WW

How Do You Take a Pig to a Parade?

Why, in the back of a pick up truck of course

A hitch of fancy Clydesdales

A mistake, but I liked it

Pair O' Percherons

Passel O' Pipers

And other scenes from the fair.

Going to the Fair Today?

Stop by the dairy booth and say hi.

Macro Monday

For more Macro Monday

Sunday Stills, the Rule of Thirds

For more Sunday Stills....

Old Dogs

Had to go the barn in the way before early, still chilly from night, dark time this morning. Couldn't remember whether I turned the milk cooler on last night or not.

I had to check. It is an obsession of mine. Did I turn it on or did I forget and spoil a night's milking? So far I have always remembered, or someone has reminded me, but there is a first time for everything I guess.

We have no young dogs any more. The "puppies: are 8 or 9. Mike will be 15 next month and Gael is 13.

And it shows. Mike can barely walk, with one bad hind leg and the old dog vestibular disease, and he is mostly blind and deaf. He no longer barks.

Ever. Even strangers can come and go right next to his crate and he doesn't even know they are there. His life is a round of dog food, sleeping and staggering through the house trying to find me or Liz, his people. When he walks by I put my hand in front of his nose, so he can know where I am and rest for a while....before he starts circling from room to room again.

He was so much dog when he was young. Taking on bulls and putting them where we wanted them. Herding heifers so well that the time came that I didn't even have to open his kennel run any more. They saw my hand go up to the latch and ran for the barn when I wanted them in. He just worked himself right out of a job.


My ever shadow, every moment of his life if he could. So smart that in the sleeping beside the bed years he only got up with me if I put on my glasses. If I didn't he knew I was coming back. If I did he knew I was up to stay. Now he sleeps downstairs because he can't get up them any more. It is sad to see him reduced as he is, but he tries...oh how he tries.

Gael has cancer and the old dog V disease. Getting around is a bit easier for her, but not much. She does still bark and take an interest in things just the same though.

This morning I let them out while I put my shoes on for my little check the tank excursion.They need to be out for a long, long time, because Mike forgets to "go". I don't know what we will do when winter comes....

When I headed to the barn, Gael knew where I was going, in that border collie way that they have. I told her to go back to the house, but she pretended to be deaf in that other way they have and trucked right on over to the barn yard gate. It is a long walk for an old dog. Behind us Mike let out a muffled woof.
He never barks.
But somehow he knew something was going on and he was missing it.

I gave Gael a firm "stay" at the gate and went on to check the tank
Which was turned on.
It always is.

She was waiting at the gate, quietly watching for me when I came back....in that way that they have. The night was redolent of passing skunk and something autumny blooming. The late summer insects were nearly deafening and the moon was full and fine. However, what caught my mind, as Gael and I walked back to link up with Mike and come into the house, was the fine and forever, as long as they live, loyalty and work ethic of grand old dogs.

Oh, and the love too. When the work is long done and the days reduced to the least common denominator, those old dogs love like it was their job.....and maybe it is.

Off Topic but Comforting

My dad used to call me Crisco...if you think about that it will come to you.....

Weather and Amish Machinery

Amish hay loader

Must hurry to make full use of the weather we are having...just about the first good weather of the summer. The boss is baling.
Chopping.
Working on machinery.

Not this machinery...this is a horsedrawn hay rake some Amishmen
left parked near here. They are hustling after hay too.

Yesterday Liz and I cleaned calf stalls and led calves. The last part was fun. I love training them to lead, even if they will never be show cows, like Northstar. They are so much nicer to handle when they are older if they are handled when young. I got to do something I have always wanted to do...lead an own daughter of SWD Valiant. I always wanted one, back in the day, but could never afford to buy one. Last year the kids went to the OHM Sale and bought some semen, and I got a heifer calf off old Beausoleil. Her name is Bastille, but I am calling her Tilly. (For you old time Holstein folks, we also have daughters of Straight Pine Elevation Pete (milking and calves) Citation R Maple (ditto), a milking Cal-Clark Board Chairman and two Whirlhill Kingpin daughters. I'll bet we are one of very few herds that do.)



Then I froze some beets. Kept on catching up on the laundry I couldn't dry all summer...no dryer so it is the line or the bars.
Did books.
Built a new fire (thanks FC, you are still helping me with that job.)
Helped unload a wagon of bales.
Milked without the usual compliment of helpers....fair week, vacation week, folks away at college.
Today more of the same, but with zucchini this time.
Not complaining though. If I could bottle this weather and stretch it out I would do it.

Fair Week

Liz, Alan and the boss went to the tractor pull last night. I stayed home, listened to the roar of the big engines, just across the river and talked to Becky on the phone and on Facebook. (Speaking of which, I would love to "friend" any of you folks if you are Facebookers. If you don't know my real name....just ask in the comments...or check over there in the sidebar.)

Anyhow, we milked early so they could get over there on time. Having milked early for the cable guy in the morning it was fine for the cows. We got Road Runner yesterday, mostly because they offered a cheaper deal than Frontier, which we had used for the past two years. I am not thrilled. It is hard to work the TV (not that I watch it, but I do hear the whining from the other room.) and this computer is not any faster...maybe not even as fast...as before.
And I couldn't install all the fancy-schmancy stuff because it says I don't have IE8 and SP2...except that I do...have both that is. Dag Nab It! However, we will save a few bucks a month for the next year so...

Because of all the early-milkin', tractor-pullin' shenanigans I was in the house by 5:30 ish, with laundry done, supper (which no one ate) cooked, a fresh crumb-topped apple pie on the counter (made by Liz. stole the pic from her too). It was so quiet (except for every ten minutes or so when another tractor went off over at the pull) that I felt like I was in the wrong house. I had a piece of pie for supper, read a good book, took doggies out and brought doggies in and went to bed early.

And they brought me home Hall's fudge......what could be more perfect?

Nice Language There Guy

You won't see words like this on Northview.

Wordless Wednesday

Happy 58th

Wedding anniversary to our mom and dad.
Congratulations on having what it takes.
Love from all your "kids".

Sorta Back to Normal

Things are kinda, sorta, back to normal after a week when our youngest border collie, Nick, nearly died from eating an illicit chicken, and the cat, Elvis, nearly passed on from a hairball infestation. We also drove to Potsdam, had several inches of pounding rain, and went generally crazy every day....There were other stories too, harder and sadder than anything here, but not mine to tell.

The stupid chicken flew over a 6-foot chain link fence to offer herself up to Nick. How could he refuse? And of course, from the evidence left in the run, she was one of the ones that is laying eggs. I have no idea what eating raw, boneful, featherous chicken does to a nine year old dog who normally consumes only dog food, but I can tell you it isn't good. At one point he would only stand up to go outside if I begged him.

We nursed him tenderly, even went so far as to dose him with the cat's hairball medicine. Tablespoons full of raw beef. Rice and milk. Checking in the middle of the night. Beaucoup de petting. I am right fond of that dog. He is such a bad boy that he has to spend a lot of time in the kennel, because killing Mike his high on his agenda and all the cats are just a little lower on the list. On the other hand he is obedient and eager to please and sweet and great company when he isn't raising Hell.

At any rate he stood up from what looked like his last and ate a couple of bites of dog food Thursday. By Saturday he ASKED to go to his run to get some exercise and bark at cats. Today he seems completely normal and is eating ravenously to make up for lost time, snapping up bites from Mike's dish on his way out the door.

Please, chickens, you have hundreds of acres to scratch around on...stay OUT of the kennel.

Elvis is mending too.....despite my inept application of hairball medicine and several set backs.

Now we just have to get used to Becky being gone and Alan back to class

Oh, and the fair opens tomorrow too.

Macro Monday

For more Macro Monday.....

Sunday Stills....Sound

I tried all week, in between college trips and rain storms and cows and such to find something to take a picture of for sound. I shot the cats meowing...just as they closed their mouths...and so it went all week. So here is a pic of one of the best sounds there is...from the archives....My brother's hands...playing music for us.

For more Sunday Stills....

If You Have To

Drive 171 miles to drop off one of your babies, far, far away.
This is the way to do it.....

Chicks...Coming and Going

Our middle chick is leaving the nest today, so perhaps it is fitting that this little guy and a small black one showed up yesterday.

Hopefully our big chickie will learn a lot, make wonderful friends, have a great time....and remember where home is. And with any luck I will have some pics of the 'Dacks for you tomorrow, because if we take the route Alan has planned we will be driving right through the Adirondack State Park. KoTF anyone?

Artificial Trees to Fight Global Warming

Sound ridiculous to me.

Real ones are so easy.
And prettier
And cheap

And someone I read this week, sorry I don't remember who or where, pointed out that we would die without Carbon Dioxide.
Inconvenient that.

***Another Turkey of an Idea***
(Or ,really, I like to look out the window by the computer to see what I can see and yesterday what I saw was Lucy)

Wordless Wednesday

****Do click***

Cash for Clunkers..The Sound of Good Motors Going Bad

.NOT a clunker

Carpe Diem has a post today with links to YouTube videos of dealership mechanics destroying perfectly good vehicles in the name of environmentalism....because that is what getting all those "gas guzzlers" off the road is, an expensive, funded by you and me, sop to a bunch of ivory tower environmentalists who never had to settle for a not so great vehicle just to get around in. Many of the poor, innocent, trucks they are ruining by running them without oil are far better than the ones we in our family drive. Nice trucks with an easy hundred thousand miles left in them. He is an economist. I am just a farmer. But the idea of killing good trucks about kills me and I don't think he was too crazy about it either.

Bad enough to crush them. To destroy tangible wealth like that.
But if you can listen to those motors running themselves to death with whatever that glop they pour into them is, you are stronger than I am.

I used to drive tractor for the boss...a lot. Back when the 5088 had a functional transmission I chopped almost all the haylage and some of the corn. Hundreds of loads a year and hundreds of hours alone in the cab, watching the rows of hay rolling up, watching swallows diving for the insects I stirred up, sometimes sharing the field with foxes, coyotes, deer and hawks.
And listening.

When you drive tractor doing crop work you learn to listen, constantly and carefully, with a certain part of your mind for every sound the tractor, chopper and the wagon you are pulling behind might make. The least, tiny, wrong noise from the engine or a bearing or a gathering chain or any moving part and you stop and investigate. Even today, when I hear them chopping when the wind is right, or hear the Case 930 coming down into the barn yard with the spreader, I subconsciously listen to the chugging of the diesel, making sure it sounds smooth and right and powerful. To listen to engines deliberately being driven until they were ruined literally made me feel queasy. Alan wanted to look at more of them and I told him he had to do it later when I wasn't on the computer.

We talked about how we would happily have driven several of the nice pieces of machinery we saw ruined...that they were in better shape than ours.

Then Alan said, "I couldn't do that to my truck."
I had to agree. I have had a few issues with the Durango, but there is no way I would let someone ruin it like that.

It doesn't bother the government at all though. They create no wealth and have no problem disposing of it in the name of theoretical pollution abatement plans. Golly I am glad I didn't vote for anybody in power in Washington right now.

Longing

I knew it would be hard.

And I knew it would happen. Must happen. Always happens in every life that is blessed by healthy offspring. Who ever thought that it would be our no so adventuresome middle kid to leave home first?

However, Becky leaves for college on Friday.
Five hours away.
She did two years at Coby, but to continue in anthropology and archaeology she must go far away.
She is ready.
Me not so much.

We already have one college graduate with all kinds of honors, and one second year student, but they commuted so although they were gone they were here too....that was bad enough.


I didn't know it would be so hard. I miss her already.

The Humming Hen

I must have passed inspection. She hovered inches in front of my face, peering into my eyes with her round bright ones. Small eyes to have so much to say, like jet beads in shining jade. The camera hung around my neck...sunrise you know...but if I moved she would be gone..poof...the way they do. So frozen I watched as she plumbed and probed cactus flower and geranium, flitting over every so often to re-inspect the edges of my shirt sleeves and peer into my eyes. She stayed a long time for someone in such a hurry.

Macro Monday

For more Macro Mondays...

Sunday Stills...The Open Road

Borden Road, Town of Glen...
all photos this week are from the archives, since I pretty much stayed home

Our driveway...this is how we get to the open road

Corbin Hill Road...there is a car hidden in that dip...
not a good place to ignore the no passing lines

Corbin Hill Road...my favorite.

A perfectly acceptable road...to cows.

June 2006 Flood, Park Street, Fonda, NY...a not so open road

For more Sunday Stills

Welcome to the Northwest

Well, all right, it is really the Northeast.

But we have their rain.

You will have to ask the kids about trying to catch heifer number 241 AKA Egypt, who was in need of certain AI services last night. We have headlocks (self-locking stanchions) right in the pen where Egypt and seven others reside. Had a certain individual (who figured mightily in the drama but for fairness sake we will leave him out of the story), actually ever finished installing them, the heifers would have been used to using them, somebody would have set the control to catch them and this entire story would have been over yesterday morning when Liz noticed that Egypt was in heat. However, that person, who will not be mentioned, didn't finish the job.

He also hadn't exactly knocked himself out cleaning the pen either...there are issues here...we will ignore them.

Efforts to catch Egypt began at the beginning of milking at around 6PM. She was not used to the headlocks so although all the other heifers got caught in them, she didn't. Had we wanted to breed the others the story would have ended early. Alas.

She also quite effectively evaded the lasso we keep for catching heifers . And the efforts of several committees to snag her with a halter. Finally Liz and Alan went into the very not clean pen and just grabbed her. She probably weighs nine hundred pounds. There was skidding, falling and dragging. I am delighted to say I missed it as I had to milk on the other side of the barn. Suffice to say cleanliness went down but not without a fight.

At this point there are items in my washing machine that I am not going to touch until they have been run through at least five cycles. There was a long line for the shower. Liz finally bred Egypt AI in time to get in from the barn at nine fifteen PM. It was ugly and I am sure there is going to be some serious moaning and groaning from the individuals involved in the bovine reproductive drama. They were pretty lame last night and after having time to stiffen up.....Please God, I hope she caught. She is a daughter of England our surprise red carrier and we bred her to the milking shorthorn, Promise. Maybe we will get a red baby....

On the plus side I bought some of that fantastic bacon from the milk inspector (yeah, really, he sells the best bacon I ever ate) when he stopped yesterday, and we had a tomato, a great big, fat, red tomato I bought at a farm stand the other day....and a huge, leafy, ripply, light green and red speckled lettuce I grew in a barrel by the back door...and several kinds of nutty, crunchy whole grain bread...so guess what we had for dinner...yeah, big, thick BLTs. Bacon crunchy, tomato-juicy, lettuce-crispy BLTs.....It almost made up for the fun we had with chores.

Farmers Squeezed by Big Milk

Here is an article, on National Public Radio of all the unlikely spots, that details some of what has been going on in the dairy industry over the past couple of decades. A good read!

HT Cousin Scott


Here is another interesting article on anti-trust efforts that may be undertaken.

Ain't Complainin'

About the weather that is. Oh, I could. The first half of the week was blazing hot. Nineties. Sticky humid. Then Tuesday night we got a pop up thunderstorm that did just that.

Pop up I mean. When we went to chores it was gloomy and a little windy. Maybe a rumble of thunder in the distance, but no looming threat. We prepped the first set of cows and got the machines on and since the thunder was getting just a tad more emphatic I walked over to the house to unplug the computers. (Which Becky had already unplugged.)

By the time I walked to the office, via the dining room, which is where they are, and back to the door the wind was howling, laying the bushes and shrubs right down and lashing the trees like crazy. The rain began to pelt down so hard it made a din you wouldn't believe. And the Thunder Rolled.

I collected an umbrella and some hats for me and the girls and waited on the back porch wondering if I should try to get back to milking. Usually whenever someone is stranded at the house by bad weather we all figure they should stay there until it lets up. Still, they had just started milking.
And Alan had gone up to the thirty acre lot to pick up a tractor and a forage wagon. He wasn't back yet when I left.

So I decided to run for it.
I don't do run you know.
Not built for it.
Bad knee.
All the usual excuses. However, I ran that night for all I was worth. It was raining so hard the umbrella was completely useless. Lightning was flashing on all sides. It was quite an incentive to hustle I'll tell you. I kept wiggling the umbrella trying to convince the lightning that it would be too hard to hit a moving target for it to bother.

It was a big relief to make it to the barn and find Alan had arrived safely. I was completely drenched but unfried. We got back to work, watching a torrent building in the roadway and the heifers trying to walk on water in a new puddle. It isn't a lot of fun to milk in a thunderstorm, but we have surely seen worse.
So please understand...I am NOT complaining

It is hot. It is humid. It hasn't exactly been the best summer ever and all....However, we really shouldn't complain about the weather.

Really we shouldn't

Wordless Wednesday

Keets 'n' Beets

(Note the anti-Elvis wire covering.)

Busy day yesterday. Men cleaned the barn, fed cattle and worked on a plugged gas line on the 930 Case and a broken transmission fluid line on the 4490 Case (always something).


Liz went to Duanesburg for some guinea keets we found on Craig's list. Here's hoping we can raise them and have resident guinea fowl at Northview again. At one time I had around 70 of them. They provided much entertainment with their continuous state of avian hysteria, as well as teaching the horses not to spook at feathery bombs going off under their noses a hundred times a day. They also liked to fly up to the top of the 70-foot tall tower and sit there and shriek at everything that passed.

Meanwhile, I did the usual house chores and bookkeeping and processed some beautiful beets my dear brother and sister-in-law dropped off on Sunday. You'll have to ask my mom the story about me and my adventure with my first baby food, which just happened to be beets. Let's just say that I liked them and leave it at that (I'll never tell).

Meanwhile, after a historically cool summer it has gotten hot, in a fast and furious fashion. I took out the digital veterinary thermometer yesterday and stood in the milkhouse by the sink. The compressor was running to cool the milk and it was over 103 degrees there.
I don't know how far over because I couldn't stand the heat long enough for the thermometer to turn off.

If the cows had their way they would just stay in the barn all the time with all the fans running....I wonder what all those animal rights folks who think it is cruel to put bovines in a barn would think of that! When we open the door for milking they crowd inside and rush to their stalls as fast as their feet will take them. Heading out the other way is just as slow as coming in is fast. Wish we could leave them in, but when they are in, stables have to be cleaned and bedded every day and the feed brought in...it just takes too much time in summer when there is crop work going on. They do have lots of shade and a creek and pasture to rest in, but they love those big barn fans. (So do we by the way).

Muddy Monday (complete with Macro)

All last week teaser clouds rumbled around the horizons, but it didn't rain. The guys went after hay like crazy, finished up a bag and got another on the bagger. Last night there was a new set of ominous boomers rolling by and Alan asked on the way out to chores if I wanted the computers unplugged.

Nah, just another empty threat.

Not

Within an hour it was pouring (just so you know, we didn't need it.) and we really got dumped on. Ramped the humidity up even more and it is predicted to get up in the nineties again today. Guess we are going to get summer all at one swoop.

The guys are so close to finishing up the hay and really need to bale a few thousand...it can stop now.