Dad Says

We have to call him George now, even though that isn't his name

Here is an interview with the folks about the gun show this past weekend. Very nice....except that his name's not George.

And aren't George and Alice a fine looking pair...with nearly sixty years of marriage behind them!

The Flashlight

In her job as a milk inspector, Liz visits many farms each day. A number of her farmers are Amishmen. Such was the case one day last week when she stopped to perform a routine inspection. As she checked out things in the milk house, she observed a grain truck blowing corn meal into an overhead bin in the barn but didn't pay too much attention.

When she finished in the milk house she pushed open the door into the stable to check on things there.

The door was wedged almost completely shut. She crawled through into the stable to see what was wrong. Corn meal was falling from the open bottom of the grain bin chute and had piled up against the door. The farmer's mules had pulled the chute open with their teeth. Thus as the trucker blew the grain into the bin it flowed down onto the stable floor below, right in front of the cows, horses and mules.

She tried to get the trucker's attention but he couldn't hear her over the noisy truck.

So she climbed up on a cow stall and hammered the chute shut herself, twisting her back in the process.

Then, because the animals were eating the feed as fast as they could gobble, she raced to find the farmer.

He was not at home, but she knew he farmed with his brother, so she drove down to his house and roused him instead. Kids with shovels were just climbing into her truck to go sort out the mess, when the missing farmer arrived driving his horse and buggy.

She said he left her truck in the dust, pounding down the road to his barn to save his livestock from overeating on the rich corn meal. Those standardbreds can fly when they want to.

She offered to help with the clean up, but he thanked her over and over and said that she had done enough just closing the bin and running for help. At least a ton of corn meal had spilled onto the floor but that much again had been saved by her quick actions.

At home that night she realized that somewhere in all the excitement she had lost the fancy little flashlight she uses to check the inside of milk pipes and such. She figured that it was gone forever somewhere in the mess of corn meal at the farm.

However, a few days later our milk truck driver dropped it off right in our milk house. The Amish farmer had found it and made sure to send it home on the truck so she would have it if she needed it (he has the same driver as we do.)

When she turned it on she noticed that it was brighter than it had been....the batteries had been going a bit dead...so she popped it open....and there was a set of brand new batteries.

Spring is Sprung

A soggy snow robin

The grass is friz

And I know just where the boidies is.

Right on the feeder

It's sprung all right! in the wrong direction!

Happy Birthday

Alan is 21 today. If you see him out and about with the Blue Bomber (or hear him, which is a distinct, if unfortunate possibility), I hope you will wish him a good one.

He has done a lot in his life for someone so young, from putting up much of our cow feed and rebuilding tractor engines to putting food on the table in the form of game (Mr. Headshot) when we were too broke to pay the butcher toprocess a beef for us. He can turn a rooster into dinner, build a fine woodshed or whisper heifers into standing still to be milked.

He has me humming Hinder songs as I wander about my work.

I think I'll keep him.

Have a great one big guy and take good care of you!

Zero to Sixty

Fireworks?

No, just a shiverish photographer and a sparkley moon

In bird.2. Less than a week ago there was nothing going on around here in the bird department. Now there is an actual dawn chorus, even if it is only the penny whistle of the titmice and the woodwind robins, with a few raucous jay squawks tossed in. The robins actually wake me up.

You won't hear a single complaint about that though. What a way to start the day.

I know everybody got out to see and photograph that incredible moon Saturday night. However, it rose so late here and it was so darned cold out, with a lazy wind (the kind that goes through you rather than around), that I didn't get much.

I sure saw some though. I got up around two AM to have a look around and you could read by the moonlight.

Indoors.

I checked.

Outdoors, tangled in the stark darkness of the honey locust branches, it looked as hard and round as a polished diamond.

Blinding

Bright.

Kind of crystalish. Not like any moon I knew before. Cold too. It got down to ten, which is pretty chilly for March around here. Perfect sugar weather though.

Sunday Stills..Canine Companions

The original three collies, Gael, looking sheepish,

Nick with his back turned,

and Mike hating the camera, but doing what I asked him.... as always

Mike, "killing" the cat dish

Gael bringing home the bacon..... er......chicken

Two Bears, the cracker dog

Nick!

To a dedicated dog person this is a fine challenge indeed. Nick is the only one of these dogs still with us, except in fond memories, of which I have a million, each less likely than the one before and all true. Dogs have been good to me.

The little brown dog, Two Bears, was an amazingly clever little girl, who got her son, Bobby, to dig out woodchucks for her by barking in his ear. We were always having to go get them out of hedgerows, where she stood on the surface barking and barking and barking, while he dug until his toes bled. As far as I know they never actually caught one, but that didn't stop them from trying.

For more Sunday Stills.......

Killdeers and the Big Old Moon

Big moon

Killdeers lament across the heifer pasture, still snow, still snow, still snow. I want to tell them to come down on the lawn. Every footstep there crushes the rotten snow like a stomping Sasquatch and leaves a new bit of open ground behind.

The lawn at sunset

There are plenty of footsteps too. Cabin fever cure here I come. I am out making footsteps every chance I get.

The river thrusts itself east and south, bank to bank and bulging, crammed with authority granted by thousands of streams and rivulets, swollen far beyond capacity by a little rain and a lot of dying snow. Black birds, cardinals, grackles, geese, geese, geese, from before dawn to after dark, swirling, rising and falling, screaming to be heard over one another. And robins shuttling everywhere, busy, busy.

All the culverts along the highways are still chock full of ice and snow so there is road flooding everywhere. Just west of the farm a huge whirlpool churns busily over a clogged drain. I swear it would suck down a car if you drove in there. So we don't.

The boss and I undertake to get some calf medicine and shavings for their little beds and inflations for the milking machines. The things we see, the things we see.

Wouldn't you think at this budget-busting laying off of everybody season that the guys moving little teeny tiny crumbles of ice that is going to melt anyhow, would not have a pay loader and a bunch of trucks and a large crew of workers out doing a job that a farm kid with a shovel could cover in an hour? Or even better, it was almost sixty...the stuff woulda been gone by morning. And they wonder......why we wonder.....

Come almost-night a moon with a big reputation rises over the horse pasture. It doesn't look that big. Maybe tomorrow when it is full.....

Just as I have had enough out on the lawn as the sun is setting time thousands of geese fly over, yodeling the wishes of their hearts across the sky.

All during our trip I looked in vain for snow geese. Now this morning as I edit the photos from last night I find that the gigantic flock that stretches so far is in fact a flock of snows. Cool

See, they really are snows

Stale Peeps

An Easter tradition since the nineteen eighties.

Big Red

The new calf, a son of Spungold-R Frolic Poker, full sibling to last year's Rose Magnolia.

Out of Broadway

Seeing Red on the Day of the Green

Here is somebody who wears green every day

As a Facebook friend pointed out the dairy markets are crashing again. It was looking as if we were going to see some decent prices this summer, which is a great thing for little farms like ours. Although we milk year round, we are just a bit on the seasonal side, with a lot of cows calving right now.

Then the mamas go outside to graze for the summer, fresh and ready to make a lot of milk for us on that nice green grass. For those circumstances to coincide with good prices would mean we could pay of some of the poor folks to whom we owe money and maybe do a few of the things many folks take for granted.

Alas, I guess those futures markets were just idle speculation, tempting dairy farmers into thinking things might be okay for a change. You can read ongoing discussions on all the factors involved in the dairy markets here.

So we are seeing red the about market messing around, and we are seeing it in the color of our bottom line.

We are also seeing it in the lovely mahogany-and-white of the big bull calf born to Broadway last night. He is sure a beauty! Of course he decided to be born at midnight after a six-hour struggle on the part of his mama, so I am even more jet-lagged than after the time change. We took it in shifts to walk over to the barn and check on old B-Dub.

For hours and hours and hours, nothing was happening. Then there were feet and a nose when I made the last hike. I assisted a little just because she had been laboring so long, but she would probably have had him okay without me. He is so huge I had to call the boss to lift him over the gate in front of her so she could lick him off!

As time goes on I like the milking shorthorn cattle more and more. Six hours of hard labor and B-Dub jumped to her feet the minute he was out and swapped ends to moo and lick. Six hours of being hard labored upon and he was shaking his head and sneezing and trying to crawl up to her face in less than a minute after birth. The red ones are hardy cows indeed.

Happy St. Patrick's day to everyone! I am using the circles under my eyes for my wearing of the green. With all the McIntosh's and McGiverns and Ferrins and such in the family background, I figure there is green enough right in my blood.

Something About the Season

Common redpoll

He let me walk right up to him

while he stuffed his beak with sunflower seeds

It is grey, muddy, soggy, gloomy, a bit on the nippy side, and I don't care one bit.

First turkey vulture-last week

First Killdeer-about ten minutes ago

Robins-everywhere

Grandma Peggy's daffodils up by the corner of the house-check

Eggs-hens are laying them

Warm enough to toss the roosters outside-yes (three roosters to four hens is a terrible ratio.

Yep, technically it is still winter, but March is so much closer to spring than February

National Ag Day

Let's party!

In New York

Cats with Thumbs and Clever Little Border Collies

Da typist

You know I am an animal lover. Been that way since I was so small that I thought my grandma's little Spitz cross was the size of a Saint Bernard.... I can remember just nicely being able to hold on to his shoulders.

I couldn't believe it when I saw photos after I got tall* and found out that he was a little bitty thing that today I could scoop up under one arm and walk away with.

Anyhow, I have always shared a special connection with animals, especially dogs.

However, today provided the most amazing in a lifetime of uplifting interactions. I got up this morning, jet lagged and grumpy from the time change, to find that Nick had enlisted Elvis the cat, Wally the cow dog, and several of the more knowledgeable among the cattle, and written my newspaper column for me.

Yeah, turns out Elvis is a secret member of Cats with Thumbs and can keyboard. They did the research and the whole nine yards. Can you believe it?

They even copied and pasted in a couple of good quotes. And you wanna know what they wrote about?

Turns out the animals hate the time change too. So much that, according to Nick, Keebler the Shuttle Cat made 350 trips between the barn and the house forwarding (and backwarding) information.

Thanks, guys! You really made my day.

*Okay to head this off at the pass, all you wise guy family members can hold the smart remarks about just how tall I am not. I am at least tall-ER than then if not actually tall.

Atall.

Sunday Stills....the Letter P

Pretty Painted Pony (the latest lawn art)

Promise of Plenty to Come

I was going to do the Peacocks, perfect for P, but the sun was out of town all week, so....

For more Sunday Stills......


***Update, after the coffee kicked it hit me that I could photograph the peacocks using the flash....

Peacock Pantaloons

Peacock, a very flashy guy

Threes

Blitz's udder (she was not involved in this story)
The blue is special liniment for her udder comfort, named amazingly enough,
Udder Comfort The stuff smells so strongly of peppermint the whole barn reeks when we use it.

As in bad stuff comes in them. Last night, after a pretty decent day we got 'em. First the chainsaw died. The boss cuts wood every day for our heat so that was emergency number one.

Then after being out of the barn about an hour and a half doing other work he went in and found that one of Becky's cows, Armada, had had a really big bull calf and had suffered a prolapse of her uterus. Major medical emergency. He called for a veterinarian and we all hurried out to get started on chores early so we could deal with the situation.

Right in front of one of the steers was the still-warm body of everybody's favorite feline busybody, the little kitty who has been in so many photos here, sleeping on calves and snooping into everything, our beloved Tux. It really doesn't pay to give your heart to a barn cat, but we do it over, and over and over again. He was the most special of the favorites.... except maybe everybody's little lovey, Athena. We figure the steer got him because he was always so absurdly friendly with the cows.

He was always good for a nice bit of string chasing too, when you were feeding out hay, or posing somewhere cute so you just had to take his picture. Liz got him from one of her farmers and she cried when she saw him....and I darned near did.

The procedure to replace the errant uterus went much too perfectly. It was all back in and the vet was ready to suture her when the fool animal got mad and threw herself on the floor. Guess what....they had to start all over again. And she landed on the vet and Liz's BF who was helping.

Yeah, there are others who had much worse, but it certainly wasn't the best evening we have ever experienced. We finally got out of the barn around nine-thirty. And then when the boss went back to give the prolapse cow her second doses of her medicines she kicked him in the chest.

He is fine and so far she is fine, and the calf, which she evidently had standing up and dumped on his head, is fine too. So there are three good things to finish up with. Guess that is all we can ask for.

Dwarfed

Anything I could write about life here at Northview would be so dwarfed by the horror in Japan that I can't seem to say much. The little triumphs and tragedies go on here as always, but the shadow of the horror there looms huge over everything.

What can you do but hope and pray? I just don't know.

Bling and Chrome

Bling

Chrome

Bling's name isn't set in stone yet, but she is a brand new baby daughter of Liz's Fustead Emory Blitz daughter, Mendocino (we just call her Blitz) She was sired by Myrik.

Can you believe how big she is? Liz had to order a 2X large calf coat for her even though she was just born, because all our normal coats were way too small for her!

Chrome is closely related to her, being a daughter of Blitz's full sister, Neon Moon, but by our own bull O-C-E-C Lindy Fred ET.

Gloom with Grackles

Ditch-dull grey outside with some kind of sleety stuff slotting clickety-clickety against the office windows. Ewww.....

Dog didn't waste any time getting back inside I can tell you. Reminds me of the winter when the next younger brother and I had measles. Lying in the darkened living room at the old farm house down the road from here (lost now to the ravages of northern weather and neglect)...no books allowed, which was worse than the disease for me. It is dark and wintry like that today...too wintry for March.

The birds don't care. Damn the snowbanks, full speed ahead. I heard the first red-winged black birds when coming over from the barn Monday and right behind them was a trio of silver-eyed common grackles. They clinked and clanked at me and whistled and whoo-whooed, then moved along to wherever they were going.

Back south maybe. Can't say as I would blame them.

Sick all week, but not sick enough not to work. This achy, drainage swamp of a flu-cold went through the whole family, including appending boyfriends, last month for Pete's sake. I nursed everybody else or worried about them or said kind things to them, but never got a sniffle myself. Which was odd.

Then weeks later, wham. Yeah, not sick enough to not work, just sick enough to not want to. Oh, well, I am sure the old immune system is getting a great boost.

Got the computer running at least. Took Keith's advice and ditched Zone Alarm, which according to the boards does this a lot (had to work in safe mode to do it) . Guess I will have to use the Windows firewall, which isn't supposed to be much good. However, a firewall, which locks the whole computer so I can't even type up the minutes of last month's Farm Bureau meeting (yeah, Johnny on the spot, that's me) is no good at all.

Anyhow, today I am thankful for daughters who bring cough drops, sons who milk most of my cows when they are home, another daughter who feeds calves early so she can help when the brother is at school, and shiny, black, spring birds (which I will hate when they start cruising the front pasture slurping up nestlings like canapés.) Have a good one!

Wordless Wednesday

Strange Cotton

Some of Dad's woodcarvings

And Easter egg pastels. That is how it looked here yesterday. The sky was sometimes pink and glowing like an opalescent pearl. Then it would turn soft, shining blue and silvery grey. Kinda like an old-fashioned post card only more treacherous. Yeah, I know its still winter...yeah, yeah, and the weather still knows it too. Our snow was about all gone. It is about all back.

Normally when snow coats the branches it blows right off in the first puff of wind. However, the Sunday/Monday storm left a coating of ice first, then painted on the the fluffy, sticky snow. It hung and clung. Last night after chores it was still clinging to every twig and branch and piled in every connection between or among them. It was pretty. I admired it. Now it can melt.

The boss couldn't even get to the ag bag to get out feed. So much snow. So deep, so soggy, so sucking of the skid steer right into piles of it. They fed dry hay instead, which is fine with the cows, but hard on the supply.

Computer is still toasted. I think it is something fairly simple and probably has to do with Zone Alarm fire wall, which sometimes goes rogue just because it can. I tinkered with it yesterday off and on all day, to no particular avail, although I did manage to run a virus scan. Which didn't find anything. If you know any handy, dandy hackers or geeks......

Meanwhile, I can't take photos off the camera, so these are what was hanging around on this computer.

Toasted

Some of the shag bark hickories on 7-County Hill

The big computer seems to be. I can get it as far as loading the browser and then it freezes. Power went out in the middle of the night in the middle of the storm and it hasn't been right since.

So, the slow little bookkeeping computer has been called back into service as an Internet computer. Paying bills online is great stuff except when your computer doesn't want to play.


Did I mention the storm? Lots of bad stuff going on around the region, of far more import than my computer. Roofs, branches and power lines all over are taking an awful beating. I think this is the worst storm all winter. The boss didn't even try to get up to the ag bag, just gave the cows a pile of dry hay and gave up.

My old friend Mike

Had to go out in it at four this morning to check the springers. Egrec had delivered a really, really big bull calf. I was about done in by the time I had managed to get it up in front of her so she could lick it off. Then after checking everybody else in the barn and kicking in some hay I went back to bed. All I could do to get back and forth to the barn....it was snowing so hard! And so deep.


At five thirty the boss stirred, so I sent him out to give Big E a bottle of calcium and some oxytocin. Would have done it myself but she is a giant and crazy as a loon. I didn't think I could.

Anyhow, it is pretty but nasty, the wind is kicking up now. I hope you are all safe and warm and dry. Take care! I will leave you with a few pics of a nicer season that were stored on this old computer.