The Men

Discussing kayak advertisements....me, I like the canoe.

Saturday Before Camp

We are off to camp today.

The dog now has tags on his collar, which will definitely need to be taped together if anyone is going to sleep. License and rabies certificate is stowed and packing is about done.

Noodles, poles, life jackets, tackle boxes........I love the smell of an old, well-loved tackle box...melted rubber, wood smoke, Skin-so-Soft...there is nothing like it.

The weather forecast is for rain and library books.

I have left a series of posts for the week, but will be out of reach of a way to answer comments. However, I will talk to you next week when we get home from Peck's Lake NY.

Hope you all have a good one!

That's Just Ducky

I am going to be putting more camp pics up here

Home Again

Yellow Perch

Common Mergansers

My other home

Companionship

A little of this

And a lot of this!!

Sustenance

Transportation

Camp

We leave tomorrow at noon. (Hope to see some of you there...you know who you are.)
Farming doesn't stop while I pack, and the days are so full and busy I barely have time to pick up the camera or spend a few minutes writing here.

I may not have mentioned it, but the boss was pulling the John Deere forage wagon through a particularly rutted bit of farm road last week when a front axle broke. When he called the local dealer about the part the price was way over five hundred bucks.
Plus freight.

Arrggghhh!! And the guy we generally borrow RR jacks from when we have a challenge like this was out of town. We brainstormed. The guys are running with only two wagons this year.
They need that JD.

But five hundred bucks! It was decided to take the part up to Broadalbin Manufacturing and see if they could weld it. If you ever need something like that done, I can't recommend those folks enough. They have big, complicated, metal machining projects going on all the time, but they have a soft spot for farmers and will fit in our little, but important to us, jobs as best they can. They do good work and their prices are very reasonable.

They repaired the axle and welded some kind of doohickey on it for $125. The guys borrowed jacks from my wonderful brother, (thanks, Mappy) who also cut them enough blocking to make what otherwise would have been a terribly dangerous job relatively safe.

And so they are running with two wagons again. They had a mishap with the bagger last week so we lost about sixty feet of bag. Thus yesterday during the storm the boss ran down for a new bag so he and Alan can set it up before we leave for camp. Teri has a pic of some of the hail that was around, but thank God it missed us. One of our friend's corn got hit last week and it looks like Sudan Grass now. In fact when we went by his place, not knowing about the hail, we thought that it WAS Sudan. It has been a very hard year to make forages, one of the worst we have ever seen.

I sure hope this weather pattern gets over itself and goes somewhere where it is needed.
Meantime....must pack.

I hope you are not bored yet

Common Merganser

Canada goose (begging, although we didn't feed them)

Common loon (not common enough though)

Foggy morning

Better this time than ever

Serenity is a duck

Ducks

Camp week

Last week was simply amazing. One of the nicest weeks we have ever spent at camp. There were birds and wild animals everywhere, the weather was stunning (except for one incredible downpour). We got to see any number of friends we don't get to spend time with very often. Caught a few fish. Took a lot of pictures...


194 in all plus one video. I only deleted a few when we got home where I could view them on the computer. I don't know what I am going to do with all those photos of ducks, geese kids and sunrises but I will think of something.

We puzzled for days over what these geese were grazing out of the trees until we started to find wild cherries floating on the water. If you click you can see the cherries, but we couldn't from where we were.

This beaver woke me up at 4:13 a couple of days ago, gnawing on a bass wood tree that hung out over the lake right under my bedroom window. It took me a long time to figure out what it was chewing and rolling rocks and splashing around just a few feet from where I was sleeping. I had thoughts of bears and other things more ominous than a beaver, until I heard it's signature somebody-throwing-a-bowling-ball-in-the-lake splash when I shined my flashlight out the window at it.

The Porch

Then yesterday morning as I was sitting on the porch sipping coffee, taking pictures of the sunrise and saying goodbye to the lake, it swam by about a foot from the porch. Then it disappeared in the trees overhanging the lake. For some reason it climbed up the hill to the outhouse, then thundered down, sounding like a whole herd of deer crashing through the bushes. It proceeded to swim aimlessly up and down the lake. Beavers are certainly interesting critters, but this one seemed to be operating on somewhat less than the prescribed number of cylinders so to speak. It certainly wasn't much afraid of me....or maybe it couldn't see me lurking up there on the porch. It just kept cruising past the porch...over and over again.





Until somebody said, BOO!

This is what happens when you say boo to a beaver

Who would ever believe that you would have geese eating cherries out of trees and beavers bowling under your bedroom window? Plumb amazing!

Home Again

We left this behind this morning to come home to the heat and humidity. No lie...I miss the lake.

******Lots of pics on the View at Northview

Peace and quiet

I am so ready for some.
(Which is fortuitous as next week is our vacation.)
Camp
Ahhh......





In the past week the guys have blown a piston on one tractor (Case 930, 43+ years old and the absolute standby for mowing, baling and running loads), killed one forage wagon dead as a doornail (it was a terrible wagon right from the get go and we will certainly never buy another New Holland), scored the shear bar on the chopper and spent about half their time running around after parts and looking for another wagon and at mid-sized used tractors. Nobody's fault but....
It has not been fun for those of us on the sidelines. (They did manage to find a John Deere forage wagon that was both cheap and functional after some minor work.)





I have sustained my sanity by day-dreaming about loons and hemlocks and the soft rippling of water against the dock. I have gently packed this and that that I can live without until the weekend. I have lamented the loss somewhere in the course of changing computers of my "camp list" with important things like a can opener and a colander detailed on it. For once I have the noodles in the pile for the trip...the floating noodles that is. I am perfectly capable of swimming and snorkeling and do, but there is nothing like pulling your feet up so you don't get them in the bottom goo...and just drifting among the sun sparkled waves. I have forgotten them the last two years in a row.

To get to the weekend, I have to finish out today.
Function through tomorrow.
Get serious about packing on Friday.
Go crazy on Saturday with last minute packing (after milking the cows one last time in the morning) and shopping for perishables, getting through check in and unpacking.




Then on Sunday morning, while the folks in the other cabins sleep off their carousing from the night before (the only real draw back to camping where we do is raucous parties all night every night...I relish every hungover minute the next morning though because it is dead quiet), the loons and I...maybe a rock bass or two....and the sun and the lake will commune in peace. The loons will have minnows and I the first cup of coffee, binoculars, camera and a good book. I can't wait.




***Photos are from other years...

Kegan's pickerel

My handsome nephew Kegan (that's him with the ruler) caught this 28 inch pickerel up at Peck's Saturday. That is one amazing fish and he didn't even have a steel leader. Photo credit goes to cousin Scott's weekly missive and I am thinking to one of my favorite aunts.

Strange to be back

It is so odd to be home. I was kind of a park rat for so many years...Adirondack Park that is and it is easy to slip back into that world.

"Today the Park is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Park combined."

Grandma and Grandpa Lachmayer had a camp there, not on a lake, but we had fun just the same. We stayed there darned near every summer weekend of my childhood. (I was hell on frogs.... needing to get a closer look at every single one I could find.) The special scent of moldy canvas can take me back to sleeping in a leaky tent and living on macaroni salad and hot dogs in an instant.

Then I lived in the park off and on as an adult. And camped in the park. Hiked the park. Canoed the park. Stayed in lean tos. Fished. Picked berries. Watched birds. Tried to garden....(a fascinating pastime with the short, short summers up there). It was another life than this one, as far removed from the high pressure of farming as keeping a diary is from working for the New York Times. Every year our visit to Peck's Lake turns me back into a person of simple wants and needs and few responsibilities for one short week. Then we come home and I morph back into farm wife, parent, writer, bookkeeper, and put on all the other hats I wear. It is like stepping out of one life, taking a trip back in time, then moving forward again. Weird but worth it I guess

See ya

Boil up some hummer food, clean and fill the feeders, take out the trash, clean out the fridge, finish up all the laundry, pay the bills, balance the check book, order grain, order teat dip, roll up the change and take it to the bank, pack the snorkels, fins, poles, tackle boxes, grab a stack of books at the library, indulge in the latest Nora Roberts (brought to me by the Farm Side, thank you), bandaids, Skin-so-Soft, Off!, dog food, dog ropes, canoe? (no, we'll come back down and pick that up if things are quiet on the lake; no sense getting swamped by the maniacs) charge up some camera batteries, drag extra hay up to the horse yard, Frontline on the dogs, don't forget the can opener, leashes, life preservers, remember the butter, hotdogs, macaroni, spaghetti sauce and home made jelly, bring along shampoo and flashlights and blankets....and oh, heck, where is that list anyhow!??!!!

We are off to camp tomorrow for a week, hopefully including some fish. Take care!

Finding my folks

When I first saw the picture below and a number of others that were given to my mom along with it, all was explained. I have always felt like a changeling child, dumped into my more conventional family from some weird place where girls like to wear boots and jeans and run around in the woods doing guy things. Heck, I have spent most of my five decades trying to outdo guys at what they do. I only got smart and let them take up the heavy lifting…and tractor driving, cow wrangling, ladder climbing, huntin’, fishin’ (wait a minute, I still fish and milk cows) and all that stuff a couple years ago. I haven’t owned a dress in over thirty years. (They damn well better bury me in blue jeans.)

Both my grandmas were lady-like. My mom went along with my dad whether he was digging rare minerals in the wilds of Canada or wearing the kilt and representing the clan at the games or carving or painting, lugging books into shows, or doing hands on archeology, but she was always a girly girl.
Not the kind of kid like I was, that brought in a dinner plate sized toad and dumped it in her lap when I was supposed to be on a date with that cute blond guy. Or had my big milk snake get loose at my graduation party and scare all the Lachmayer great aunts half to death. Or was the best, most un-tackle-able football player in our gang. Or played guitar in our garage band that graduated into a bar band that rocked any number of wild places, even one biker bar....where we played Born to be Wild for about three hours straight because we felt safer doing so. (After all some of our audience was out in the parking lot throwing some of their buddies off the roof onto parked cars...all in good fun, of course.)

I felt like a freak.

Until I saw the pictures. There were my great grandma, Carrie Montgomery, whom I never met, and a whole passel of great aunts, wearing rubber boots and men’s knickerbockers or baggy old men’s pants, camping along the beautiful Canesteo River. They held up massive bass they had hooked; they cooked rough in the woods. They rode in wonderful wooden boats and set up this delightfully inviting camp. (Don't be fooled by the dresses in the cooking picture. Others that are not posted show them dressed like female hunting guides and darned proud of it.)

When I saw the camp I wanted to just walk right into the picture. It said home like my own living room does.

Take a look at my mom’s blog, Tryon Books and More, and see my late great aunt Fanny. (That is her with the bass in the bottom picture. She is the one wearing knickers and close-cropped hair.) Fanny had a collie dog too!

How I wish I had known all my Grandpa Montgomery’s sisters-in-law and his mamma.

They were my kind of women. Or maybe I am theirs.