Milestones

It would be great if you could wish dear Rebecca happy birthday today. She is a very special person, as her co-workers, customers, friends and family well know.

And she makes the best darned coffee you can get anywhere in town....heck in both towns....I am having a cup of not-so-superior stuff this morning because she is off work for her birthday, and I miss the good kind.

Happy Birthday, kiddo! We love you!

To our favorite Farmer Chick

You know, the young lady who has an incubator in the dining room and lambs and ducks and turkeys and chickens and guinea hens and quail and a calf etc. in the old heifer barn.

Happy Birthday!

Kicking over the Traces

Tomorrow the family Christmas get together.

Sunday the holiday itself. With a two-year-old. She is so excited.

Monday Johnstown CBC. 

Monday night. If all goes well, and the good Lord willing, and the crick don't rise, and all of the ifs ands and buts fall into line.

Heading south. Where the birds and the sunshine live.

Thirty

As birthdays go, it's a big one. Thus I want to be the first to officially offer best wishes to Liz on the actual day of her 30th. My, what a long way we have traveled.

Lamplighter

Besides starting a Facebook page for her crocheted stuffies, our middle kid can also wire lamps.If you go to the link and like her page you will automatically be entered in a drawing for a stuffed bear or bunny when she hits 100 likes.

For this I am most grateful, as without her technological abilities, the office would be mighty dark. Wish we had bought her the parts earlier!

And then there is the book she bought that I hadn't read in 30 years or so. Spent a most enjoyable evening racing through it faster than the horses that grace its pages.

Thanks, Beck!

The Best

Got cattitude? (Or when Peggy wants the kitties, Peggy gets the kitties

Birthday ever, to the best Becky ever. Hope you have a great one! Love you.

Middle Child

Works two jobs just to keep things going.

Brings good books, finds the best authors, pushes me off the deep end of reading.

Time after time.

Whovian

Best Mac and Cheese in the world....

Need to know something? She'll research it for you. Fastest search in the west...or east....

Always willing, quiet, but strong.

Middle child.....

My Becky

Happy Birthday kiddo...when you choose your birthday books from my collection, choose well.

Love you!

Upset about Dinosaur Hunting

Liz takes on the folks who believe dinosaurs still rule the earth...along with some AR fanatics. Good job, kiddo.

Upper Garden Done

Becky and I finished it today. Everything is planted, except possibly some pumpkins or gourds in some new ground. (Dear friend, Numberwise, we kept you in mind as we filled the rows. Extra pretty much everything if it grows, which is always an issue, especially in a wet year like this.)

A sad day for us though.....

After two weeks of having our boy living at home and working just a few miles away, he is back in our nation's capital, far away from hearth and home....or heart and home, as it should be. It was nice while it lasted, although I wasn't crazy about the job he was on...right out in the middle of that mean old snake of a river that runs past the place. They don't call it the Mighty Mohawk for nothing. My dear  brother is still there for a while...hey, Mappy, watch your step out there! With all this rain it is extra high and mighty.

This morning brought adventures in guinea hen chasing. Liz had them in a coop with a broody hen, sitting on turkey, guinea, and hen eggs. Suddenly they decided that beating her up and breaking the eggs was the thing to do.

So we had a capture committee meeting and put them in the same house as the peahen, although not in her coop. They had better behave!

The boss is baling some hay, not the best as it has been rained on a bit, but I have never seen a year where we weren't grateful for every bale we put up. I am sure not looking forward to unloading it, but it's got to go in. Gonna rain again tomorrow.

As You Can See Below

The younger two of our three offspring (Alan and Becky.....you know who you are) thought it would be fun to hack Northview last night, since I left the computer up on the kitchen table when I went into the living room.

After Liz and I canned 18 jars of strawberry jam yesterday. 

And froze four quarts of berries for shortcake next winter.

And cooked a turkey dinner.

And planted 18 hills of squash and helped move manure and mulch around the edges of the garden. And such.

And got a TICK!!!!! EEEEKKKKKK A TICK!!!!

  I am utterly phobic about ticks and it was a deer tick too.

Rotten ingrates. Alas, they know I have a certain strange sense of humor and wouldn't really get mad....just pseudo mad so to speak.

And I love them, and love having them around, so I put up with them.....but they had better watch out....just sayin'

Happy Birthday, Liz

The kind of girl who fixes fence with a chicken tucked under her arm (hey, women invented multitasking).

 Hope you have a great day, kiddo!

Weekenders

What a weekend. Flooding...inside the kitchen no less, from a leaky thingumabob under the sink. I think I have that mopped up and the boss has stalled it, but whoever plumbed this place was not a pro or very foresighted. No shutoffs where you need them....

A funeral, for Jade's cousin. Long day for them. Lots of wren noise. Lots of rain. Today the sun is doing its thing, but it is cold for May...way, way cold.

Days with my boy, which mean a lot to me, btw. There are few things more delightful than sitting on a porch with someone you love. And we have lots of love and a pretty darned good porch for it too.

He scored a long weekend at home, before a long, nasty spell away, and we took full advantage. Talking of potential property acquisitions, trying on futures, and watching the birds come in. Slowing down the woodchuck onslaught, one pellet at a time....why is it that all the herds of coyotes that trammel the lawn each night and day never eat them?    Fixing windows, moving things too heavy for mom and not of interest to others, general home improvement, enhanced by good company and warm talk. He is off today for two months far away and lonesome and we will miss him. At least he will be a little closer than Virginia, which was way too far. But, first, driving a tractor in a parade today...I hope there will be pictures.

Chicken dinner. Steak dinner. Vanilla ice cream with homemade strawberry jam from last summer. There is almost always good food and companionship in this house. People coming in and out to eat and talking and talking and talking. Big dogs. Little dogs. Big horses. Little horses....not in the house, of course, but you can see them from the kitchen window.  Feeding cows and calves, heating milk, hanging buckets. Grass that is slow to grow where we want it and all too quick where it has to be mowed.

It is quite a thing to have everyone home at once...But this is a big house and can hold them all quite well, and a good thing too. It seems to like the noise and bustle and gets its glow on when everybody is home....well, except for that blasted flood in the kitchen. I think it likes to have its rooms full and busy.

Traditional Wisdom

Suggests that the mothers of infants nap, shower, or indulge in a little "me" time while their babies are asleep.

Or, if you are a Northview girl, you could tear the vacuum cleaner apart and repair it.

Just sayin'......

Orion Wore a Kilt of Clouds

She looks a lot like daddy
and a little bit like Great grandma Peggy,
which is pretty fitting I'm thinking

As seen from midnight stairs the umpteenth time....

Kind of fluffy for a guy like him, but  he looked good in it, step dancing out there, on the heifer barn roof.

When I came down again at dawn, droves of robins queued up to take a turn bathing in the big rut in the driveway.

Festooned with frosting, the trees were trailing veils of gauzy mist...the whole river was shrouded in it, the geese like mysterious strangers hiding from the unfurling sun.

I thought to take pictures of it all to save to show her what her first day looked like, someday when she is old enough to see them.

But I didn't, because I was too darned scared.

We were all scared and it was a long and worried day.......but worth every fearful second.

At the end the young family was increased by one, and the new parents knew a bond like no other.

And the new grandparents shed a couple of buckets of tears of pure, deep, elemental joy, that can only be engendered by the birth of one so loved.

Welcome to the world, Miss Peggy Ann Marie Schultz. We love you baby girl.

He Asked

On one knee in the horse's stable....

And she said yes!

Congratulations Alan and Jennifer...this has to be one of the best Christmases ever!

Puppy Love

Liz Wants a Blog Post

This morning we had some up close and personal veterinary work to do on five strong, flighty, more than a year old, heifers.


They are not sick, this was just routine stuff, but it had to be done. They are housed in the old sawdust shed, which was built to keep the sawdust from running away. It served that job quite well, but despite the addition of some sturdy gates, it won't bear having heifers tied to it,  or slammed against it, or handy-dandy gate moving or anything like that.


Thus these heifers had to be caught and held without the benefit of good equipment.


The boss tried. He has always been a strong, capable man, leaping tall buildings at a single bound and all. However, he has been injured a lot of times over the years, plus he broke his shoulder and dislocated it a couple years ago and it just doesn't do what he needs it to. And he is well over sixty.


Thus he couldn't just grab them by the nose and hang on like he would have done even a couple of years ago.


This work absolutely had to be done.


There was no one here but us wimmen and him. His lariat has a broken catch on it and is essentially worse than useless.


So Liz took an old calf halter, undid the nose band to form a makeshift loop, handed me her engagement ring and got in the pen.


After all the fruitless previous efforts by her dad, and there were many, in about fifteen minutes she roped all five heifers, held the rope with one hand while she did the work on them with the other, then turned them all loose. Then she took back her ring and put it back on.


She was covered with manure, bruised, battered, and has one finger that may not have been meant to bend that way originally, but the work is done and everybody is still standing up and taking nourishment.....she told me she expected a blog post out of it at the very least.


So here, it is...Upstate NY, where the men are men and the women are scary.

The Cow Whisperer and Strawberry Shortcake

Liz and Strawberry

Our Liz. Walked right out, tossed a halter on Northstar the other night and brought her in to be milked. You don't normally do that with a first calf heifer. Norry walked in like an old show cow. It was pretty cute. She has been led a couple times before, but still.


 BTW, June named Norry in a name the calf contest a while back. Northstar baby pic

High comedy around the place yesterday morning. Norry had the tiniest little heifer the other day...so small we spent some time looking for a twin but didn't find one.

And a few weeks ago, Velvet also had a mini calf...a bull. Although the girl is red and the guy is black, they are brother and sister on the male side, both being sired by our Checkerboard Magnum's Promise bull of old.

At the moment the big heifer pen at the back of the barn is empty and Shortcake, as Liz named the bull, has been living there in splendor. We decided to put Strawberry, the heifer (aren't we cute?) in with him for her own safety. She had already been nearly drowned in the mud by the big heifers out in the barnyard, curious to see anything so tiny in their domain.

Is that my bottle...do you have my bottle, buck, buck, bunt, bunt, bunt

Well, just as we started to let the cows in for morning milking, Strawberry shot out of the pen like a blob of red toothpaste and began to bolt around the barn.


Liz grabbed her (she only weighs about thirty pounds) and stuffed her back in


She came back out


Lather, rinse, repeat.


Then Shortcake, deciding that this all looked like a lot of fun, hopped through the wall himself.


We were all laughing so hard we could barely catch them. (And isn't it just like a guy to not figure out for himself how to get in trouble but to embrace it so gleefully once somebody shows him how).
 

Since we did have to get some chores done rather than play with calves all morning, the boss put up some gates and plywood to keep the little miscreants in the pen...and so far Strawberry has only gotten out one more time when the big beef steer opened the gate, but who knows what we will find this morning.

Happy Birthday Liz

Our critter whisperer is 26. When she was three she could pick her cows (her grandpa gave her a couple) out of the herd in the barnyard....and she hasn't changed a bit.

Liz at 6, unloading her first show calf, Sonora, from the trailer

Love you Liz and hope your day just keeps getting better.

Farm Girls

Patch themselves up with duct tape when they blow out a knee and still have to work.

Go to the parts store up at the other end of the county, carrying THIS part along...with instructions that it is NOT this part that is needed, but the OTHER part.


And somehow remain cheerful and fun to be around.


The subject of both these photos is Liz and the stories are true, with no names changed to protect the innocent.......