers. I had seen a few tearing up the stag horn sumacs out in the front yard, but yowsa! What a huge and noisy flock was hanging in the back yard.

Suddenly they took off with a rush of wings that had to be heard to be believed. I kinda waved the camera in their general direction and clicked the button a few times. Got a tiny fraction of the flock just by luck

Hearing the sound they made got me thinking about what the passenger pigeons must have sounded like when they flew over....and did it rain feathers...and other birdie by-products....when they passed....just wondering is all.

Links

Gratuitous cute kitty....Athena

Just because:

Dairy, a dirty job nobody wants (and here we are doing it for the love of it)

It's National Dog Day. The boss thinks that PeTA and HSUS should dig into their coffers and buy every dog in the country a nice, thick steak! Nick is waiting for his right now.

The estimable Chuck Jolley on the NYT's ag "expert". (Great job, Mr. Jolley, you knocked this one out of the park!)

And the best ever of those little copy and paste jobbies from Facebook:

A dying granny tells her granddaughter, "I want to leave you my farm. That includes the villa, the tractor and other equipment, the farmhouse and $22,398,750.78 in cash." The granddaughter, about to be rich, says, "Oh my Granny, you are so generous. I didn't even know you had a farm. Where is it?" With her last breath, her grandmother whispered, "Facebook".

Thanks to Isla Gringo

Contentment

Teeny Leetle Spider Guy

It makes me happy to learn new things. These things do not need to be useful in any way...my brain is a old granny's attic crammed with pointless clutter. However, interesting, odd, cool, unique, yeah, even totally meaningless in the grand scheme of things trivia, that is treasure to me.

Some of the stuff that has come my way this summer:

Female cardinals sing too. Thanks to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for this little tidbit. No wonder it seems as if we have so many of them each winter.

Leave the landscape alone if you visit Hawaii. Pele prefers it apparently. There are places where you can return anything you inadvertently remove....especially lava rock.

There is in fact a cloud appreciation society (and so there should be). Thanks to Cathy, I now know that you can go to their website to view staggeringly lovely photos of all sorts of clouds. Do not miss the opportunity to sooth your soul with their sweet and sensuous photos. Here is one of Cathy's.

I have also learned a few creepy crawly buggy things and a couple of new butterflies, and maybe a bird call or two, bad things that can go wrong with tractor engines and transmissions (there are a lot and they are all expensive and nasty) and a couple of new recipes, but the above three are my favorites so far this summer.

Good to the Last Toothpick

My folks bought their first home when I was in sixth grade and my brother in fifth.What a thrill to live somewhere that was all ours. No landlord to appease, no fear of moving on to another house, another school, a new set of friends...or maybe no new friends and lasting loneliness. We moved a lot before they bought that house.

It was a nice little place.

There was a teen-aged Norway maple in the front yard and a medium-sized silver maple in the back. He claimed the front tree and I chose the one behind the house.

We were arboreal kids. (And eagerly aquatic and active land mammals as well. No computers, no TV most of the time. When we played, we played outdoors.)

We climbed those trees. A lot. Hung tire swings from gnarly old ropes. Swung upside down by scabby knees; played Tarzan. Remember that wonderfully satisfying Tarzan yell?. Listened to our first cardinals, learned about bugs and squrrels, and dreamed our dreams. Who needs playground equipment if they have a good tree?

I read books up in my tree...that one branch was the perfect height for a not so tall, scrawny kid to grab hold and swing up to perch out of sight and out of mind among the limbs. There was a good spot to sit and a better one to belly sprawl, arms and legs hanging down like a lounging lion.

The tire swing was a horse....many horses....all kinds of horses. I was born with an admiration for all things equine, and suffered from acute horse envy for many years.....who knew I would end up with cows?

My mind has been full of stories since I first learned words so when I ran out of books the stories played out in the tree or on the swing.

I loved that tree.

However, as kids tend to, we grew up, outgrew trees, tire swings, and childish fantasies and turned to other things. Got jobs and cars and real horses and new lives.

The trees grew huge. The Norway tangled the power lines and finally succumbed to whatever kills heavily pruned roadside maple trees.

The silver maple morphed into a staggeringly huge monster tree. Even if I were still 11 and skinny and agile there were no more inviting limbs, calling me to climb. Instead it began to shed limbs in ice storms and wind storms and even just at random. It overshadowed the folks' yard like a deadly wooden thundercloud.

It had to come down. And a couple of years ago, courtesy of a tree service, it lost its last leaves, shed its final samaras, and died the honorable death of an old tree.

There was so much light, fluffy wood after the brother and family split it up that the folks yard was half buried in it. Finally a couple of weeks ago, it was decided that there would be a wood lift. All day trucks run by family members shuttled piles and piles to our side yard.

Then the boss and Alan and I loaded the skid steer with buckets full and shifted most of it up to the stove.

I built a fire the next morning and since that day I have always had hot water. For someone who heats water with wood and hardly ever actually has any wood, it has been the most amazing luxury imaginable. Hot showers, hot dish water...all I can use....it boggles the mind.

And all I have to do to have it is to pile about two bushels of the soft, light wood into the stove each morning and walk away.

Each morning I am thankful. To mom and dad for letting me have the wood. To brother, family and everyone who spent a whole Sunday dragging me wood. They had better things to do, but did it anyhow.

And I am thankful too, to that old tree, which has given its all to me for nearly fifty years....good to the last toothpick. What a grand old plant it was.

Fog Light

Up way before the light today, disturbing dreams of animals that need care, and dogs gone by, calling out for me to save them. It was so real and then to wake and find that Two Bears does not need to be fed, hasn't in twenty years or more, and never will again. A grand dog of history but gone, long, long gone.....

Two Bears, taken in Colorado, many moons ago

Nick though, Nick is glad of my early morning and his hours-before-normal breakfast time. Glad too that Liz picked up some samples of fancy dog food at TS the other day and he can have a taste...and a spoon of last night's meat loaf gravy....nom, nom, nom.....

Rooster crows at 5:06. Indigo bunting tunes up at 5:32 and does not stop. At all. I want some of what he's drinking. I could use that much energy.

Fog is soggy grey right now, drooping and dingy like it needs to be bleached and hung on the line in the sun. S'okay, when the sun gets around to getting up it will light up like a pearl and glow with silver warm light. The fog muffles the sounds of trains and traffic and makes them seem mysterious and cool....rather than just noisy and annoying....

No cows; couldn't milk if I wanted to. The fog shelters them from prying eyes, sleepy out there somewhere on the hill. They will not come down any more without being pursued, not even for their tasty tithe of morning grain and the water in the big blue tub. They are not liking the mud that ALL THIS DARNED RAIN has made. It hurts their poor feet. Old Mandy cow is being kept in the temporarily vacant heifer pen so she doesn't have to make the trudge to pasture. She does not much appreciate the gesture and leans her long, black, self over the high, red gate, calling sadly and sticks her nose in the window at me....OVER the plywood that keeps heifers from ripping out the window. She is one tall cow I'll tell you!

This much water from ONE rain....there have been many others

We put the two young jerseys out with the cows a couple of weeks ago. What a pair of sixes! They travel together as if yoked like oxen, brown on brown, and always in trouble. Quick to it too; they can dart in the barn door and run around like dervish fools in less time than it takes old folks to hurry to close the door.

We are the walking wounded here, alas. After all summer of being the broken-footed, useless gimp, I am surrounded by folks in worse shape than I am. Becky is laid low by a vicious summer cold, that is dripping and gripping its way through the house. Liz sprained her ankle while feeding her horse and is having a miserable time milk inspecting, working here and trying to get ready for the fairs. Alan went out to change a tire yesterday and put his hand in a wasp nest...just as he was finishing up. His ear was stung eight times and his wrist three. Oh, my the swelling... Yow!

How I hate those nasty mixed vespids. Sting first and ask questions later. And they build their nests in the damnedest places and defend them to the death...no matter whose.

Well, as we listen to the sucking sound of our economy going down the drain, I leave you with good wishes for the day. Enjoy the indigo buntings and good dogs in your world, while the great ones in Rome fiddle to the tune of the flashing flames.

Housekeeping Triage

Or how I spent my day.

I was in hot pursuit of the Farm Side deadline, (which I never did make, sorry boss), writing about apples, which I love, and having a grand old time.

Phone rang. Unknown name. Unknown number. Almost didn't answer.

But I did. Yowsa. Complete strangers wanted to visit and take photos for reasons I will let you in on later.

I am probably not the world's worst housekeeper, but I'll bet I could hold my own against some pretty serious competition. (One reason I keep border collies is to herd the dust bunnies.)

I cleaned.

Emergency style. However, the first visitor arrived well before I accomplished anything of note. Thus there are photos floating around somewhere of the dining room table weighted down until its poor oak legs cringe with half of NFO's national paperwork (I swear) because Liz stores it there. Photos of curling wall paper, and the boss's giant piles of newspapers and farm magazines.

Pics of clutter, clutter, clutter, two families, the boss's folks and us, worth of accumulated what not and who knows what not. Not neat that's for sure. Argggghhhh......

Visitor number one left, with visitor number two still in the offing. Liz came home and pitched in like only a young person who does not have a broken foot can. We dusted, we swept, we shifted junk from one place to another. I boiled some vanilla and cinnamon on the stove to try to cover up the pervasive aroma of dairy air, which I am sure city folks notice when they stop by.

Visitor number two arrived, camera in hand, and took pictures of even more places, including our bedroom, which is neat but dusty.

Alas, all our labors were probably for naught. The Thruway is too noisy. The trains are too noisy. Noisy, noisy, noisy.

Tis true dat. They are annoying as all get out, and supply a constant susurrus, often ramping up to din, of horns and tires and engines and Jake brakes and train whistles, day and night.

When we know for sure (if we ever do) I will tell you who our visitors were and what they wanted. I'll bet you will be almost as surprised as I was.

Meanwhile the house looks half way decent, so if you want to stop, by give me a call. I'll put the vanilla and cinnamon on to boil and brew up some instant coffee. Maybe even some cookies?

Get Goats

That is my answer to this problem.

It worked here. And as to the fencing thing, the guy we bought the original border collies from had a business out in California grazing goats on the power lines to keep down brush. One man, one dog, no fence needed.

Tonic

A good porch is like a tonic. You can step out there full of worry and care, brimming over with problems and pains.
In a word...glum...

Then the sun peeks out from behind a bank of foggy clouds.

Company arrives.

Light mantles the land like a glowing golden blanket.....and along with the light and the birds and the beauty and joy, comes peace, stealing in on the song of a secret catbird singing in the grape vine, sliding home on a carpet of dew, creeping up to curl in your lap like a contented cat.......

Yeah, I love a good porch.

Down Sizing

His name is Chainsaw and he usually lives up to it....however, maybe he is trying to tell us something.

Should we change his name to Brush Nippers?