Omen

I hope this morning is one for our luck on the Christmas bird count, which is coming up soon. The girls and I were walking over to the barn at about five minutes past needing a flashlight. We were traveling real slow and cautious as it is nasty icy under about four inches of mealy, slick new snow.

Just as we got about half way there this huge, ponderous, slow-flapping bird lumbered over the heifer barn roof, barely flopping along. I was hoping for an exotic owl of some sort until I saw the long, trailing legs. Of all things to see in December when everything but the river and the Schoharie are frozen-a great blue heron. I know almost exactly how low it was flying because it winged its way right past the tower on the house. That is 72 feet tall and the bird was halfway up the roof part, we'll call it 65 feet. What a strange sight for this time of year. We have counted only two on the Christmas bird count in all the many, many years we have done it. I am crossing my fingers that he flies up to the Mayfield South section of the Johnstown count and sits around waiting for us to drive by. We just love those "ooh, ahh" birds. (That is what you say when you see one.)

***Herd health today. Cross your fingers, if you will, for lots of pregnant cows.

How do you spell relief?

Headlights of the girls' truck coming up the icy driveway...home for the night.

Wood gathering

Southern style.

And northern style.

The boss cut this mostly dead apple tree down for me last week. Since we are expecting a major "snow event" in the next couple of days, I brought down all I could so it doesn't get covered with snow.

The lichens like it (click for closeup)

So do the cottontails

Now

'N later

This Problem has Legs

Because I simply must work on the Farm Side today...and because there are other irons tangling up the fire...I will share with you a math problem a friend sent us recently.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, which is my excuse for not coming up with an answer. Ditto Liz. Becky didn't bother. However, Alan is like a pit bull when a problem intrigues him. He just works and works and works until he figures it out.

Which he did.

I'll bet all of you smarter than the average-type bear folks can too. Here it is.

Who can figure this out? (In school - this is called a story problem.)

There are 7 girls on a bus
Each girl has 7 backpacks
In each backpack, there are 7 big cats
For every big cat there are 7 little cats

Question: How many legs are there in the bus?

Actually, I just couldn't get past those backpacks...can you imagine the howling, and growling and yes, even caterwauling that went on within them? Glad I wasn't on that bus anyhow!

We never got rich and missed out on Disney World

Our Liz is about to graduate from college with a Bachelor of Technology degree. She has to finish an internship working on another farm and then she is done. Since she started college, four long and challenging years ago, she has wanted to come home and work into the family business with an eye to taking over. She has worked here on the farm since she was a toddler, including during all those years in college. (As have her siblings.) She has still maintained a spot on the Dean's List the whole time, as well as a membership in Phi Theta Cappa, and taken as many as 24 credits at a time.
Yeah, we're proud of her.


And yeah, we would love to have her come home to farm. (Any and all of the kids are welcome if they can work out a way to work together.) There have been plentiful times when we thought eagerly of retiring, but the place was kept afloat so we could take over and it only seems right to try to do the same for the next generation.


Wouldn't you think that the profs at an ag and tech school would be delighted to see her join us? Wouldn't you expect them to love to send young adults home to continue the family farm?
That is certainly what I expected.


However, for weeks, months even, Liz's teachers have been berating her for throwing her life and education away by coming home, especially since we are a small and not particularly outstanding farm. Discussion has become quite heated. All the many ways we might fail or she might fail have been pointed out. Her skill at breeding show cattle has been called into question (there have been several critters with the Frieland prefix that stood grand champion over the years-all of them hers). Her intelligence has been belittled. (That "dumb farmer" stereotype again). One teacher pointed out today that when she marries and has children she will want enough money to take them to Disney World and can't make it on a small farm.


And that, right there, just nailed me to the wall. Disney World! As if that were the gold standard of pleasure and achievement. The be-all-end-all epitome of American existence.

Although my folks ran an antique shop and book store when I was a young 'un, the boss comes from untold generations of farmers (we literally don't know how many). This farm itself is well over sixty years old and our kids are the third generation at this location. (The great grandparents had another farm on the other side of town.) We both grew up somewhat less than wealthy by conventional standards and never made it to Disney World. Can you imagine that? And then we went ahead and raised our kids the same way.

I know I should feel the depths of cultural deprivation over the Disney issue but actually I was perversely proud when Liz and Becky were in the lower grades and failed a test based on their cultural knowledge (they didn't know all the characters from the Little Mermaid or some other Disney flavor of the day movie.)


The boss and I both grew up showing at the county fair and thinking that was pretty big stuff. We have had visitors sneer at that, but darn, it really WAS fun. So we made sure our kids got to do it too.

When things got tight when they were small, instead of hopping on a plane for a warm climate and a theme park, we took "nature walk" mini vacations hiking around the farm. If one of us couldn't go their grandpa took them. They learned to recognize real birds and animals, to read tracks and know trees and plants. (Too bad about missing Minnie and Mickey, but they got to see robins and green frogs instead.) When we had time we took them hunting brachiopod fossils in Schoharie, digging Herkimer diamonds or hit the Old Stone Fort Museum or the NY State Museum. Or Blue Mountain Lake Museum. Or the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown. Poor deprived little things.

They missed out on jaded people dressed up as imaginary characters, and million-dollar thrill rides, and had to make do with piddly little tractor, horse and pick up truck rides (and cow rides sometimes). They had to suffer with just time with their folks and the grandparents...every day. However, they did get the chance to know that what they did every day mattered. Not only did their help mean a lot to us, but every time one of them picked up a shovel, taught a new calf to drink from a bucket, or drove the tractor out to rake hay they were helping feed the world.


To me, that stacks up pretty good against flying down to Disney World, but then I am not much of a sophisticate, so I could surely be wrong. And we certainly may fail, Liz or no Liz. Farming is tough stuff, no matter whether you have fifty cows or ten thousand. (The challenges are different, but I know I would much rather get up every morning and go out and milk our fifty than be the owner of a 10,000 cow place when the INS shows up and there is nobody left on the place to milk them at all.)


Anyhow, I personally can't wait until Liz is done with her education and home farming with us. If the farm fails, she has that degree to fall back on. If it succeeds, well, good, maybe she can afford to take her future children to Disney World.
If they even want to go.

Florida dairy closes

I thought that this story of a southern farm family's struggle to stay in the dairy industry was interesting.

How it went last year

Indoor lettuce

Seedlings

Indoor Lettuce

I planted a flower pot full today. Not much will make it to the table, as I can't walk past and not pick a leaf, but even a little is a wonder on a sandwich up here in the frozen north in the middle of the winter. I grew some in a cooler last year and we ate it for months. I use two mixes from Pinetree Garden seeds, winter lettuce mix and lettuce mix. I love the different shapes and colors of leaves that you end up with.

I am contemplating starting small flower pots of it and giving them as Christmas gifts to beloved folks who are impossible to shop for. Is this a good plan do you think?

Toots

Sorry about the not so great photo...the barn is dark and the flash doesn't make 'em look so great either.


A few more critter photos on the View today

Road trip

Just a short one...over to Altamont yesterday to pick up a beef we had processed. (Came out surprisingly good too, for an unfattened Holstein heifer).Roads were pretty bad, as it is really cold for so early in the year and spitting snow all the time.

We saw these Canada geese on the way home and stopped to take pictures. The silly things just walked away down the cornfield, even though I was quite close to them. Sure are a lot of them around for so late in the year. I see hundreds almost every day.




On the way home we ran along the river for a while. What a melting pot of water fowl lined the banks, littered the rocks and crowded every little left-over pool. Great black backed gulls, ring bills and herrings, millions of mallards, Canada geese, mergansers, plus hordes of crows. There were literally thousands of them.

Missing

Last week, against the wishes of certain people, (such as me and the girls) certain other people (who shall remain nameless) let the heifers back out on the hill. We had just gotten them in for Pete's sake, but they were tearing the wires off the tractor and getting in the way of feeding and barn cleaning. He brought them back down nights, but let them out days. Problem was there is a Jersey in the bunch who looks just like a deer (still deer season) and a springer that was ready to pop any day.

Of course the springer had her baby way out by the pond. And of course they couldn't bring her down because it couldn't walk and she was on the prod and yadda-yadda-yadda.

There are times you just keep your mouth shut and hope for the best, which, sadly, was not what we got.

Of course she came down without the baby. And of course when the kids and I went out to get it in off the icy fields it was gone. And of course there were calf tracks leading out of the pasture, through the fence, across two fields and down into a ravine. Of course they tapered off and vanished. Of course there were six sets of coyote tracks following them at a run, all the way from the cow pasture to the ravine. We let the mother out to look for it in case it was hidden, but she just wandered around mooing for it, with no luck at the actual finding part.

Alan kept taking relays of fresh flash lights out and tracking, but he just couldn't pick up the trail again where it disappeared in the ravine. He searched half the night to no avail. We looked for three days before we finally gave up and accepted that the coyotes must have taken it and dragged it away. They have gotten calves before, but I felt especially bad this time, because if only the mother had been left at the barn we could have gotten it in safely. Easily. I knew the boss felt bad too, although he would never say so, because if anybody mentioned it he just walked away.

Then night before last, I heard a little cry when I was walking over to milk. I couldn't tell if it came from the barn or down where the boss was down letting the heifers back into the barnyard from where they had been out on the hill. I thought to myself that it would be so wonderful if the baby had somehow survived and found the heifer herd, but I knew better. The last tracks were so far from the pasture, it had been three days, it is so cold and coyotes are so relentless.

I went in the barn and started setting up with a heavy heart. I just couldn't get the baby off my mind. The animals are our responsibility in this world and I can't help but take it seriously. Even though I had nothing to do with putting the mother back out in the field, I felt a deep guilt over it.

Then came the Christmas miracle. The boss walked in the door with a furry little black critter trotting at his heels. Somehow that baby had escaped the coyotes, found her way back across a good half mile of unfamiliar terrain, and followed the heifers to the barn. A little later she latched right onto a bottle of milk and wagged her tail with what looked to me like sheer joy at being warm and fed. She had never seen a person, but she just loved folks from that first second. She even climbed out of the pen where we put her so she could watch the boss work on the feed cart yesterday. He said she stood there right beside him staring at the motor he was working on, so close he could feel her breath on his hands. I guess he is forgiven, because if she can, she follows him like a dog.

We rarely keep Milking Shorthorn Holstein cross calves as we have a registered herd. However, the first thing the boss said, after I got over the tears of joy that she was found was, "She stays, she earned it."

Her name is Toots.

The ice one

Me zero

I was helping the boss drive the heifers out of the barnyard this morning, so the milk truck doesn't have to wait for the gate to be opened. I was carrying my empty coffee cup, four bags of wet cow washcloths and a fiber glass sorting stick. I took a step.
And crashed flat on my back on the icy hill, banging my head a good one and wrenching at least one arm. He said I was talking but my eyes were open and not looking like anyone was home.

All I can say is, the ice won. Bah.

It's senior picture time

Snow stories

This morning the boss and I got to regaling Alan with stories of winters we experienced as children and young adults. The years between the time I was about fifteen (and he nineteen) and the time I turned 28-ish included some staggering winters. There was a spell when I was living in one town and milking cows for a farm in another when the weather had to be experienced to be believed.

I had to be at work every day at five AM, so I left home around 4:30. That winter we had nearly a month when temps never got above twenty and at least a week of nights that reached thirty below. I drove a little Volkswagen station wagon sort of thing. It was an early example of front wheel drive and would go anywhere you pointed it. It was also a typical VW so the heater was dead. We used a little catalytic space heater to "warm" (warm being a relative term, resembling the comparison of scale of perhaps Vesuvius and a cigarette lighter, with "warm" being the lighter and comfortable being the volcano) it up and defrost the windows.


I would go out every morning at four or so and light the darned thing (with a match-it had an open, circular "wick" which was quite exposed), then go back inside for more coffee. If I propped it on the seat just so, it would sort of thaw a hole in the frost on the windshield so I could drive to work. It wasn't exactly ideal, but there isn't a lot of traffic at that time of day anyhow. I never missed a milking.

Then there was the blizzard that hit when I was living in the camp in Caroga Lake. (No insulation, one layer of simple board walls-it was a SUMMER camp after all). I don't remember exact weather statistics, but I probably was commuting to the same farm (I worked there a long time before I met the boss). During the night we got feet and feet and feet of snow, howling winds, temps way below zero...it was like living in Alaska. The little sheet steel wood stove in the living room (sole heat source) was a joke in the face of such weather. We didn't have running water though, so there was really nothing to freeze but us. Sometime during the maelstrom, while all occupants slumbered (including dogs) the front door of the cabin blew open. When we awoke in the morning we had to shovel two feet of snow out of the living room. (And you wonder why I refuse to get all excited about global warming.) At that point we accepted an invitation from some friends who had an apartment in the city and stayed with them for a few days.


The boss's stories of winter wildness included taking water upstairs at night so he could have a drink if he was thirsty and finding it frozen in the morning. Icy winds howling through the walls. Snow that the biggest tractor on the farm couldn't get into, let alone out of.


I have other memories of driving that same VW with that same stupid heater to that same job in an ice storm. There was simply no way the car could go on the roads themselves, which were like a long, black hockey rink. Still I had to go to work, as I loved my job and my employer's cows needed to be milked. So I put one tire on the snow bank and crept off to Johnstown where 150 Holsteins awaited. Never missed a milking then either.


We were nuts. We drove bad cars (I had one that you had to park on a hill to start and a truck with two leaky tires, which I swapped twice a day to get to and from work-I could change tires better then any girl I knew) and lived in frighteningly primative places. However, we were young, intrepid and didn't really know any better. And it was a real good preparation for marrying a dairy farmer. I fit right in from the day I got here.

C'mon fish, hold still for a second

Naughty

Kudzu


Or...could it be sunspots (or the lack thereof)

Meme from NYCO

This probably won't be much fun if you live down south, but NYCO cooked up a pretty good meme for those of us that live in the snowy regions.

Here it is, straight from NYCO with my answers below:

"Winter Questions:

I haven’t ever done the “blog meme” thing before (i.e., “Friday Five,” five questions that everyone is supposed to blog about on Friday - it’s a friendly way of getting blog traffic to circulate) but here’s some winter questions and answers. Feel free to tackle these questions on your own blog, and I will add a link to your post.

1. What’s the winter tool you can’t do without?

2. The winter tool you could do without (i.e., find unnecessary or silly)?

3. Your favorite music to listen to when stuck in the house in a snowstorm?

4. The winter sound you least like to hear?

5. Your driveway shoveling pattern: vertical (up and down)? horizontal (pushing from side to side)? Or any which way?"

Answers from Northview:

1) The Frothingham Free Library

2) Roof rake (our roof is about thirty feet high-at the bottom)

3) Emerson Drive, (of course)

4) The wind thumping and banging my bedroom wall and slapping the bird feeders around.

5) I hope and pray that my driveway is "shoveled" by a man with a skid steer. If not I rely on 4-wheel drive or hibernation.

Your turn-how do you handle the interminable days of winter?

***Update
Mrs. Mecomber and
Breezey have played too!
Loping Loubob as well!

Oh, kitchen, my kitchen

The fearful week (and four days) is done
Noses have weathered all attacks, the prize we sought is won
The smell is gone, the air is clear, and mama is exalting
While follow foods that are not tainted, the odor gone a faring

But heart, oh heart,
The grief that I have taken
While in the barn the kittens whine
Ousted from inside

Oh, kitchen, my kitchen, I am glad to have you back sir
Rise up, for you the cats evicted, for you the mom rejoicing

***to make things perfectly clear.....eleven days ago, Liz was given three cute (well two cute and one Hellcat) kittens by a dear friend of the family. They are more teen aged cats than kittens and for those long and miserable days they have lived in dog crates in my kitchen. Let me tell you, three cats in the kitchen smell...well, they smell real, real bad. No matter how often their little boxes are cleaned. Today they were exiled to their new home in the horse barn and I am a very happy camper. Very happy. Very, very happy.
However, Liz is not happy and thinks that I am mean as a box of rattlesnakes left on a hot sidewalk too long. Even so, it is nice to be able to breathe again.
(They only got to stay in as long as they did because the Hellcat one bit our friend and we needed to make sure she didn't have rabies.)

HT to Walt Whitman, who said it so much better.

Winter wonder-land (or why can't the calendar get it right?)

According to the calendar, winter arrives in this hemisphere on or somewhere around the 21st of December, close to the old Julian calendar solstice.


That same calendar is ALWAYS wrong and has been every single year of my life. Winter up here begins WAY before the 25th and ends when it gets good and ready. Believe it or not, we had frost the 8th of June this year, the latest I have ever seen. (There was ONE year, back when my brother was still in the service, when we had the oats planted by the end of March and all the fence built too, but it was such an aberation we are still talking about it.)


Wikipedia says this, "Winter is one of the four seasons of temperate zones. Almost all English-language calendars, going by astronomy, state that winter begins on the winter solstice, and ends on the spring equinox. Calculated more by the weather, it begins and ends earlier and is the season with the shortest days and the lowest temperatures. Either way, it generally has cold weather and, especially in the higher latitudes, snow and ice."


Say what you will about Wikipedia, they got that one right. In fact, it looks as if winter is throwing its snow hook our way starting about noon today. (Oh, joy.) Not to mention its ice. Rain. Sleet. Freezing rain. High winds.


I think I will hibernate.


Or, alternately, I will betake myself off to the grocery store for some dog food as we are out, and have five (count 'em, five), bottomless canine consumers, warn up the homemade soup from last night's dinner for the human contingent and pray for school closings, which will send the company of helpful and entertaining young adults my way tomorrow.


***Stormy day update, file under unbelievable: the tank driver mentioned in the post below turned the dial on the bulk tank washer backwards AGAIN today and broke it (these things are like a washing machine dial and can't be turned backwards. He has been picking up milk for decades and knows better). Last time he did it it cost us six hundred bucks to fix. Eventually we got part of that paid for by the trucking company. I doubt we will get them to do anything this time. The boss is so mad he is fit to spit.

Troy Stanley or Lee Eisneberg

All afternoon yesterday we listened to the hostage drama at a Clinton campaign office in New Hampshire. (The girls called me as they were leaving college, or I wouldn't even have known about it as the boss and I were busy battening down the hatches.)

All afternoon yesterday Fox called the alleged perpetrator Troy Stanley. This morning when I sat down to read the news headlines they are calling the guy Lee Eisenberg.. So which was it? And did he really only have road flares? And who is Troy Stanley? Is he upset over the apparent misidentification? Or is one just an alias for the other? Just wondering.....

***Update, a commenter has answered these questions in the comment section.