The progression of darkness

It is pure dark when we go to the barn in the morning…unless the moon is gleaming at the zenith like a cold pearl in a sea of jet. Then there is an unearthly freezing light making spooky shadows behind everything on the lawn. The lawn mower looks like a grizzly bear and the garden pond is the black lagoon. Orion is stomping his way across the heifer barn ridgepole, bound straight north to the horizon. It is dark as ink. Dark as black velvet. Dark as night.
The rooster is crowing.


It is half dark when we are finished with morning chores. Although a flashlight isn't needed, it is dim enough that it is easy to remember to take the one we used to get to the barn back to the house to illuminate our evening stroll. Orion has gone to bed and the moon is long gone.
The rooster is crowing.


At seven, when the girls are warming the Dakota up for the drive to SUNY Cobleskill, and Alan is rushing through a pre-bus shower, it is sorta dark. You can see, but all is shrouded in a misty, clinging gloom. It is not a pretty time of day.
The rooster is crowing.



It is sorta dark again when the girls get home. (Unless it is Monday or Wednesday, when they have late classes.) Then it is pure dark when the beam from their headlights sweeps the gloom away as it precedes them up the driveway.
The rooster gets in one last rebel yell at the sight of the light.


It is half-dark when the guys go out to night feed. By the time they are done, you can trace their progress by the tractor lights out on the hill.


It is pure dark when we start to milk again and pitch dark when we are done. Orion is standing on the eastern horizon, pulling on his boots for his nightly trek across the sky.
At least the rooster has finally wound down for the night.

The piggies, they are a changin'

*Click here to see Piggies then*


*Piggies now*




*Why they call them piggies in the first place*

I feel lucky

And pampered. My cow, Frieland Profit Eland, an elderly lady of ten summers, is expecting a calf by Citation R Maple sometime during the next few days. And last night Liz got up TWICE with her and the boss checked her for me this morning, so I didn't have to go out to the barn in the middle of the freezing night at all. BIG thanks to both of them. No baby yet, but keep your fingers crossed......

Lace making, no bobbin, no thread

Trans fat ban

Here is a wonderful advertisement from the Center for Consumer Freedom on New York City's new trans fat band. I will agree to food control when they pry my last chocolate chip cookie from my cold, dead hand!

Chicken on the garden pond pickin' out snow

That was the week that was.....

Wait a minute. It's not over yet!

Weekend, storm rips up section of barn roof, making a big mess of steel and boards. The hay mow is now rather drafty.


Monday, deer cutting and Christmas tree raising. Blacksmith to trim horses' feet.


Tuesday, wrote the Farm Side early, did the books and banking. Takes me about two hours to spend the milk check these days.

Wednesday, insurance adjuster, milk tester, grain truck and Select Sires rep. We bought another rack of Rain, because two out of three kids picked him out of the young sires line up. Set Tom looking for some Four-of-a-Kind Eland for us too. My sweet little Erin that was killed this summer was by Eland and I want to try to breed another one. We also had the old semen tank filled with nitrogen. If it hasn't sprung a leak we are going to give it to a good friend who has helped us out in many major ways over the years. He fed cows for weeks when the boss had his appendix out a few years back and really bailed me out with fixing silo unloaders and such. We will throw in some semen from our own bulls too. Some of them have turned out pretty good and he can use them for clean up if he wishes. Cleaned house too, including shaking out door mat and sweeping mud off porch.

Thursday, cats deposit large, eviscerated, very dead, rat on nice clean door mat. Thanks guys, I love you too. High school Christmas concert tonight. The boy sings in chorus and bangs on various implements of percussive pain in concert band. I love the choral part of the deal. However, the band instructor loves complicated, hard to play and intensely boring music, so I will spend that part of the show trying to decide which of the mops of blond hair on tall boys at the back belongs to my tall blond boy, and which to his pseudo-twin, Pat. (They have convinced one of their friends that they actually are twins despite Pat being six inches taller and living a couple miles down the road. Amazing what underclassmen will believe.)

Friday, wait a minute! I don't have a darned thing scheduled for Friday, except taking Becky to college and getting some groceries. Whoopee!!!!!

The boy tree

The kid got a second deer on Sunday, so yesterday he stayed home to get it in the freezer. It was just a little spike buck, but the meat will be welcome this winter. The beef that those yokels in the rant a few posts down let hang for a month is barely of "okay" quality, thanks to their cavalier treatment of our meat, so we are going to be eating a lot of venison.

Anyhow, all through the tedious process of boning out a whole deer, he was antsy with the desire to get done and get out on Seven-County Hill to look for a Christmas tree. Because the kids have asthma he has never enjoyed a real tree. We have a stately, but phony, fir thing that serves, but it surely isn't a creature of the wild forest. It was edging on toward dark when the last package flopped on the freezer shelf and the knives were lined up on the counter for mom to wash. He grabbed his chainsaw and took off with the 884 bucket tractor as soon as he was done.

About an hour later he showed up with a fat, bushy little white pine. Not exactly the most sought after of Christmas shrubbery, but it is cute just the same. As all the official ornaments are stashed upstairs in a closet we spelunked around in the china closet and various drawers and hidy holes looking for strays. Then the weird thing happened. I shined the flashlight into Grandma Lachmayer's china closet, looking for a cousin-made creation I knew was lurking there. Instantly a tinny rendition of Silent Night rang out.

What the heck! My furniture is not in the habit of serenading me when I look inside. As that same cupboard is the repository of much treasure, from marbles, stray old coins plucked out of the woodwork of this ancient domicile, and every other oddity that someone brings in, we open and close the door all the time. There generally isn't a resounding Christmas carol to greet us. However, after much searching and emptying (and the incidental discovery of the little rooster ornament we were seeking) we tracked the tune to its source. Years ago mom gave me a little "Mary Moos" music box....and it is light activated. Guess the battery is pretty special and the thing liked the shiny flashlight. Anyhow, it wasn't the ghost of Christmas past celebrating the introduction of a real live tree after all these years, just a neat little resin decoration.....still it gave me pause.

If you fill it, they will come....

Herd of collies

*Mike, Nick and Gael. The slightly stunned expression on Mike's face is because Nick, the rowdy dog, has just run into him and knocked him down.

Cord McCoy

Cord McCoy was kind enough to grant Liz an interview via email. You can read his bio and his answers to her questions over on her rodeo blog, BuckinJunction. Cord is a highly successful PBR bull rider she was lucky enough to meet at Turning Stone this spring.

A case of mistaken identity

Liz says that the calf that followed me home, (see below) or actually to the cow barn the other day was Soiree, not Dakota. Liz is the oracle of cow identification here at Northview, so I will not argue. Plus she owns both of them. This differing identity is significant in that Dakota is the daughter of a retired show cow, Dallas, and granddaughter of our best-ever show cow, Frieland LV Dixie, and thus would be expected to be a bit of a pet.

Soiree on the other hand is out of Soir, the worst kicking, meanest, most miserable, nasty, ill-tempered so and so in the barn, and one which I flatly refuse to milk under any circumstances. Soir is out of Star, who although she is a sweet old thing now, used to jump every fence on the place, and wouldn't ever come into the barn until she was darned good and ready. She was not impressed by Border collies either and just stomped the heck out of them if they got in her way.

So how did this come to pass? I truly have no clue but I am not complaining.

The neatest thing

There is a new editor over at the paper, whom I just "met" via telephone this week. He seems like a really nice guy. He called me today to explain something to me and I am afraid he must have thought I was a bit of an obliviot when I returned his call, because I didn't quite get what he was talking about. As regular readers know, today is my day to ferry Becky over to SUNY Cobleskill and sit in the parking lot for a couple of hours drinking orange juice, reading exciting books uninterrupted, (a Kathy Reichs Bones book today) and talking pictures if something wonderful comes along. (As it often does, since that campus is more like a park, than, well, a park.) It's a tough job but someone has to do it. The day's newspapers are usually on my reading list

However, today for some reason we got an extra copy of Thursday's paper instead of today's so I didn't see the Farm Side. So I didn't know quite what my new boss meant when he talked about "Diary" being spelled wrong. However, as soon as I was off the phone I ran and got the Recorder and saw what he was referring to. He put the address of Northview Diary in the little blurb at the bottom of the Farm Side about me being a regular columnist and all. And although the web address was correct, the title was Northview Dairy...which makes perfect sense after all.

That is so cool! I am just delighted. Thank you, thank you! Most of my friends, who stop by to read ND, come from west of the Mississippi or south of the Mason Dixon line. Maybe local folks will visit now. I can only hope.

Unplug the television

Probably everybody in the world but me already knows this thing about televisions.
The "sucking power whether you have them turned on so you can watch Supernatural or whether they are just attracting dust like the black hole they resemble" thing that is.

However, until I read it in a Kim Komando update I was trying to puzzle out, why, when we bought the girls their own televisions when they came of age, the power bill suddenly skyrocketed, even though they are rarely home and don't really watch much. Kim had the answer one day though. Modern TVs are always "on" so they can recognize the remote control. Of course it didn't take me long to begin a semi-scientific experiment. I told the young ladies who reside with us to unplug the darned things whenever they were not actually watching. The boss volunteered to do the same with his.


In less than one month our budget plan with National Grid dropped over thirty dollars. I expect with a full month of this practice it will offer an even larger savings. I am dancing little jigs and grinning ear to ear. Thanks Kim! So if you have a television and can stand to reprogram the time thingie all the while, unpug, unplug, and be paid in serious savings for your trouble.


***disclaimer...I am NOT a TV watcher and when the kids were little we didn't even have one. They read, were read to, or joined us at everything we did, from business trips to turning going after the cows into a nature walk. We were much more likely to take them down to Schoharie to collect brachiopods than to watch Disney with them. I despise most of what is offered on the very well named idiot box. However, when the girls hit the age of officially grown up we figured they were old enough to choose. Besides I was sick of the fights over the remote when the boss wanted to watch football.

Out near Richfield Springs

Strange mornings

Dakota

Had to make a quick trip to the house this morning just at the end of milking. I was in a hurry to call the propane company and thus was dismayed to discover a medium-sized heifer on the lawn behind the house. However, to my complete and utter amazement she gave a happy little hop and moo and started right down the hill to me. I threw some chicken feed pellets in a bucket that was handy there by the back door and headed to the barn. She trotted happily along behind me at peace with her world and glad of my company until we had to pass Nick's kennel. He was reacting to her presence about like any frustrated Border collie would and she was afraid to pass his triple strength screaming black turmoil.

"Kennel time!" I bellowed over his tumultuous uproar and he beat a retreat into his dog house and shut up for a moment. From there the trip all the way to the cow barn was uneventful, with the heifer, (I think Dallas's yearling, Dakota), even waiting while I opened the gate for her before proceeding right on through. There are days when I am really, really glad that Liz makes pets out of all her calves. This one isn't even a show calf. Amazing.

Election edumacashion shocker

Elaine Shein over at Blogriculture, the Capital Press newspaper blog, has one of the most powerful pieces I have read in a while over there today. She discusses studies showing that a majority of people get a majority of the information upon which they base their election choices from political ads! Elaine's article is very thought-provoking, asks a lot of important and hard to answer questions, as well as most likely being a nice refreshing dose of maturity after my post below. Hope you get a chance to read it.

Beware, tirade ahead

I don't know if I should even write when I am this angry. Maybe a chill pill would make more sense. It seems that every time we find a meat processing plant that does our beef the way we like it, they go out of business. We loved the SUNY meat lab; they did a great job. We tried another place after the dean closed them up, but they were horribly high priced. Therefore, we took our most recent animal to a company we used for years, back when some very competent older people ran it. We stopped going to that plant when the old folks sold out to some geniuses who sent back meat with steaks off opposite sides of the same cow that were so divergent in size that we could tell somebody got a little creative about who got whose meat. Since we sent out a Belgian Blue with rib steaks the size of platters and the weird ones were palm sized, but probably came off a prime angus, we didn't really do too badly out of that deal but still...

I didn't say anything to the boss when these new characters quoted him a real cheap price even though my feeling wasn't good about it. The feeling was right. They have had our steer for twenty-nine days, about two weeks past when we should have had it back. And they STILL have not cut it. (Beef normally hangs ten days to two weeks. Three weeks is pretty long, although we have hung them that long and had good meat. If the cooler the animal is hanging in is not a real good one the meat starts to taste funky after a while.)

For the nasty man from that company who just finished reading me out on the phone for having the audacity to actually CALL his place on the phone about the matter.

1) If you don't want me giving your girlfriend a hard time on the phone, don't leave your customers hanging on, waiting and wondering if you are ever going to cut their beef for weeks past the time you said you would have it ready. So what if I talked to you about it before? That was last TUESDAY. And the boss called you the Monday before. I don't think calling back six or eight days later is pressing you too hard. And tell her not to explain the aging process to middle aged farmers. Trust me we are familiar with it. I want to eat the meat not get Medicare for it.

2) Sorry you have had people sick and meat cutters out and all. We were real reasonable about that the first couple times we called. After a while reasons become excuses. That is OUR milk-fed steer sitting in your cooler getting older...and older...and older. Just how long CAN beef hang before it turns into something else?

Bah! I am too mad to spit!

Of course the guy will eventually cut our meat and it will probably be perfect, but we have been worrying...and worrying...and worrying.

Oh, and I persuaded the boss this morning, with very little difficulty to book the pigs he is fattening right now into the expensive place we went to after the meat lab closed. You get what you pay for and peace of mind is priceless.

**thanks to all ND readers for letting me get that off my chest so the smoke will stop coming out of my ears and I can go get some work done.

8 Point Buck

Here is a link to a picture of Alan with his deer. I put it on my low traffic blog so as not to hurt too many tender sensibilities, but his big brother and assorted other relatives want to see a picture.