Mandolin Rain using Junie as a foot rest

Things to see at the fair

Little piggies. Two of these will be coming home with us not too long after the fair.

The boss bringing in straw

Fair time

This is our farm sign on our fair display.

It was cool and pink and hazy this morning....

I love mornings like this....

Whitewash revisited or a lot of bull in the afternoon

Well really it was a steer, but he sure acted like a bull. We whitewashed yesterday so I went over to the barn about four PM to start undoing everything we did to get ready. I was pulling plastic off the bulletin boards when I noticed something amiss. The great big shorthorn/Holstein steer we are raising for beef was not in his stall. Instead he was up in the manger fighting with a yearling heifer, Chicago, who was still tied in her stall.


This guy is a brute, may 13 or 14 hundred pounds of nasty-as-a-bull. (We women have often wondered if the guys missed something of key importance when they castrated him, although they swear they didn't). Anyhow, he doesn't like me and has always lunged at me whenever I walk past his stall.


Still I couldn't just leave him fighting with that poor little heifer.
So I picked up a piece of pipe that had missed being put away and walked over to that side of the barn. I was careful to stay close to things I could hide behind.


Good thing too. The first thing he did when he saw me was charge right at me. I jumped into the baby calf tie up and swung the gate closed in his face. He ran right up to it and threw his head over snorting at me. I gave him a pop on the nose with the pipe, which backed him off a foot or so. A second pop sent him back to fight with poor Chicago some more.


As soon as he was otherwise occupied I slipped through the stalls, where he would have to wind around them to get to me and ducked out of the barn.

I hustled to the house to send Becky after the men, who were baling, and Liz and I went back to the scene of the crime.
There is no stopping that girl.
"I am not afraid of him!" she declared. Chicago is one of her babies and she wasn't about to let her be abused by a big pile of beef.

I took my hickory stick; she took the pipe. She opened the gate to an empty pen; I tiptoed up behind all the fans, which were stored under a canvas for the whitewashing. That gave me something to duck behind if he charged. I hollered and whacked him on the rump with my stick. She stood by the gate and threatened him with the pipe. In less time than it takes to tell it that stinker was locked up in the pen. However we had to let Magma, our red calf, loose to run around the barn because she was tied to the gate. She had a fine time thundering up and down the mangers and walkways and running underneath him and under Chicago while we were working.


The men were as far back on the farm as they could be, about a mile away, and Becky couldn't find them, so we had the barn all cleaned up by the time they came down. It took at least an hour to rope the darned "steer", (which I still think is a bull), get the nose leads and a halter on him and walk him back to his stall. With three people holding the ropes.


I think Lizzie and I ought to get the farm-girls get-it-done award or something. And I think it is time to call the processing plant real soon.

Kashette, up to no good.

Getting ready for the fair

Christopher Porco Guilty

I am stunned by the verdict. Although I have been convinced all along that he probably was, in fact, guilty, the evidence that the press released didn't seem much more than circumstantial. I suspect we will see an appeal, and I can't really blame them if they seek one.

At any rate, the six hours of deliberation seem short for the situation, but then I wasn't sitting there in the jury box. Still...

Good post at NYCO blog

NYCO has a good post today on the traumatic stress the June flooding caused area folks.
The boss noticed early on that there were a lot of untimely-seeming deaths in the towns worst hit by the waters. Guess he wasn't the only one.

Oh, and Assemblyman Tonko is asking that the rumors about the dams not being opened fast enough be investigated too. We first heard these stories at a local business that was destroyed almost entirely. Only a limited amount of credence was given to the rumor at that time, but now, hmmmm.

Japanese enjoy US beef

According to the Cattle Network three Costco stores there sold out of American beef products as soon as they were available. Five metric tons fairly flew off the shelves the very first day the beef was available. Beef prices are already trending upward, probably on the strength of that story and the shortage of feed that is fast developing across the nation. Now if the blankety, blanking fools in the processing plants can keep banned material out of the meat and the USDA can do their job to make sure of that, maybe we can enjoy the open market for a bit.

Review milk

Thanks to Kim Komando I discovered today that Amazon.com is selling milk, and, since folks like reviewing books and records, they are doing the same for nature's most perfect food. Read all about it here.

Sunday's prize catch

Just outside the kitchen door...

Good morning sunshine

One year

I missed it! I missed the anniversary of my first year of blogging. It was yesterday. I was busy taking my son fishing and such. (They weren't biting so we brought home some crayfish for the fish tanks and lots of pretty rocks instead.)

Oh, well, I would like to thank all the people who have stopped by to read and/or comment over the past year. Without you this would all be pointless.

Went to Mill Point on Schoharie Creek this morning. Good time had by all

Susan Butcher

How could it be? How could Susan Butcher, athlete enough to have won the Iditarod four times, probably one of the toughest people in the world, be gone? Susan was one of my greatest heroines for as long as I have followed and loved sled dog racing. Her name was synonymous with everything that the Iditarod represented. You know, bravery, determination, heart and a spirit of adventure.

She died from complications from a bone marrow transplant undertaken to combat polycythemia vera, a rare disease of bone marrow and blood..

Born in 1954, she had two young daughters and was married to lawyer and fellow musher, David Monson.


You can leave a message for Susan's family and friends at theStatus.
(Type in butcher for the ID and butcher1 for the password.)
Trail Breaker Kennels
Susan's bio

Don't touch bats!

950 or so Girl Scouts may have to be given preventative shots for rabies, because a counselor at their camp caught wild bats and encouraged them to touch them. There were also bats roosting in the girls' sleeping shelters.

We used to have problems with bats coming indoors down at the old house until we finally cemented up the right hole in the chimney. Becky woke up with one on her pillow one night and we hauled her and the bat straight to the hospital to be checked out. She was unmarked and the emergency room doctor actually asked if he could keep the bat (which Ralph knocked out with a spray can of ether used to start tractors, and put in a jar). The doc wanted to put the bat in his new bat house! Only 1% of the bat population has rabies, but you can't be too careful with that terrible disease. I am terrified of it. There are wild cats around here and they just scare the life out of me because we are in a rabies area.

Reminiscing and Rustlers

You never know what will make a difference, what will stick, what will stay with your kids forever (which is scary as heck!). This morning I was at the sink talking to Becky while trying to get the smell of filamentatious algae off my hands, after cleaning some out of the garden pond. (I originally went outdoors to chase Comedy away. She was trying to scoop out some lovely guppies and goldfish for a mid-morning snack. The empty OFF! can I tossed her way served its purpose, but I somehow got pulled into the great time-sucking black hole known as puttering-in-the-yard. I wound up dragging a half a mile or so of stinky green gunk out of the pond and mulching under the hostas with it. You could tell what I had been up to from six feet back.)

Colin Raye’s song, I Think About You came on the country radio station. Beck, who is now 18, said that she had always liked it and would always remember it in a special way. She reminded me, “You sang it to me once. We were outside Grandma’s house and it came on the car radio. I was sitting in the front and you leaned over and sang it to me. I remember because I was eight years old.”
(You have probably heard the line, “I think about you, eight years old, big blue eyes and a heart of gold. When I look at this world, I think about you.....”)

I think I like the song because it has always reminded me of Beck, who does have that sort of generous, giving and caring heart (which she hides under the exterior of a teenaged curmudgeon.)
Imagine remembering something like that for ten years and liking it because I sang it to her (if you have heard me sing, you will know how unlikely THAT is.)


I walked away from the sink, still stinking of rank green pond weed, but with a nice, warm feeling to carry around for a while…at least until the next time we go to war over prepping cows or feeding the pony or something.


*On another topic entirely, check out this story on modern day rustlers. These cows didn’t need a national animal identification system to be traced. All that was required here was a vigilant owner and some eager policemen.

Morning through the moonflower vine

Goodbye to the Catskill Game Farm

What a shock this morning to hear that the Catskill Game Farm is closing. It has been there simply forever, as long as I can remember (since 1933 in fact). It was a popular school field trip, a fun and educational, if exhausting, day out with the little ones and a well-known breeder of many threatened species. (The facility won awards for many of its breeding programs, including Przewalski horses.)

The farm features over 2000 animals from dozens of species. For some reason the Galapagos tortoises and the rhinos always stick in memory, as well as seeing the long blackberry colored tongues of the giraffes coil towards your hand when they reached for grain.

They say declining attendance in large part blamed on several lousy summers in succession is to blame. Insurance costs are another factor.
Although I have been there so many times that the trips and animals rather blur together it will be sorely missed. Even local farmers often sold lambs to the owners to stock the petting zoo.

There will be an auction this fall to disperse the animals and equipment. From Addax to Zebu by way of Kulan and Kudu, that will be quite an event.

We are thinking that we will take the kids and the camera back this summer for just one more visit before it all falls under the hammer.

Poor baby

Twisted Robin

I wouldn't have seen this if I hadn't been cleaning the filter on the garden pond this morning after milking. However, I walked over to hang the used filter on the fence so I could hose it off and there it was. I hurried over to the door to ask Becky for the camera and rushed outside for a close up.


I thought it would be really cute.

Then I saw the beak. Poor twisted little bird. The parents are still caring for it, and soon arrived to beep and boop at me in protest at my presence in their territory. I don't imagine it will survive long after they stop. Comedy was hanging around too, looking for handouts. She is a terrific hunter but I didn't chase her away. I suppose that being eaten by a barn cat would be a kinder fate for the poor thing than starvation.

Buying a new car

Actually that is kind of a misleading title. I was really just doing research online in order to do a better job of buying a USED vehicle for our second daughter to drive back and forth to college.

Anyhow, I stumbled across this article and was stunned and kind of shamed to see how easily we fell for some of the ploys used by car salesmen to suck in innocent buyers. (We drive a beat up old '94 minivan that we bought new from a dealer who used several of the tricks described in this story to get a few extra bucks from us.)

I will know better next time. You can too if you take time to read this admittedly long article.

Creamsicle

BlackJack....Northview's other equine

New "face" in the blogroll

I added a new link to the Blogroll this morning to a colorful and interesting blog from Central New York. The author stumbled on Northview via flood photos and generously gave me a link way back last month.

I am returning the compliment, (albeit kind of late in the day) especially since just their Blogroll alone is worth a visit. Anyhow, welcome to NYCO's Blog.

*Just a note: If you are an upstate New Yorker, plan on spending a while if you click. NYCO links to dozens of pertinent stories that you will find yourself wanting to know more about.

This is Frieland Andre Magma, daughter of Frieland LF Volcano. We finally got a red one!

Still more global warming

A Coyote at the Dog Show wrote an interesting post linking to this story last Sunday. Seems global warming is affecting Mars a lot like it is reported to be doing here on our comfy little home on the third rock.

"In fact, Mars may be in the midst of a period of profound climate change, according to a new study that shows dramatic year-to-year losses of snow at the south pole." Says Space.com (Sound familiar?)

Okay, our ice caps are melting; their ice caps are melting. If we accept that ours are wasting away to mere snow cones of their former selves because we drive to the mall too often, should we assume that Ray Walston and Bill Bixby found themselves somewhere unexpected when they shuffled off this mortal coil? And that now that the front yard is red and doesn't need much mowing they bought a new SUV and are spending their time 4-wheeling among the red rock.....polluting the atmosphere in wanton disregard of what they are doing to their climate? Maybe they need a treaty?

Or should we rethink our arrogant assumption that we are turning up the boiler here on earth and instead look to the head honcho out there in space for answers to hypothetical climate change?

Of course, if we think we have strange weather these days, up there on the red planet it snows dry ice. Imagine talking about THAT kind of weather around the water cooler.

The Same Old Same Old

Those who are longtime readers here at Northview Diary will remember how long and hard we agonized over the hostile takeover of the cooperative we had long shipped our milk to by a financially struggling cooperative in New England.

We felt that we were being sold a bill of goods by the new owners, so we called for our contract and moved to another company. It doesn’t pay as well as Allied Federated Cooperatives did and we miss having good people working hard to negotiate favorable prices for us. However, this news story from the Burlington Free Press, made us awfully glad we changed. Seems Agri Mark, the folks who shut down our old cooperative are in big financial trouble and they are taking the cost of their problems right out of their members hides.

We may be experiencing record low milk prices right now, but at least nobody is dipping into our check book to pay for what looks an awful lot to me like bad management. A number of farmers are leaving as soon as their contracts are up.


We are glad we never joined.


Still it will be a terrible shame if Agri Mark goes under. They are one of the few independents left in the region. The demise of each small coop results in a worse monopoly on processing and marketing dairy products than already exists and this does not mean good prices for producers.

Dang dog

Sorry to have been AWOL since Sunday. It was entirely invountary. Alan's delightful border collie, Nick, decided that day to run over to the window to bark at Lizzie's horse, which she was allowing to graze on the lawn. He used the phone jack for a handy dandy brace so he could see better. It was not up to the strain of a forty-pound hound bouncing up and down on it, all the while screaming epithets and bellowing death threats at the intruder on his own personal, carefully marked, lush green (thanks to an overkill of rain) grass. A teeny, tiny plastic piece parted company from its shell and the whole shebang gave up the ghost. What with the flooding and all, repairing dog damaged wall jacks is a low priority I guess and it didn't get fixed until tonight. I have to give the phone guys credit though; they were still working tonight at 6 PM.

After almost three days without phone or Internet one thing has been proven.

I am addicted. Relentless restlessness, irritability, crankiness, crabbiness, it was like being without coffee. Worse even. It is going to take my family weeks to recover I fear.

Sorry Ralph, Liz and Becky, you'll have to blame Alan. I told him to put the darned dog out...about five minutes before the phone jack joined the Hesperus on the reef of Norman's woe.

Home again

Came home from camp today, with the car stalling at every intersection and rain pouring down. Found the river on the rise with rushing black water pouring under the bridge. There are flood warnings out for both our “home” counties and it is looking pretty bad.

Again.

We had a great week though. The lake was as warm as a bathtub and yet refreshing in the heat. Fishing was poor, but we caught lots of trees and stumps as well as some rocks and a good part of the State of NY.

Alan took up fly fishing, which yielded the best catches of the week, including a big fallfish and a number of small-mouthed bass.


I don’t need to catch fish to be happy. A good book and a pair of binoculars….and my camera of course, and I have every thing I require for contentment. A fresh cup of coffee bumps it up to total luxury. Took many pictures and "note blogged" since a little red notebook is much more portable than a desktop. It was all good.

Wish it was just beginning.

Before the storm

Beggers

Solid comfort

Going fishing just after sunrise

Postcard from camp

Hope your week is going great as well, with no snags worse than this one in your world.

Sunflower

Powerful flood photos

Dan Weaver has some aerial pictures of the river at its worst on his blog. Even having seen much of the flooding they are amazing.
Upstream. A Mohawk Valley Blogzine.: Aerial Photos Of Flooding On The Mohawk River.

It's time

Jobs for today... boot up the old computer, find the list of things we need to bring, (until I created this list I had to drive down and buy a new plastic collander every year for three consecutive years). Pray that the Lexmark printer has just one more task left in it.

Accompany Liz food shopping.


Take the middle seat out of the mini van so there is room for the cot and the dog crates.

Do last minute laundry, water ALL the plants, pack the field guides to birds, trees, and wild flowers and all the binoculars. Oh, and the Collin's Complete Field Guide to American Wildlife and Cache Lake Country.

Go to the library for stacks and stacks of other books. Try to get down to the hospital to see mom, or at least give her a call. Replace the worms the %^&%#!* birds ate out of our compost bin/worm bed.


Milk the cows and feed the calves for the next to the last time before CAMP!!!!!


See you next week!

Still more rain

Possible solution to a watery problem

Out in the barn tonight Liz and I were discussing ways we could share this outrageous largess of water we are laboring under with our friends to the south and west. They are suffering from an interminable drought, while we are getting too much rain. Rain that is wrecking our neighbors' homes and businesses.


All day rain.

All night rain.

Sluicing, sheeting, rattling rain that is washing out all the roads that the boss just finished regrading for about the fifth time this summer. Rain that is preventing us from storing our crops or getting the cows fed properly without using up what stored feed we have.

We have way too much; they have too little.

Seems like a solvable dilemma.

However, we struggled to come up with a way to create enough wind to blow the rain clouds over hills and mountains to where they are needed.

Then Liz came up with a brilliant idea.

Politicians.

Lots and lots of politicians. Granted the rain will likely be kind of warm by the time it makes it to Florida and Montana, but there is enough hot air produced in Massachusetts alone to push the rain all the way to California. I think that if we point Kerry and Kennedy and Dean west and use everyone in the White House as a relay south, the watery unbalance that is plaguing our nation will soon be remedied.
It's worth a try.

Here we go again

Look what we have for today.

THE NATL WEATHER SVC IN ALBANY HAS ISSUED A * FLASH FLOOD WATCH FOR PORTIONS OF N. CT. WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS.EAST CNTL NY & SOUTHERN VT. THIS INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING AREAS IN NORTHERN CT.LITCHFIELD COUNTY. IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS. BERKSHIRE COUNTY. IN EAST CNTL NY.ALBANY. COLUMBIA.DUTCHESS.GREENE.RENSSELAER.SCHENECTADY. ULSTER.HAMILTON.MONTGOMERY.FULTON.HERKIMER. SARATOGA.WARREN.WA & SCHOHARIE COUNTIES. IN S. VT.BENNINGTON & WINDHAM COUNTIES. * THE FLASH FLOOD WATCH IS IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM EDT THIS MORNING THROUGH LATE TONIGHT. * LOW PRESSURE MOVING EAST FROM THE GREAT LAKES WILL INTERACT WITH VERY MOIST AIR OVER THE REGION TO PRODUCE A GENERAL RAINFALL OF ONE TO TWO INCHES OVER THE REGION THROUGH TONIGHT. HOWEVER.THE AIR OVER THE REGION WILL ALSO BE VERY UNSTABLE TODAY AND TONIGHT. THIS WILL RESULT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THUNDERSTORMS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING ONE TO TWO INCHES OF RAIN IN AN HOUR. THESE HIGH RAINFALL RATES COULD RESULT IN LOCALLY EXCESSIVE RAINFALL AMOUNTS & PRODUCE FLASH FLOODING. A FLASH FLOOD WATCH MEANS THAT CONDITIONS MAY DEVELOP THAT LEAD TO FLASH FLOODING. FLASH FLOODING IS A VERY DANGEROUS SITUATION WHICH RESULTS IN VERY RAPID RISES OF WATER LEVELS & LITTLE TIME TO REACT. YOU SHOULD MONITOR LATER FORECASTS & BE PREPARED TO TAKE ACTION SHOULD FLASH FLOOD WARNINGS BE ISSUED

Just what we need!

The One I Drove

The big red tractor, with the big red chopper, with the big red wagon is the one I drove yesterday.

Mowing Hay

As performed by a sixteen-year-old virtuoso....you can see that the hay is well past its prime, but there is quite a lot of it.

Chopping hay

I haven’t chopped hay in years, but I did yesterday as per my son’s request. He figured (rightly), that an extra person would speed things up at least a little. I used to do almost all the hay chopping, but when the Boss’s mother passed away I took on most of her jobs and really didn’t have time any more. Plus a sixteen-year-old kid can work rings around a middle aged woman when it comes to running machinery. Seems as if they are just born with the knack.


It was kind of fun in a nervous sort of way. Our tractors and impliments are pretty antiquated and I am scared to death of breaking something and putting us even farther behind. The weather has done a good enough job of that already. However, I chopped in second gear, high range and managed to not even break a shear bolt. Not bad for an old lady.


I took the camera up in the field with me, which offered a little enjoyment to lighten up the seriousness of trying to get in first cutting that should have been cut a month and a half ago.

I suppose that what we lost in quality we will probably make up in volume though. It will mean supplimenting with more expensive grain this winter, but what can you do?


Of course after a big day and getting in ten loads, counting what we fed the cows, the floor came out of one forage wagon destroying part of the drag bottom and leaving us with only one working wagon.

Such is farming.

Animal Welfare Bill

House bill H.R. 5557 will probably go down in defeat...or at least we hope so. Read why here.

Frieland Z Mandolin Rain

Pretty sunset

Heavenly skies after a week from Hell

Flood tales, tall or otherwise

There are a number of flood horror stories that I can’t put in the Farm Side because they remain unsubstantiated. However, some ring true and deserve to see the light of day, so here are a couple or three.


The authorities are alleged to have failed to open the river dams in order to save pleasure boats moored below them at the expense of further damage to land facilities. Whole towns were pretty much wiped out. I am thinking maybe there just wasn’t time to do anything about the locks and dams, but who knows?


Our diesel guy was reportedly refused admittance to our road, even though there was no possibility of flooding anywhere between the intersection where he tried to turn and us. (This one is no rumor, but came right from the driver.) We live about an 8th of a mile from that intersection by the way, and were out of fuel for the generator and field work.


One valley fire department is said to have lost all their fuel to water contamination. The same delivery guy told us that they were called because their trucks are on relatively high ground. They could also apparently be accessed without going through any serious high water spots, at least nothing that would stop a large diesel engine. Local authorities refused access to the trucks anyhow.



A local farmer was allegedly arrested for trying to get into town to pump out a stranded family member. He left court and drove right down and helped her anyhow.


FEMA is offering people who lost entire homes and all of their possessions between $2000 and $2500 to help them rebuild. They gave each person a debit card for that much in Katrina, much of the money being used to buy shameless luxuries. Guess upstate NY isn’t quite as glamorous.
(Bear in mind that these stories are just that, tales that are being told as folks gather to assess the damage and commiserate over their losses.)


At least one rumor that was giving us fits is that Peck’s Lake is closed. My much-anticipated week at that facility begins a week from Saturday. When we heard that the lake was closed I came pretty close to bawling. I know a lost vacation isn’t much stacked up against the devastation that has hit our neighbors. Still the peace and quiet and the loons and rainbow trout mean a lot to me.
Thus I was delighted, thrilled, overjoyed, and just plain real happy to talk to an extremely agitated Alby Peck today. Seems the papers were just fishing for something to write about, and pretty much fabricated the closed lake story. Peck’s is open and eager to regain all the business the false story cost them.

More flooding down along the Delaware

Endment has some photos of the flooding in other parts of the state....plus a bear!

Doppleganger?

Close but no gar

Dam(n) Info

I have been checking The Gilboa Dam Information site regularly, since last week's flood. I suspect that you will be as distressed as I was when you read today's entry about the failure of emergency warning systems for the affected area.

To put it simply, nothing worked.

I know that up here on our hill we were almost entirely cut off from outside communication. Although we have a generator, cable TV was out and local radio stations went right on running talk shows and playing lousy music as if nothing had happened. Thankfully we still had a phone, so my parents let me listen to TV bulletins over it. However, many folks had nothing and the systems that should have been operational failed.


There are thousands of helpless peopleliving in the footprint of that antiquated structure. I think some serious attention had better be directed at effective emergency warning before it is too late. This week should serve as a lesson in preparedness....or the lack of it.

Toad Mode

Surprise

During the flooding that struck the valley this week, we were very much in need of something interesting to distract us from the dark side. Alan provided me with a great diversion right in the middle of the worst of it.

All the big tractors were about out of diesel by Thursday morning and we still needed to run the generator so the boss sent our boy way back in the field to get our ancient 930 Case tractor. It is getting close to 40 years old now, but although small, it had a full tank of fuel. (Roads were closed and our fuel supplier is still under water.)

When Alan came back down he hurried into the barn and shoved something wet and grey under my nose saying, “I think you are going to like this.”
He was really excited, but all I saw was a small toad. I don’t have bifocals any more, and with my distance glasses, which I use for work, it WAS a toad.
He insisted that I take a closer look, so I took my glasses off and peered…and oh, my God, it was a grey tree frog!

I love frogs. Well, heck I am pretty fond of most herptiles and have taken an interest since I was tiny. A big old milk snake actually created quite a diversion at my high school graduation party by getting out of its terrarium and terrorizing all my great aunts.
Although little hyla versicolor is fairly common and you can hear the toad-like call on many spring nights, I have only ever seen one single specimen when I was a little kid camping at Peck’s Lake. This is probably because they are able to change color like a chameleon. They also have special pads on their feet that allow them to stick to surfaces and travel up and down trees (or teenaged boys' arms...Alan said it felt "cool" to have it climb on him).

Ours sported an amazing array of patterns. I suspect that the toad camo was a handy-dandy defensive mechanism, as toads are poisonous to eat. Alan said that the critter was the same rusty color as the engine block of the Case when he found it crawling around on it, but it turned into a “toad” when he picked it up. We put it next to the garden pond, where an hour later it had turned the precise dingy white color of the faded paper label on the side of the tank (photo above). I haven’t seen it since but the kids with their younger, sharper eyes have seen it doing dirty brown on an old wooden box and the precise green of one of the pond side plants. I hope it stays around.

I am so glad my boy is a frog lover and thought to save the frog from certain frying as the engine heated up. I am also delighted he brought it home to me. My birthday is next week and I'll bet the little tree frog will turn out to be my favorite present.

Fairgrounds

This is the fair grounds, where the rides are set up, and parking for Fonda Speedway. We could joke about having jet ski races this Saturday in place of the usual stock cars, but the situation is just too serious to laugh about.

Flooded Mohawk Valley

Park Street in Fonda

More flooding

We are finally back in the modern world after 36 hours stranded by closed roads and no power. There is a street under this water, as well as a playground and two parking areas. As bad as it is here, there are many places who had much worse damage.

The river and its clone

This is the Mohawk River at Fonda. The trees you see in the center of the two channels are not an island. They are the northern bank of the river. The second "river" was a corn field yesterday with some of the best corn in the county growing on it. Now, well..... it is not.

Emergency helicopters are flying over and the police prevented our feed rep from getting here. At least the milk tanker finally made it in.

So much rain last night

Fire whistles are wailing an eerie harmony across the river and down in town. I don’t know how many villages are represented, but more than one for sure. Trains are still running at least as I hear one banging down the tracks right now.

I fear for Gilboa. The Mohawk was more than bank full yesterday and laced with whirlpools. Everywhere else there are drought and fires; here we have relentless rain that is washing the whole valley away. It is the worst I have seen it so far this year.


When it is like this I am afraid to leave the farm. If Gilboa goes there will be a darned near Biblical flood and we will not be able to get back home to the cows. At least we are high on the hill. I shudder to think what would happen to friends, neighbors, indeed whole comunities around us.


There goes the whistle again.


Update: We took Liz's four-wheel drive and tried to go to town for some groceries. However, we are pretty much isolated by flooded roads and bridges that are under water or deemed impassable by local authorities. (Water is up to the bottom of the bridge between Fonda and Fultonville) One can escape to the east and south, but there is nowhere to buy anything to the south and east is straight into Gilboa Dam flood plain territory. I just don't want to go there. The interstate is completely closed, trains aren't running and there are chunks of telephone pole in the middle of the road just down the way. Not good.


Also not good is that the sheiff went by with the airboat on a trailer with about five patrol cars flying low behind them about half an hour ago. TV is out and there is little coverage on the radio so we are pretty much cut off except for phone and Internet. We will just have to wait to find out what happened.

More rain tonight and tomorrow.

Wheep!

After the big rain yesterday we were sitting around waiting for it to be dry enough to go out and get something done, when a loud sound like a smoke detector with a low battery pierced the air. It seemed to be emanating from the front porch. It was a sort of whistled, "wheep............. wheep," in that exact tantalizing rythym that makes it so hard to figure out which smoke detector is doing the beeping.

Since there are no smoke detectors on the porch I knew it had to be a bird. A number of them have discovered that if they sing or call from that porch or the cedar trees beside it, the two story front hall amplifies them nicely when the front door is open. They sound like really loud, big, dangerous birds that way, and impress all comers.


This call was one I had heard before, although never as clearly, and had never identified. I stalked the porch with great care, tiptoeing through the entryway and out the door, but the singer was concealed in the trees. Although it continued to yell, “wheep!”, even when I was on the porch I never saw it. However, through the wonders of a Google search for “bird call wheep” I soon discovered that our smoke detector imitator is a great crested flycatcher. You can see one and hear the call here.


Now if only I could see the actual bird out there, instead of just looking up every few minutes because that, "time to change the batteries", sound is such an important and ingrained signal to my brain.

Oxygen please

You have surely heard the phrase, “under the weather’, as in, “He was feeling a bit under the weather yesterday and stayed home from school.”

Well that about describes life in the great Northeast in recent weeks (although we only wish we could stay home and make it all better). We have wavered between constant cold, clammy rain, a few blazing days of 90-degree temps and sticky, humid misery or the stuff we have right now, that is living inside a low-lying cloud of thick, scummy air reminiscent of Los Angeles at its worst, only with no sunshine.

As I sit at this computer gasping for oxygen and dreading the barn, where said already scarce oxygen is going to be shared by 54 cows and few million flies, (which adore sticky airless weather) reaching hard for weighty words that will inspire you to comment freely, all I can come up with is ARRGGGHHHHHH………..

Yeah, we are under the weather all right.

These are some of my dad's woodcarvings, although he has done many, many more.

Frieland Zander Foolish (born on April Fool's Day) and Liz. Foolish is all clipped for the show, except for her head, so she looks a little silly.

The catbird seat where he sings just outside the front door. I missed the catbird though.

More NAIS

The government of our fine nation is frantically attempting to get a national animal identification program into place, allegedly in part because we are at risk for BSE or mad cow disease. They are cramming the whole concept down our throats as if will actually change anything rather than costing farmers a lot of money for the privilege of being further inspected and regulated and getting to do a lot of pointless paper work.

Canada already has such a program up and running.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency just released the results of their investigation into a case that surfaced there in April of this year.
(From the Cattle Network), “The investigation, conducted in line with international guidelines, identified 148 animals, including the affected animal’s herdmates and recent offspring. From this group, 22 live animals were located and all tested negative for BSE. One additional animal, which is currently pregnant, has been placed under quarantine and will be tested once it has calved. Of the remaining animals investigated, 77 had died or been slaughtered, 15 were exported to the United States and 33 were untraceable.”

They blame the age of the animals for the lack of traceability, but notice that only twenty-some animals that they did locate were found alive. 92 were long since eaten or disposed of so they couldn’t be tested. What good did the tracking system do?

Not much by my measurements. Except for 23 animals still at the farm, which were negative anyhow, it was much too late to prevent disease from entering the food chain if was ever going to. NAIS is just a feel good program for the government to point to and say, “Look what we are doing for you.”

Farmers can say, "Look what you are doing to us," instead.


[NAIS]

Dad

Master of anything you have ever attempted.

Antique dealer. Gun collector and expert on them. Master cabinetmaker. Artifact finder. Mineral collector, stone cutter and wonderful jewelry craftsman. Silversmith. Award winning wood carver and painter. Bibliophile. Book dealer. Teacher of fishing and bird watching and citizenship. Book binder. Blacksmith, the forging kind, not the horseshoeing kind. Fly tier. Historian. Gardener. And so very much more….forgive me for anything I forgot.

The man who blanched but didn’t holler when I dropped his station wagon into park while driving down Main Street in Fonda, when he told me to stop. (Well I DID stop didn't I?"

Happy Father’s Day Dad. You have always been the greatest!

Stealth frog

The boss of something

Every border collie needs to be the boss of SOMETHING. Ours have each invented their own little job to help keep order around the place. They have lots of time on their paws and control their little behavioral fiefdoms relentlessly.

Nick hates cats and thinks it is his place to eat them all. We frown on that since we just happen to like them, but sometimes the strength of his desire overwhelms his good manners and he nails a cat. He starts with a wide mouthed grab at the head, not too hard, just to see if he can get away with it. He never does. I think he would swallow them whole if no one was watching.

Mike considers himself cat protector in chief. When Nick bites a cat; Mike bites Nick. At any other time there would be an instant dogfight, but Nick knows he is wrong. In fact he is just testing. He slinks away with his tail tucked under.
Surprisingly Mike is especially protective of my favorite cat, Deetzie. Border collies are so expert at reading body language that I am sure he realizes that I like her best.

Gael has chosen to be the receptionist for the family business. She runs to the door barking at every variation in the wind, each woof from Wally, the blue heeler who lives outdoors, every siren, clap of thunder or extra loud moo from an amorous heifer. She makes sure that we never miss anything, whether we want to know about it or not. She answers the phone too or barks dramatically at anyone who does. So helpful! It is delightful to converse with your banker or veterinarian with a dog barking six inches from your ear.
However, Nick has figured out for himself that I holler at Gael every time she barks at the phone. He darts out from under the table where he likes to lurk and bites HER on the scruff of the neck whenever it rings. She is his mother and will not put up with such stuff from a mere whelp, so she turns around and bites him back. Now, instead of a dog barking at the phone we have a dogfight under our feet. Thank God for the answering machine!

Three dogs; three very important goals in life. And to think we got them to herd cows.

Sunrise

Three Collies

Gael, Nick, Mike

Gypsy moth

The grass glows like a carpet of emerald here, with the sun shining after all that rain. (Especially since I could finally get at least the part around the pond mowed. In other sections the grass is so tall that Nick went in through the open garden gate this morning and then couldn’t find the gate again to get out. I could have used side commands to talk either of the other two dogs out, but he doesn’t know his “sides”- "come bye" and "away to me" that is. He had to find his own way out. Pretty tall grass when you can lose a full-sized border collie in it!)

The trees echo the same bright summer color, but you only have to drive a few miles either north or south to find all the branches bare and black and ugly. It doesn’t smell too good either. There are no birds, no leaves, no color, nothing but a twisted desert of disaster. The gypsy moth is having a high point in its cycle and the caterpillars are devastating the woods both in Fulton and Schoharie Counties. It is the worst I have ever seen. I think I will do some research today and write the Farm Side about the mess. I haven't seen any mention in the paper anywhere else and it needs to be noticed. I heard that the state cut funding to control the critters and I am wondering what the story is there.

Shameless Bunny

It's been a while so I guess it's time for another shameless bunny picture.
This is Pegasus

So now we worry

We just turned on the news while we get ready to go out to milk the cows and heard that a 15-yr. old died driving a go-cart out into the road just above the school. The odds that it will be one of the kid’s friends are very high. Alan is after all 16 and knows kids who own go-carts who live on that road. It is a small rural road.

It is the next to the last day of regular school and our gang is looking forward to getting the regents exams behind them and getting on with whatever summer the weather is going to allot us this year. It is not going to be much of a summer for some folks near here though. So sad.

Beautiful Becky

Bad, Bad, LeRoy (or in this case Jack) the cat

I want a cat like this.
Tip of the hat to Jeff at Tazaret.

Global warming?

It is 50 degrees at the airport and probably a lot colder outside town. That is over twenty degrees colder than normal.

The furnace is running.


The windows are closed.


The winter clothes that I sorted out to take upstairs and put away have been placed in a pile in the back room where they are handy, since we still need them every day.

In June, no less.


I usually keep a couple of sweatshirts out for everyone, as you can expect some cool mornings, but this “summer” there are still as many heavy (not to mention muddy) boots by the kitchen door and big, thick coats and shirts piled on the chair there as if it were still January.
And rain! 26 out the past 30 days it has rained. We are supposed to POSSIBLY get two nice days before it rains again.

We have no corn planted. It should have been finished weeks ago. This may actually be a good thing, as at least one farmer of our acquaintance is going to be forced to replant all their land because of the rain. We don’t have any, but at least we don’t have to pay for it twice.


The guys are only able to chop green grass for the cows (which is what we feed them in the summer) by towing the tractor on the chopper with the 2-105 four-wheel drive. This means double the man-hours, double the fuel and the field is turning into a disaster area. Three-foot deep ruts fill with running water before they have gone ten feet. The field will be ruined and have to be plowed for corn, which it is according to the government too late to plant. If this doesn’t stop soon they will have to hit another field the same way.


The corn fields were all ready to plant when this weather struck. They just sit there bare and muddy. Don’t know what we are going to feed the cows this winter.


Or this summer for that matter. We can’t make hay either. The old saying about doing that task while the sun shines is true. You have no choice in that matter.

The only heartening aspect of this true slow-moving weather disaster is that when you go to a farm meeting, the farmers are still joking, although you can see the fear behind their eyes.

“The drought is over,” they say.

Photo failure

Is anyone else finding it impossible to post pictures to blogger using picasa?
Or is it just me?

The sign........revisited Northview style

Al-Zarqawi

We are getting ready to go out to milk the cows and Fox news is muttering in the background. According to news sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by coalition forces in a safe house in Northern Iraq. Despite this having been a major coalition goal, as he was blamed for inciting much of the insurgent violence that has slowed the effort to build a new government in Iraq, the news folks are falling all over themselves trying to find some reason that this is a bad thing, or at least not a good one. They so hate the Bush administration that they deny them even this. Al-Zarqawi is blamed for beheadings of foreign captives and hundreds of roadside bombings. Whether the press likes it or not, he won’t be missed.

Now what?

We are a quivering lump of collective disappointment around here today.


Becky is our second one to graduate from high school here at Northview Farm. When Liz finished her school career, we took out a funny ad in the yearbook, sending her a congratulatory message from a long list of her favorite cows. It gave us all a happy chuckle at an emotional time in her life passage.

Therefore, back in early January I composed a somewhat similar, but appropriately different, ad for Becky. Hers said something along the lines of “Emerson Drive rules, we love you Becky etc.”, as she is a great fan of that country band. I sent my check for thirty-five bucks and assumed that all was well, since the school cashed it. Beck spent six months badgering me about the text of her ad, as I kept secret what I wrote. We had a lot of fun with it.
Then yesterday the yearbooks came out.

No ad.

Nothing.

Oh, all the ads for the school board member’s kids were there. The teachers’ kids. The jocks.
But no ad for my Beck who has been waiting so eagerly for so long.

This is a one-time thing. She will never have another high school yearbook or another chance to see how proud we are of her in print in front of all her classmates, who have given her plenty of misery for being an opinionated bookworm, who has never been afraid to have an unpopular opinion or to speak out against conventional thought.

I am angry and I strongly suspect that I will have a lot of trouble even getting my money back. We went through this before with some magazine subscriptions I bought from the school, paid for, never received and never got my money back, no matter what I did.

What to do? What to do? First step is to call and complain this morning. Then what? Hmmm. I think I know what Friday’s Farm Side will be about.


And we do love you Becky, and we are very proud of your sharp mind and incisive thinking. And the 17th (when we have tickets for a real, genuine, live Emerson Drive concert) will be here before you know it.

Update: I talked to the teacher in charge. She was quite nice about it, said that they are going to improve the oversight of the program and send me back my money. We were not the only ones to end up in the same situation and I had the feeling there had been a lot of flak flying around before my call, so I took it easy on her. Too late to fix it anyhow. It is a disappointment, but I guess there are worse things.

Some things don't mind all the rain quite as much as we do.

Montana terrorist hunter

Here is a story that Sarpy Sam featured on Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere. It is a bit long and is printed in the notorious WP, but it just fascinated me. Imagine an ordinary American woman taking the time to learn Arabic after 9-1-1, and running eight computers all night long, luring would be terrorists out of the woodwork, in order to turn them over to our intelligence agencies. Imagine being brave enough to testify against some of those crazies in court. Impressive.

We are not having nice weather

Normally this is a six-inch deep, clear trickle over pretty stones.

Lucky me

I sometimes complain about the challenges of farm life, probably more often than readers would prefer. It can be a hard life, and it is comforting to whine. However, there are some rewards we don’t often think about that can make a day very pleasant indeed. Such as taking your 18-yr. old to get new glasses and pick up the wonderful dress grandma made her for the Senior Ball.(Thanks, Mom, she looks so beautiful in it.)

And coming out of the store to find a young man with a big box of yellow kittens free for the taking.

And being able to take as many as you can carry right home with you.

Oh, it was a job to push my cart loaded with a big pile of stuff, including fifty pounds of dog food, out to the car, all the while juggling two little golden live wires. (Thank God for elbows.) However, I was more than repaid in excited smiles when Becky finished her shopping and I gave her one, and when we got home with the other one for Liz.

Lucky me, yellow cats! If I had more arms I would have taken them all.

"Come on now, hold still, for a second."
Maqua-kil Blitz Mendocino

Tornado warning today and this is what we saw. It never made it to a tornado here, but north of us it did some damage.