More storm stuff

This little toy car is inside the kitchen window
(gotta find where that snow is sneaking in and caulk it!)

It CAN be pretty

Chingachgook...or just some silly boy hunting pigeons in the storm?

We just like to take weather pictures I guess. It is nice today except for the wind....lots of sun.

Into the heart of the storm

Photo by Alan

Photo by mom

Photo by mom

The snow is 24 inches deep on the car right now, but seems deeper where the wind can't get to it. The extra-large bucket on the skid steer fills before Alan can even go five feet. We haven't seen a storm like this in many, many years.

He took the blue jay photo from the upstairs window using binoculars like he did on the deer pictures last fall. It gives an idea of how hard it was snowing earlier. It has actually gotten worse to the point you can barely see 5S. Big storm!

Blizzard warning-Happy Valentines Day

These came out of the closet last night and are leaning on the wall in the kitchen. Alan was in 4-H rather than the boy scouts, but he belives in being prepared. (For those of you who live where the manatees roam they are snow shoes and I would rather see a flock of robins I can assure you.) He also split up about a face cord and a half of stout maple last night and tucked it in under heavy canvas. We brought heifers in off the hill and stuffed them in the barn with the shorthorn bull, fueled up everything and picked up all the stuff that we could think of that might be hard to find under the snow that is forecast.

As of ten last night the college had cancelled classes for today for the first time in the three years Liz has been attending. Shortly thereafter FFCS joined a growing list of schools that are closing today. I am real glad of that. Although it looks like today is going to be a rough one at least we will know where they all are and have their invaluable help this day.

Now there are blizzard warnings for the first time in years. So far we only have about four inches, but it is that mealy stuff that tends to be a harbinger of lots more to come. I guess we are as prepared as we are going to be, but the B-word makes me plumb nervous.

As a wee footnote, the boss and I had the privilege of being awakened at some obscene pre-dawn hour, by an idiot on a snowmobile going about half again as fast as the plow trucks and the semis on the Thruway. I thought about a hundred mps, the boss says 75. Anyhow the foo' was either on the bike path or actually on 5S itself trying to find himself a headline or maybe an epitaph up in Evergreen. I dunno, but he sure woke me up. Anyhow, Happy Valentine's Day...hope it ain't snowing where you are.

Mysterious bee disease

This could be very bad news!

Could be a rackabore bone

One of my read-'em'-every-day type favorite bloggers, Florida Cracker, posted an interesting puzzler today on his blog. (He is a teacher and likes to test us.)

Most guesses run toward mineral block or salt lick, but I am thinking maybe it is a rackabore bone. We see 'em all the time up here in the hilly country of Upstate NY and I am thinking maybe one retired to somewhat flatter Florida and succumbed out in FC's warm southern forest. Take a look and tell me what you think.

More About Growing lettuce indoors

Cabin fever and garden deprivation can get really intense by this time of year up here in the frozen north country.A sunny day that isn't too cold comes along and you just itch to go outside and plant something or pick something or do something besides stuff wood in the stove. However, the ground is still frozen and will be for a long time yet, the wind is still biting and it isn't even maple sugaring time. Sometimes, I can kind of ease through the no-dirt, no-greenery, no-gardening doldrums by puttering with the houseplants....repotting Amaryllises, cutting down gangly geraniums, picking off spent flowers and such, but really I need to grow something new and interesting. Most years I grow a few geraniums from seed, and maybe some lobelia, moon flowers or other things that require a bit of fussing. This year I am out of dirt and need to go buy some....which kind of goes against the grain.

Anyhow, I decided that we needed some lettuce that I knew came from a clean, fresh, not-in-another-state source so I decided to plant some in the living room. I used compost from the buckets I grew tomatoes in last summer and threw in some perlite and put the whole mess in a Styrofoam cooler left over from toting soda and Bologna sandwiches to the fair last summer. It has been slow going because there is so little sun, but it is beginning to come along quite nicely now. I nip off a leaf every now and then just to sample and I think we will be able to use it in sandwiches pretty soon.

Back to the barn

No-o-o-o....I don't want to walk.

It's cold out here!

Please carry me mommy...

Repeat after me....

There are no flies
It is not muddy
Snow is pretty

Say it again
There are no flies
It is not muddy
Snow is…..

***Most politicians understand that if you tell a lie often enough people will begin to repeat it as if it were the truth...so I am chanting the mantra above in hopes that I will somehow start to like winter...

I might add:

People pay for dermabrasion to make themselves look younger. I am hoping wind blown snow has the same effect for a much lower price. (Although so far all it has made me look is redder.)

When I let the dogs out for a constitutional convention I do not have to stand on the porch shivering and calling, and calling, and calling before they come in. As soon as I open the door I find them huddled on the back porch in a trembling black mass and they fall all over themselves trying to get in.

There are no flies
It is not muddy......

Yesterday

**Alan took this yesterday afternoon, just as the sun was beginning to set. You can barely see the houses with the reflecting windows except at that time of day.

No such thing as a free lunch

Yes, this dog crate is in my kitchen

But, no, that is notadog.

***It's a little Zipper

Today's desktop wallpaper

Brought to you by the ducks of Peck's Lake NY

Following Michael's fingers

Sitting there today I reflected on how many hours, how many years, how many decades even, I have spent watching his fingers fly over the fret board and copying as best I could the chords he made. It has never been more than a poor facsimile, my part of the music, but it sure has been fun doing it.

Making music together began perhaps in my aunt’s yellow convertible out by the curb at 14 Bloomingdale Avenue, listening to fifties rock and roll and singing along. We were small then, and that car was the epitome of glamour and adventure.

Doing dishes together, him washing, me drying, and belting out Beach Boys and the Dave Clark Five. Even then his high, pure voice put my rumble to shame, but we had fun anyhow.

Then the “band” came along, that first one we started, with him playing on an antique wooden drum set that came into the shop and me wishing my short, untutored fingers would somehow learn to bend into a chord on his wonderful black guitar. Neighbor kids who couldn’t play anything either jammed into my bedroom with primitive instruments and an astonishing lack of talent. We made a lot of noise anyhow.

A couple years later we got a bit more serious. We learned to more or less really play our instruments. By then I knew enough chords to actually play a few songs…as long as they weren’t too hard. A better sort of musicians joined the gang, a lead guitar player, a pianist and a bass player. We began to practice in cellars and garages and to play at school dances and even actually got paid… usually about enough for gas money and solder to fix the always broken wires on the PA speakers.

Long before that time his talent was evident. He wrote music, played drums amazingly, learned guitar and other instruments.

After a few years of playing bars and local resorts the band broke up. We grew up, moved away, got married and grew apart, but always a couple of times a year we got together to play. He still took his music seriously and took it places, singing and playing in church, taking lessons, always getting better and still better.

I took cows seriously and never really had any talent to begin with…tone deaf as a dog howling at the moon. I still play the same second-hand imitation Gibson I have had for over thirty years…on the rare occasions that I play at all.

Still when we sat down in living rooms, on porches, at camp, at his house, at my house, at someone else’s house, I could always follow his fingers though songs that I didn’t know. Even though I had often never even heard them before, I could always read the chords he made like a sort of musical mirror and follow somehow. He would drag me along on his tuneful coattails and for a while I could fly on borrowed wings.

As we celebrated a late Christmas with his family, mine, and that of my younger brother today, he played John Pryne’s Paradise and I followed his hands. We played LA Freeway and soared a little…( at least it seemed that way to me, I am not sure how the people listening felt about it). He rattled off a Guy Clark song and I missed a few chords, but his lead was solid and by the end it fell together nicely. We did Danny’s Song and he let me sing the lead on the chorus in my scanty little voice and held me up with his rich harmony. It gave me cold chills.

He’s a pretty good brother, my next younger one. I think Ill keep him.

***I am going to keep the other one too, the baby of the family. He is such a lovely guy. He brought me diamonds today, great, gleaming chunks of them like ice glittering in the headlights on the highway.

*** Herkimer diamonds that is, but I love them anyhow.

The UN Global warming report

Here is a quote from a story that A Coyote at the Dog Show linked to the other day.

"Giegengack may have a personal 50-year perspective on global warming, but the time range he prefers to consult is more on the geologists’ scale. The Earth has been warming, he says, for about 20,000 years. We’ve only been collecting data on that trend for about 200 years. “For most of Earth history,” he says, “the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has only rarely been cooler.” Those cooler periods have meant things like two miles of ice piled over much of what is now North America. Nothing to be nostalgic for."

Here is more:

“Sea level is rising,” Giegengack agrees, switching off the sound. But, he explains, it’s been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago. The rate of rise has been pretty slow — only about 400 feet so far. And recently — meaning in the thousands of years — the rate has slowed even more. The Earth’s global ocean level is only going up 1.8 millimeters per year. That’s less than the thickness of one nickel. For the catastrophe of flooded cities and millions of refugees that Gore envisions, sea levels would have to rise about 20 feet."

Too bad the world listens to Oprah first and scientists second.

A canine hero

This story of a stray dog, rescuing an injured motorist is pretty amazing. I knew I liked dogs.


***Update...Becky and I got to talking on the way up west to do errands today and came to the conclusion that if the animal that came upon the poor lady was a cat large enough to drag her by the collar she would have been a menu item rather than incredibly fortunate.

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!