Happy Halloween

Another game for your spooky enjoyment.

Cat Bowling

For those who want to get an early start on Halloween festivities.***


http://www.itsga.com/fun/cat_new.swf


***For cat lovers, no animals were harmed in the making of this game. They were "spared".
***For non cat lovers, bowling for cats says it all.

I don't mind

It is a closely held secret how I feel about driving Becky over to the college for her Friday classes. Liz takes her other days, but has nothing scheduled on Friday so it is my turn. The other day the bookstore lady from whom Becky buys me a coffee for the drive home mentioned to Liz that she felt sorry for me having to sit in the car all that time.



Let's see, how can I handle such punishment week after week? It was so still this morning early that you could hear the leaves falling. They made a sibilant rustle like the pattering of a crisp rain at the beginning of a summer storm. The air was crystal clear after last night brought us the first real killing frost. Oh, we have had a few little ones that polished off the tomatoes and cannas, but last night it hit the mid twenties. Driving down the valley it was so clear that a church steeple appeared to be suspended in space like a knife on a string. You could spot pigeons soaring miles away in the pristine sky.



Oak trees unfurled a sprawling magic carpet of gold and red and chestnut across the mountains. Stark shadows sharply outlined those mountains in the brilliant slanting sunlight. The view was so beautiful coming down into the Schoharie Valley that it almost hurt to look at it.

Once I parked a scattering of crows dive-bombed the parking lot. Amusing to watch one alight on a slender, brittle twig and try to balance, flicking its wings and teetering awkwardly. One flew so close to the open car window that I heard the rustle of its feathers like a whisper of silk right next to my ear.


Canada Geese, flock after flock of them, crisscrossed the sky, flying low and fast. Or they wheeled, calling plaintively, over some body of water out of sight below the campus. I sat in the car, warm sun at my shoulder, a good book in my lap and no more work to do than to leap out of the car occasionally to snap another picture of the unfolding morning beauty. Poor me.

Sycamore leaf

This landed on the car right in front of Danescara when Beck and I were driving by today. We were on a wild goose chase to see a strange, long, wooden sail boat go through the lock at Tribes Hill. Somehow it got so far ahead of us that we missed it. We often make a run for the lock if we see a real cool boat going past the house out on the Mohawk. I sure would have liked to get a look at this one, but it was not to be. Nice leaf though. Big too, that is a full sized pencil there.

Congratulations Sam

To Sarpy Sam at Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere, one of the best of the best, on three years of insightful blogging. He is one of my first reads every morning.

Wild weather

We had a few bright flashes of sunlight today, which was pretty welcome. The boss found at least one field where he could actually get some corn chopped without having Alan tow him with the White 2-105 4-wheel drive. A lot easier that way.

Sweeney vs. Gilibrand

Fired off the Farm Side this morning SIX HOURS before deadline. I am way proud of myself, but really, it was an easy topic and darned near wrote itself. Although newspaper subscribers will have to read between the lines to figure out who I was ranting about, I will save you the mental anguish. I was all fired up about the campaign between Sweeney and Gillibrand for the US Congress. Good Lord, those two are like whiny little kids, not an issue between them, but plenty of childish tirades and he-said-she-said trash talking.

I love to put the things Becky has learned in college sociology class to work in rating their honesty. She says that when someone is lying they tend to glance involuntarily downward and to the left. Watch 'em when they rant and rave. See where they are looking?

Thankfully, no matter who wins that contest neither of them will represent this district. We just get to suffer through their campaign rhetoric on television. Can't wait until November 8th!

FFA and the vegetarian

Not much time to write these days (broken stable cleaner, two sick cows, three feet of mud in the fields with corn harvest only just begun, seventeen calves in the barn and a partridge in a pear tree) so I will share another great story. This time you can read about the vegetarian animal rights activist who will perform at the annual FFA convention. Amazin'!

Another view back on the hill

* taken from Seven County Hill field looking west across the Sixty-Acre Lot*

Meth

Nothing funny about meth. Nothing amusing about the way it is showing up in rural areas like this. However, this story of how some young, er, dumb and dumber fellows tried to steal some Sudafed to make some is hilarious. Not everyone uses cat food in quite that manner.

Argghhh....

Talking turkey

Hunting that is. (Note the fashionable duct tape fastening the orange vest together. This boy has style.) I know there are those who don't believe in hunting, but we have at least two hundred turkeys on our three hundred acres. (They gather together in the winter and we count them so we know.) The two or three a year that we roast will not be missed...and they are fat from eating our corn and alfalfa.

Partly because he is an avid hunter, this boy knows every inch of our land like other kids know the ins and outs of video games. In this picture he was showing me where he shot three turkeys with one shot one time (quite by accident). He loves to take me out to share his special places...an old pallet leaning on the rocks in the Sixty-Acre Lot hedgerow where he can hide and watch the wild things go by, a puddle where a dozen green frogs lurk, waiting to plop into the water with a startling splash. The old dam, the owl tree, he leads me to them proudly when we have time. I have visited all these places before when I was young and eager, but it is good to see them again through his fresh, fervent eyes. He is a capable tracker and so keen of nose that he can SMELL where the birds have been. My nose isn't sharp enough to notice until he points it out to me, but he is generally right.


It is comforting in a way to realize that the nature walks we took the kids on when they were little, turning over rocks to look for salamanders and spying on birds, have come full circle. Now we are the ones being taken.

How bad the corn is

This morning the sky was lumpy and dingy grey as if someone had stretched a dirty sock across it. For a while the sun tried to spill down between the lumps, but by the time we were done with chores there wasn't a ray to be seen.

It is plumb depressing. It just rains and rains and rains. A flood watch is on for all day tomorrow. Again.
The river is already bank full from all the snow up west last week . Meanwhile the guys go out to try to chop corn and the fields are quagmires. They are getting two or three loads a day on good days and barely enough to feed the cows on not-so-good days. Yesterday the boss jack knifed both feeder wagons bringing them down the hill. Dangerous. Worse when it is the forage wagons that he is bringing down. I don't know how they are ever going to get the corn in if it doesn't dry up soon.

The picture is how bad the corn is in at least one field, from all the rain this summer. There are fifteen or twenty feet or more between the stalks on half of the field, none at all on part of it, then a good stand up where the drainage is better. Very worrisome.

Tragic news

The death of a fellow student* of our girls, the teenaged son of a favorite professor, has been rattling our world this week. This is too sad for easy discussion, so I will just let you read about it. The alleged perpetrator is not a student at the college, but notice that the police apprehended him in a dorm.


I feel so much sympathy for the friends and family of the young victim. Not much more to say about it.
*Correction, the Gazette says not a student, although the girls knew him from campus.

As requested

*Shagbark Hickories behind Seven County Hill*

Finally made it up to the top of the farm today to get the overview photos of the farm requested by mrs. mecomber and my dear friend, numberwise, (in Vitamin Sea's meme the other day). Becky and I took Mike and walked a good part of the way, but every now and then Alan picked us up with the truck, as he was working getting wood in.

The rides were most welcome. Seven County Hill is named that because you can supposedly see seven counties from there. You can certainly see quite a distance, although there is no telling what counties you are looking at. We saw many amazing and wonderful things, including a three legged frog, turkeys, vultures, and a marsh hawk.

*The three-legged frog*

*Looking out over the valley from the 30-acre lot*

Seven-County Hill

*Click for a better look*

*The villages of Fultonville and Fonda can be seen from here*

Here how the world looks from the top of Northview's tallest hill. On a day like this it is cold and windy up there, but it sure is pretty. We just missed a spell when the sun was playing shadow games with the clouds, making brilliant patterns of dark and blazing colors from the maples and poplars. When it is sunny and clear you can see several more sets of mountains behind the ones in the background.

However, by the time we got home from Bellinger's Orchard with some nice Ida Red apples, it was mostly all grey and threatening, so the pictures aren't all they might be. Oh, well, Alan and I had a great time poking around on the back of the big hill, which drops off in a very steep bank to a few fields in the back of the farm.

Pumpkin Tide

A lovely picture of a St. Augustine, Florida church, surrounded by burnished gold-orange pumpkins, was posted recently by Florida Cracker on his wonderful blog, Pure Florida. It reminded me abruptly of one of my favorite poems. I had pretty much forgotten it, since it was something I liked way back in college when being seen reading counter culture poetry was quite the thing to do. Still, the instant I saw all those pumpkins lined up in front of that beautiful edifice it jumped into my mind as swiftly as a leaping whitetail.

Here it is just in time for the Halloween season.

The Pumpkin Tide
I saw thousands of pumpkins last night
come floating in on the tide,
bumping up against the rocks and
rolling up on the beaches;
it must be Halloween in the sea.

from The Pill Versus The Springhill Mine Disaster 1968 by Richard Brautigan

What's up at the paper anyhow?

I dunno. A few weeks ago the Farm Side started showing up on Saturday some weeks when Friday is its normal day to run in the Recorder. That seemed to happen when I got real close to my noon Wednesday deadline before sending it, so I figured that I was not getting it done in time to make the cut for Friday. Then they started leaving off the tag line about me being a dairy farmer and regular columnist and all. I didn't pay much attention; this is a busy time of year and it just wasn't a big deal. However, a good friend was bugged by it and called the new publisher and complained. She phoned me after the fact and said he was very nice and told her he was sorry about it. I chuckled and thanked her for noticing and caring enough to take the time to bring the situation to the man's attention. As long as they kept paying me, I wasn't going to get too excited about it.


Then this week they printed it with no byline, no grinning mug shot, no tag line, no nothing, not even the name of the column. Come on now, how is anybody even gonna know what they are reading, except that at least it was in its usual spot on the side of the Friday editorial page? (If you actually want to see it you will have to spend a buck as the paper has a pay per view website.) There have been quite a few changes at the Recorder lately and maybe that is what is going on here. The masthead is bigger and has a nice drawing of a windmill. In fact the whole look of the newspaper has changed, mostly for the better I think. Still, I hate to see that look change so much that I am no longer part of it.

Are they trying to irritate me enough to drive me to full time blogging? Sort of a death by a thousand (paper) cuts type of thing? Do they hate me? Was it an oversight? Should I cry and pound my heels on the floor?

Or should I laugh and wait to see what they do next week? Yeah, that works for me. That's just what I'll do.