Incredible Photos from the 30s and 40s

Do take a few minutes to look at these in the Denver Post. They are phenomenal and include homesteaders inside their prairie homes, juke joints, dam building and so much more. Amazing!

HT Luv Hahn on FB

Now That's Photography

Digital camera+Styrofoam+balloon= incredible photos of our planet

Photo Contest...Last Days

Only a couple more days until the contest ends and the photo "Liz and Jack is still in the top ten. Some people have done even better than I have and have voted on days when I forgot. Thanks to every single one of you for voting every day!

The Contest is Almost Over

It ends on June 4th. I would be most grateful if you took a minute to scroll through the wonderful entries and enjoy many aspects of farming and ranching.......and if you vote for mine...well that is great. You can vote once each day as long as the contest continues.

You can see them all here.

Thank you all so much!!

Photo Contest (Sticky Post, scroll down for new ones)

Much to my surprise I discovered that I was a finalist in a photography contest. I had completely forgotten that I entered and couldn't even remember what photo I submitted.......The final winner will be decided by voting. If you wish to place a vote for my entry you can do so here. There are a lot of really nice entries and I am tickled to have a photo chosen to be among them....mine is almost at the end so you will get to enjoy them all.

You can vote once per day until June 4th. I would be most grateful and I thank you in advance.

Sunday Stills...Tri Color

For more Sunday Stills......

Sunday Stills....Silhouettes

Did we have fun with this one?
Oh, yes, we really did.
At first I thought I might not even try....so busy this time of year. Then once we got started I had such a great time that we ended up with a lot of them.
For more Sunday Stills, go here.

Saturday Morning Special

Playing with Picasa's collage tool

Cow-lage

Anti (cat) matter

Same sky, different day

Taken from the same porch as the photo in the last post but early this morning

Stuff

We have lots of white-crowned sparrows. They are amazingly tame! (Wrote that wrong the first time, which is what comes of blogging before coffee.)

And Alan's big brother took him to a ball game this weekend (ballgame photos by Alan, who took the little camera along)

I think he said that is the new Yankee stadium above

Deadline Wednesday

I never joined Wordless Wednesday, although you sure can find a lot of fine photography from the bloggers who have on that day. However, I gotta come up with 1000 words for the Farm Side today, so here it is....Deadline Wednesday.

Wow

Had the morning off yesterday. Although Saturday isn't Sunday, it sure was nice. The guys went off for cow hay and to hit a machinery auction and to try to buy my Christmas present from the boss***, so we women had the day to ourselves. Liz kept the cows fed and I worked on the wood stove. There are times when that is a miserable and thankless task, but on a day like yesterday it beat housework all hollow.

Alan takes care of the stove for the most part, but he tends not to shovel out the ashes. Not something you need to do every day with an outdoor stove, but sooner or later it must be done. They were at least a foot deep.

These outdoor wood-burning critters are supposed to be inefficient, but if you burn them right when it is time to clean them out there is nothing left but incredibly heavy, dense, mealy powder. I swear every shovel full weighs twenty pounds. Yesterday there was a sluggish fire of gigantic maple blocks burning so I had to clean around that, and I was pretty pooped when I got done. However, the sun was hammering down hard enough that I soon shed my fleece vest. (You know you are a farmer when your vest says "Today" on it and rather than being a Zen statement it is an advertisement for mastitis medicine). It was actually warm enough for just a turtleneck and jeans, which is a mighty fine thing. After the shoveling I scavenged some apple up in the orchard and got that sullen fire fired up so to speak. (I didn't use any of my precious fat wood, as I didn't need to but last week I build a fire from scratch with it -just three little pieces that I broke off-and it was fantastic. I had a fire that was woofing and snarking up the logs in about five minutes! Thanks FC, again.)

It was a fantastic day to be out. Our resident mocking bird was hard at work teaching the cardinal how to sing his song. Clouds of blackbirds were nattering around in the box elders up by the old hop house. There were geese and killdeers and robins. Chickadees, titmice, and goldfinches. It was just warm enough to work hard, but cool enough to be comfy. The grass is actually turning GREEN! For the past two years spring has been so late that there has been no grass well into May. As we are buying feed seeing the land green up lifts my heart plumb up. No bugs yet either, although I slathered on plenty of OFF! to dissuade ticks from visiting my vulnerable ankles. I hope today is half as nice.




***The boss promised me one of those waffle deck plastic wagons for Christmas, but couldn't find one during the winter months. He is still looking, but they are just not in the stores yet. I love something like that for hauling wood and garden dirt and hay and all. Can't wait until he finds one!

Guess who went out barefoot with the doggies this morning

To shoot pictures of the moon? (The rest of them were taken through the windows...I am only half way crazy).







Happy, happy morning...no school, no milk truck, Liz has the day off so I can let everyone else sleep in an extra hour while I play.

MOS

Photo by Alan
This is the road we take every day over to the college....I stand corrected. Becky took this one.

Big (ish) sky

Another view of the beaver dam taken by Alan while mom was driving about 55

No more excuses

For lame photography.....



Thank you...you know who you are but I don't know if you want to be unmasked here.


First attempt....it's raining so we are a little limited outdoors, but as soon as the sun shines... I have already been immortalized on television as this hooks up to it....much fun being had here.

Something's brewing

We crawled out of bed a little early this morning because Liz is going to help out on a Farm Bureau membership drive a little later in the day. We were nearly done milking when the sun came up. Its rising was at once ominous and glorious. At first there were bands of purple and sandy tan. Pretty enough, but in a Martian sort of way...the colors were simply not of this earth. Then the strange dullness slowly dissolved into a sea of red so bright that it shone right through the house from the living room to the rippled old glass in the dining room windows. There the red was exuberantly bubbled and wrinkled by the ancient panes until it looked like lava flowing down between the curtains.

The milkhouse wall was stained bright pink for a few seconds too, like a sunlit villa tucked against a hillside somewhere on the Mediterranean. I hurried back into the barn to call everybody out to see, but by the time I turned again the color was gone and the sky had faded all to grey. Because Liz was in a hurry to get Becky over to school (the latter is paying the former for chauffeur duties) the breakfast above is not what we are having today. However, a week ago Sunday was another story altogether. Anyhow, between the red sky at morning and the weather forecasts I guess we have a storm brewing. Sleet. Freezing rain. High wind watch. Bah humbug!

*****Visit Pure Florida today to see the kind of photos of Herkimer Diamonds that someone who knows what they are doing can produce. Mine are feeble by comparison.... even though the stones are just as bright and even somewhat larger.
It is kind of neat to walk outside with a flashlight here at night, as all the Herkimers and slabs of mica from Richter's Mountain sparkle like, well, like diamonds in the night....maybe someday I will get the knack of photographing them.

Faded photographs

I have been looking for some specific photographs of a certain dog who used to rule here (he needs a nice Northview memorial post)....I simply can't find them, but here are some that I came across during the search. As any of you who know us will see..........we have aged.......

Red sky at morning farmers take....

Pictures

Northview girls

Frosting...the heifers are in from the hill

Liquorice ...(I think)

Mandy

Bama Breeze

***Notice that only Bama and Mandy still have ear tags, and all Mandy has is her official USDA tag (required for shows). They ALL had tags like Bama's when they went to pasture. The National Animal ID System, NAIS, will rely on ear tags to trace animals to their source.....what a wonderfully reliable system they are planning.