Got up way too early this morning

***moon photo uploaded three times before it stuck!

.....to check on a heifer, Sedona, who is going to have a calf any minute now…or so we hope. Yesterday she was leaking milk and you could clearly see that the baby had moved up into the birth canal so it won’t be long. The barn lights were on, so I knew someone had been out since midnight but I went out anyhow. Sometimes you can check an hour after the last person found nothing and the calf is already there. We turn the lights on if anyone goes out between midnight and dawn, as cows respond well to a somewhat extended photoperiod and give between five and sixteen percent more milk if they get enough hours.

Of course, Sedona was fine, chewing her cud and looking at me with mild curiosity. No calf yet.

I checked the other two heifers who are close, Zipper and Bariolee, (no action there either) put some wood on the stove, and came in out of the pearly darkness to enjoy a couple of hours on the computer in splendid, uninterrupted solitude.

I wrote this post and uploaded the moon picture.
Blogger closed and ate the post.
I did it again.
Blogger closed and ate the post.
This time I had right clicked and copied so I could just past the text back in.
Blogger ate that too.

I could think of some lovely choice words for Blogger this exquisite, shining, mid-winter morning. Uploading the same photo thrice and having to rewrite the same number of times is just a pain in the neck. The second words never have the life of the first. However, I will save my nasty thoughts for the busy little troll who put a volume or so of half truths, lies and damn lies in my comments, but doesn't have nerve enough to leave a public profile so we can see who they are.

And I will write this in Word and just go through and fix all the curly quotes later.

Eastern cottontail

Alan took this photo at night, through the living room window with a flash. You can just see the little round rabbit among the brush along the foundation

Becky

Happy 19th Birthday!

***Becky says thanks to everyone who was kind enough to wish her well in the comments section. She had a good birthday as far as I can see, with a teddy bear from her little brother, clothes and books from the boss and me, neat stuff from big sister and some terrific books from Grandma and Grandpa, who run a bookstore and have books on Tut, archaeology, Native Americans and other things that interest her.

And then we had monster burgers, her favorite, for supper....of course on the down side she had to milk cows and go to college, but you just can't have everything.

Magnum

Nights when sleep is slow in coming I reconstruct my old horse in my mind. Sometimes I start at the bottom at his round black hooves, with just the one waxy, yellowish white one on the near hind that looked pink inside when it was raining. I can say, "Pick," in my mind and he will hand me a hoof so I can scrape clean the grooves around his rubbery frogs and the edges of his shiny steel shoes.

I work my way up over his strong pasterns and the hard roundness of his shaggy fetlocks, with the sharp little bony place at the back that you could always feel through the hair. Next to his cannon bones, on legs so solid that the only unsoundness he ever had in over thirty years of life was a splint he popped when he was two. I am usually asleep by the time I reach the night eyes or chestnuts, the little oblong protuberances on the inside of his upper legs. I am told that those are vestigial toes from the days when horses ran on more than the one toe they use now.

If I start at the top the first thing I envision touching are his fringed black fox's ears. He had wonderful ears. They would flop all anyhow when I was grooming him, or prick eagerly at the prospect of dinner. How he loved to eat...he was always hog fat in summer, so round he made my knees ache when I rode him bareback, which I always did. Next come the deep hollows over his dark brown eyes. They say the offspring of an older mare will have deeper depressions there. I don't know if it is true, but his dam was not young when he was born and his hollows were always as deep as those of an old horse. In my mind I can feel the silky hair of his forelock when I brushed it and the wiry waves of his long, thick mane. I have never stayed awake long enough to feel his sharp withers or to dig my fingers into the soft fur between his forelegs, where he loved to be scratched. However, if I go over him in the daytime, inside the memories of our decades together I find every dapple, feel his elbows, knees and the soft hair on his upper lip when he licked my hand for the salt.

I can remember the way he felt bouncing between my knees at the bottom of Grey Road Hill. He knew we were going to run up it every time we went that way and he loved it as much as I did. What a feeling to have him canter in place beneath me waiting for the slightest lift of rein, the least shift of weight to tell him, go, go, go, race up that hill as if tomorrow waited at the top.

He would pound up the winding curves running so fast he was flat on top, not a ripple in his racing. Then as we reached the apex his fine chiseled head would come up, his back would round into a canter and he would snort with delight, as if to say, "We done good boss, didn't we?"

We had to put him down about four years ago when he colicked from an impaction and twisted intestine. He was 31. I bought him when he was two and I was just past twenty. When I get to missing him...and I do...because you never have more than one first horse and he was both my first and my last, although I owned many others during his lifetime...when I get to missing him, I reconstruct him in my mind and then we tear hell bent for the top of Grey Road Hill just one more time.

Barbaro's death got me thinking of him today....

Frost on the punkins

And on the stained glass windows too!

Summer memo

This is a picture of a water lily blooming on the garden pond. Thought those of you who are also shivering here in the far, far north might enjoy the reminder of better (and warmer) days.

UPSTREAM still swimming along

Dan Weaver, who is probably my favorite local blogger, gave serious thought last week to quitting. More than a few would have missed his particular insights into regional news and politics. Thankfully, someone wrote him a persuasive email, convincing him to continue to keep us upstate New Yorkers informed about the shenanigans of state and local government. I for one am grateful.

Signs of Spring

Postcard from our robin...







Thanks FC!

Blue Monday

At least one psychologist considers January 22 to be the most depressing day of the year. One scientist even figured out a mathematical formual to choose the most miserable day, based on the end of the holiday season, bills piling up, cruddy weather and so forth.

We had no idea two days ago that we were experiencing the worst day in recent memory because of that formula. Actually we though we were just having a lousy day. First both the skid steer and the bucket tractor experienced major breakdowns simultaneously. The fellows couldn't get the manure out because of the ice.There was no pretty way to feed the cows because the bucket machines were both down. Instead the guys drove the feed cart over to the pile to get the corn. It is not made to work outside in rutted snow so one had to run alongside keeping it from tipping over while the other drove. Meanwhile they needed to get a new hitch on the truck as the old one broke and they had to hook the trailer up to take the pigs to the meat plant. While crawling around in the snow under the truck, Alan got a big chunk of rust in his eye and came screaming into the house in horrible pain. We got it out all right, but he really suffered.
It was ugly.

While all this was going on cow # 146 decided to tear her stanchion out, rip down all the water lines on the south side of the barn and run around the barn beating up on other cows.

Then the heifers got out. ...because the guys left the gate open when they ran inside to catch 146 and turn off all the water.

They raced to Hand's to get some plastic pipe and nuts and bolts and such to cobble everything in the barn back together so we could milk and the cows could drink.

It was just a horrible day. I hated to see the men coming toward the house. Every time they came through the door they had more bad news. By the end of the day we were just grateful to be done and sit down and forget about cows and tractors and snow for a few hours.

Who knew that all that misery was just Blue Monday ?

"The truth is a lot of people feel down at this time and a lot of people have depression as well, particularly men, and they don't want to talk about it," Dr. Arnall said.

I feel better now.

Regional dairy meeting made the big news

Liz and I attended a meeting on the dairy farming situation here in NYS last week. In fact, this week's Farm Side is all about it. I was surprised to find that this story about the meeting made Dairy Alert from Dairy Herd Management, even though farmers, literally from the eastern border of the state to the western, were there. Here is another story from a newspaper in the region.

It was a good meeting, well-run, well-attended and very much to the point. Now we will see if all the legislators who attended it are able to do anything about the current pricing crisis. Always supposing that they want to do something.

School is easier

Than feeding all these critters without a tractor!

Hooter

Sister to Hattie

Hattie

Sister to Hooter

Got milk?

In your ear perhaps?

Sequoia

I want grain!

You're not my mother...

Spent the morning outside in 4 degree weather, lugging box elder trees down off the hill behind the stove and trying to get the fire going good enough to get the indoor temperature above 50 degrees.

Other than that it is (in theory) my morning off, it wasn't really a horrible job. Alan had the foresight, when we first got him his saw, to knock these little trees down for emergency wood. They are not far from the stove and they are bone dry so they are very light. It is easy to pick up a 4-inch thick, twenty-foot tall tree and drag it away with one hand. Lots of nice little birds were chinking and cheeping nearby, the sun was shining off the snow, the sky was brilliant blue and the wind wasn't too bad. As long as it stayed down we weren't really uncomfortable at all.

The box elders burn like tinder....(wait a minute....they are tinder) and we soon had the stove burning great. We are now quite comfy, (although somebody is going to have to get the darned tractor started and get some real wood pretty soon).

However, what really gets me going is to come inside and turn on Channel 9 Weather.
And to hear the weatherman, who is quite literally young enough to be my son, tell me firmly, (as if I were three and a half), "Bundle up when you go outside. Cover all exposed skin and don't be out any longer than you have to. There is a real danger of frostbite and hypothermia."

DUH

I have so many clothes on INDOORS that I would roll off the hill if I happened to stumble. When any of us go outside we wear even more than that. Most sensible folks do. The average person over the age of five is smart enough to figure out for themselves that it is cold outside in upstate New York in January. If they missed that part of life 101, having the weatherman tell then how to dress just isn't going to cut it....so to those pesky (and generally inaccurate) weathermen I say, show the long range forecast and get it over with.

I have been dressing myself for a while now!

A duckache tonight

Liz and I were waiting in heavy traffic on Riverside Drive tonight as we left the Truck Stop after fueling up her truck for the big return to college Monday. As we paused for a parade of semis to pass, I watched perhaps fifty or sixty assorted gulls wheeling over the river. There were herring gulls, great black backs and a mess of ring bills. They were just beautiful against the storm blown clouds and I wished aloud for a pair of binoculars and a safe place to park so I could try to sort them out and look for exotics.

As they drifted away east a gap opened in the traffic and I estimated whether I could safely exit or not. Suddenly a large bird, blacker than the gulls and seeming somewhat larger, sailed swift and silent downriver from the west. It reversed right in front of us and swooped like a bolt down toward the water. A pair of ducks we had not seen sprang up in panic and the big bird whirled away defeated.

It was a bald eagle.We were astonished. I was expecting maybe a stray cormorant or something. Not that eagles are terribly rare here but we don't usually get that close to them. It proceeded on east behind the gulls hot on the trail of a mess of mallards. Who knew that eagles eat ducks? We thought it was fishing.

Here we go again...mandatory NAIS

Just as the USDA kinda, sorta, maybe caved into pressure from farmers and ranchers and made National Animal ID a voluntary program, some **&^%$( in Congress wants to go back to a mandatory program.

Hungry visitor

*Chickadee!!

Where have all the small forks gone?

(Old dogs took them, everyone.)

Yeah, the mystery is solved.

See there are a couple (or three) of us here at Northview who like to eat with salad forks. (I don't know just why, but I can promise you that it doesn't have anything to do with small mouths.)

Anyhow, over the past year or so, our small forks have dwindled in number until we were down to four. That meant that there was no skimping on dishwashing between meals. The drawer was always bare.

Then one day there were only three.

I KNEW there were four at dinnertime.

However, when I put away the silverware after I washed dishes one was gone.
I made a serious search. I even dug around in the outdoor woodstove in case some one had burned one up with a paper plate or something.

No fork.

I eventually gave up and we were months with only three small forks.

It was annoying. You almost always had to wash a fork before you could eat dinner.
Then the other day Liz went to take dogs out. Gael sat stubbornly in her crate, not wanting to brave the elements (can't blame her there.) Said crate is tucked in next to the chimney in a darkish corner of the pantry. There are sundry rarely used objects such as divorcee barn boots and single-parent gloves piled around it.

When Liz went in to haul the old lady out for a walk, there was something glinting under her fat, furry fanny.

Yep.

The other salad fork.
There is no way it was dropped there. Nowhere near the sink or table.
There is no way it walked there. No legs.
No pack rats. Too far east.
I don't think we have Borrowers.

Therefore the only logical conclusion is that Gael is practicing for the advent of opposable thumbs in Border collies. She has been using it to eat the dog biscuits that she hides in there every time I hand them out.

Now I am going to have to drag the darned crate out of its cluttery corner and see if the rest of the missing silverware is behind it.

I'll do it right after I have a discussion with Nick about why I found my 1970's era yellow lace prom gown in HIS crate yesterday….