Apple appreciation day

Looks kind of wild and wonderful doesn't it?

However, turn the camera less that 45 degrees and all you can see is traffic....trains, trucks, cars and in the summer really expensive boats.


Since the snow has momentarily mostly melted, the guys and I brought in wood today.
Not together. They worked all day getting a dead elm up out of the ravine between the house and barn. A good friend stopped by the other day to pick up some Holstein semen we were giving him to make room in the tanks for Promise. He took a look around and saw the massive, bare-limbed monster where it loomed dangerously between barn and house.

"Why don't you cut that one down?" he asked, "Right handy to the stove and all..."
The boss admitted that with his bad arm he was a little afraid to mess with it. Elms are treacherous droppers of huge, brittle limbs and will kill you if you aren't careful (or maybe even if you are.) This friend has a long history with logging and firewood and a really big chain saw. He made short work of getting it down, but there was no way to avoid it going into the creek.


I stayed away from that job and went up into the orchard instead to bring down pieces of a dead apple limb that Alan cut up for me a few weeks ago. They have been buried under snow, tantalizing me by being so close and yet so inaccessible. With a whole mess more snow in the forecast it seemed like a plan to get them in. I had already hauled down a lot before the snow flew and still scavenged three heaping wheelbarrows full from just one limb. The apple trees are part of an old orchard that we used to use as a horse pasture. I like it up there.

I have never seen a yellow bellied sapsucker, but they may very well have seen me.

The horse pond. We have always wanted a willow tree and this little shrub volunteered. Don't know if it is a black or crack willow but it serves the purpose.


If I had just a little more zoom and a bit faster camera you could see the gulls like paper darts that flashed across this dramatic sky. I am grateful to the apple trees. For branches to keep me warm, for looking so pretty even in the winter, and for an excuse to be out here all afternoon and still call it work.

Winter birds

This has been the best winter for birding in a long time I think.


The usual suspects arrive at the feeders every day. Lots of little birds of the sparrow, finch and chickadee clans. Jays have made a raucous comeback after West Nile disease decimated them a few years back.
Lots of red tailed hawks.
Not enough visits from the Cooper's hawk and we miss her when she isn't here to bomb the pigeons.
WAY too many mallard ducks and crows, going after the corn bags every afternoon.


Then for three or four days somebody was out in Grandma Peggy's little winesap apple tree making soft, purring calls that I not only did not recognize, but had never heard before. It is very hard to pick out birds on grey, cloudy days, and despite several efforts I never saw our murmurous singer. Then day before yesterday there was someone large and grey out in the young honey locust in the old orchard. At first I though he was a shrike, but he flashed black and white as he flipped down and picked up some large object, maybe walnut sized.


Wow, a mockingbird! I'll bet he was my mystery singer and is mimicking some southern songbird. We get mockers sporadically but it has been ages since the last one. Peg used to put black currents on the windowsill in the living room and they would come and eat them. In fact when we moved up here Liz found a mummified one in the closet of the room she chose (shudder). If this one stays around I will put out some raisins or currents for him. I think the big thing he picked up was probably a dried up old apple from the orchard, but there are lots of wild grapes, rose hips and other dried fruits around for his dining pleasure.


The best bird sighting came the other night when Liz and I were driving up the river on our way home from the Farm Bureau board of directors meeting though. With the locks open and the ice gone for the moment, the long, flat, stretch on Riverside Drive looked like a sheet of dark, polished metal as we slowly passed.

Then a softly glowing shimmer of movement caught my eye out on the inky expanse. I turned to see what caused it (Liz was driving.) For the entire length of the smooth part of the river, from the old insurance office all the way down to Dunkin Donuts (and maybe beyond, I couldn't see) a narrow necklace of gulls floated like a trail of feathers down the center. In some places the trail was only a gull or two wide, in others thirty or forty marked their places in the roosting flock.


Gulls look different at night. Ephemeral, like insubstantial like puffs of milkweed down. To keep their places in the constant stream of the flowing river, they leap frogged over one another, a handful at a time, skimming low up the river to land at the head of the line, then floating slowly back down. They were so incredibly lovely, adrift on that long, silent mirror, that it took my breath away. I am rarely pleased to be out late at night, but the gulls made me glad that I was.

***Alan saw a pair of something huge and white, with long, trailing legs, laboring up the river the other night. I suspect great white herons, but didn't get to the window fast enough to see when he came in a hollering. They come under the heading of maybe once every ten years or so birds and are a big event. I hope they come back by.

Amish corn shocks and other harvest icons

The dark building in the rear is our old hop house. It still contains the drying racks that were used to dry that crop

Amish corn shocks against the horizon one day this week

Under the influence of green cardboard

Something in the water...or in the cardboard, I'm not sure

Here at Northview, before our milk goes into the bulk tank, it runs through an inline fibrous filter that takes out any bits of straw or debris that may have been pulled in with the milk. These filters are 24 inches long and 2 1/4 inches wide and come in a green cardboard box, which holds somewhere around fifty of them. Said boxes are rife with potential, simply rife. They are nothing but trouble.

Last night, while setting up for milking, I found I could not get my fingers on a filter (the green box is stored inside a white metal box on the wall, (into which it just nicely fits), for purposes of cleanliness and keeping the milk inspector happy). Liz tried to reach one too and couldn't, so she pulled the green box out of the other box. Yep, just one left. We were all set just the same, since the boss had bought a brand new green box of filters, which was sitting on the windowsill. She plugged into the metal box. Then she set the empty green box over by the door to be taken to the stove, and warned me, "Don't let Alan see this, you know what will happen."

Well, yes, I did know what would happen...it has happened before, it will likely happen again, but in the business of getting started I forgot all about it and left the box right there. Sure enough, when it came time to tear down he spotted it. Immediately he popped the end over the top of his head and became, "Napole-ON" (as he pronounces it in a hokey French accent).
Why he thinks a two-foot long filter box on top of his head turns him into a famous, (but short), French dictator, I don't know, but last night he discovered a new phenomenon. When you hit six feet tall and you put a two-foot long box on top of your head, you can't stand up in the milkhouse.

Instead Napole-ON had to scurry around bent almost double. That didn't slow him down though. (Dang it!) He began to cavort with the box (taking up a lot of room like only a teenaged boy on a tear can do. They seem to expand to fill all available surface area and then some). Because of these windage and elevation difficulties he took the box off his head and became Bionic Man. With his bionic cardboard arm for swatting family members and making foolish he was invincible (and not so very helpful either). There is just no dealing with him when he gets his hands, (or head) or whatever, into a cardboard filter box. They make him crazy.

As a responsible parent I needed to do something, anything....to stop the insanity. I tried to rip the box off. (If you take the box away he calms down and will get back to feeding the last hay feeding of the day and taking hay over to the horses.)

I couldn't get it though. I just couldn't. Because of the empowering properties of the box, my advanced (and ever increasing) age and infirmity (not to mention the fact I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt), all I could tear away were little 2-inch chunks of green cardboard.

"Hee-Yah," he waved it tauntingly at me and ran out the door. Of course I followed and we did box battle beside the bucket rack outside the door. More pieces fell to my onslaught, but I still couldn't win the day...(mostly because I wound up lying over the bucket rack guffawing helplessly, with tears streaming down my face).

It is hard when you are laughing yourself sick to get someone to stop waving a box around and finish up feeding, but eventually that happened. Maybe he just got tired. Maybe whatever properties green cardboard filter boxes possess finally wore off. I don't know.

I swear though, the next time we empty out a box of filters I am going to take it right over to the stove and toss it in. Never again will I risk leaving it lying around waiting to transform my mild mannered son into Napole-ON. Never.

I like this lady

Meanest mom on the planet sells son's car.

More Thurwood

January 8, 1874

Foggy and warm and it rained a little and I went up to Dunckels and in the afternoon it rained and got windy and cold and that is all.
3 eggs for today

Here in 2008 at Northview Farm the weather fellas are also predicting a warm day. I am predicting more grey hair, as I take Becky out driving every day, praying as we go. She needs her driver's license. I need a tranquilizer.


When that is done there is the work on the Census of Agriculture, which we are required to fill out. It is where all those NASS numbers come from but it is HARD (warning pdf file) and it makes me whiny. It says that it takes fifty minutes per response. I don't know if that means per question...there are pages and pages, per page, yep, a lot of them, or for the whole questionnaire. All I know it that I worked on it all afternoon yesterday and it isn't done yet. Wish the government didn't expect us to do their bookkeeping for them.

We also got news that our USPH inspection is coming up, which requires that we offer for consideration a barn that is somewhere near as clean as the set of ER. (Check that link out and imagine complying in a 200 year old barn full of unhousebroken animals, and run by men of the "drop it where you use it" school of tool care. Thank God for Liz is all I gotta say.) We knew that was in the offing and have been working on it, but it is no fun at all.

And then there is the Top Scan thing from Homeland Security. Farm Bureau has been frantically working to get farms exempted from having to fill one out (we have fertilizer and propane and such on hand and may be terrorists or terrorist targets). Even with the information they are sending me in almost daily emails, I have no clue whether we have to fill one out or not. Or how.This sort of snuck in under my farm politics and regulation radar (I get perhaps fifty or sixty emails and newsletters a week on farm policy, agricultural news and commentary and visit many sites that compile such data. Never heard of this one until last week. Since the deadline for compliance, once you figure out whether you have to comply is January 22 that is cutting it pretty close.)

Tax time looms. (Numberwise I need you....He-e-e-e-el-l-pppppp!!!!!) The books must be put in order. New files set up for 2008. All my mistakes of 2007 found and fixed. Arggghhhh!!!

I envy Charlie. I don't exactly want to live without electricity. I would miss my computer. However, I already take care of farm animals every day and I already have to keep warm with wood and hard work. We already grow a lot of our own food, and I do know how to live without modern conveniences having once resided in an itty bitty cabin in the woods, minus most of them.
I would love to forgo all the above government intrusion into our lives and business in trade for the ability to just do the work....you know, feed the cows, milk the cows, grow the food. I'll bet nobody told Charlie how tight his milkhouse door had to be or how to turn his calf buckets upside down.

Coincidence?

I think I will put the same post here today that I wrote for my garden blog (not much to post about there this time of year). Over on Garden Records, however, every now and then I copy an excerpt from the 1874 diary of Charles Thruwood, a farmer from Fort Plain NY (just a handful of miles up the road) . Charlie was 21 that year and had a grand time voting for the first time, breaking horses and doing a lot of hunting, besides working real hard on the farm with his family. It is interesting and informative to compare what happened on a family farm in his day to what happens on one in our time.


Perhaps not surprisingly, although the machines may be bigger and the animal numbers larger, there is no question that the cycles of life, the seasons, and the land have not changed. (No matter what hype you may hear on the topic.) For example, last night our maple syrup guy, who taps our sugar bush woods, (and gives us wonderful maple syrup), stopped by to negotiate for this season's tapping arrangements. I am sure in a few short weeks I will be reading of Charlie Thurwood's families doing their sugaring off as well. We will see when the time comes if the beginning of the maple sap run in 2008 coincides with that in 1874. (We have owned this diary for a good many years and it often has before.) I generally spot the beginning of the run by icicles hanging from maple branches that get broken off along the road. These are formed by sap and are tantalizingly sweet. Alan and I often break off a couple and melt them for coffee water...just for the fun of it.


Here is the copied post.

"From the Charles Thurwood diary

A very foggy day and in the morning it rained a little and I done nothing but the chores and went hunting and Henry Meyers was here and at night Til and Charley Bouman and Dunckel and Ezra Dillenbeck was all to our house. 4 eggs

Here at Northview we are also experiencing a January thaw, which is much appreciated. Had a little rainy sleet Friday into Saturday, which finally made the paths fit for walking again. Interesting that 134 years have passed between these two farmer diary postings and yet the weather is nearly identical."

Bull Jacking in Nashville

I usually leave the rodeo stories to Liz (and she will probably report on this in more detail when she gets in from the barn...two new calves in two days, much excitement.)

However a story about some maniac carjacking a 28-foot trailer-load of PBR bucking bulls with the owner's wife sitting in the cab, and taking off in downtown Nashville was just too amazing to pass up. The bull jacker eventually ran out of diesel, but he ate Mrs. Newcomb's sandwich on her.

Imagine stealing a truckload of this!

Cory Melton signing autographs

Mike White rides one

***Photos from PBR Enterprise rodeo at Vernon Downs last June

Birds

With the world locked in ice, and covered by about a foot of snow so powdery and fluffy that it looks and feels fake (not to mention slippery) there is little to be seen outdoors. Nothing but unrelieved white, punctuated only by the grey of the trees and an occasional flash of vague color from a salt encrusted car down on the Thruway. This season is when the birds really come into their own as points of interest. (Of course we watch them all year, but now they are the only show in town.)

Day before yesterday I trudged through the drifts up to the orchard to get some dried apple wood to boost the lame, wet-wood fire that was supposed to be warming us. (HAH) Over the river a large raptor soared, spot-lighted by the brilliant sun just showing over the southern horizon (she ain't so very high in the sky these days.) It flashed past, simply glowing, white-black, white-black as its wings slowly pumped the wind. It was probably nothing more than the hungry red tail that hangs around all year, but it looked like an ancient dragon patrolling up the small breadth of still-open water.

Yesterday I went out on one of my perpetual motion trips to the stove just int time to just miss seeing the Cooper's hawk, just missing a pigeon. She huffed and puffed on the barn ridgepole snapping her elegant wings open and shut in irritation when it scooted under the eaves and into the barn (I have seen her duck in through the open window after one now and then, but she didn't yesterday). She is so respected by the neighborhood flying rats, that not one pigeon landed on the heifer barn roof for the rest of the day (they sat on the house instead, darn 'em.)

Same day, feeding the birds. When I walked toward the swing set where the feeders hang I didn't see a one. However a veritable cloud of juncos, gold finches, chickadees, white-throated sparrows, Sassenachs, mourning doves, blue jays, tufted titmice, and who knows what all else, flew out of the old Christmas tree. Alan put it up so some of the feeders hang among the branches. The birds seem to love the shelter, and I am kind of fond of it too. I can just lean back here at the computer, twitch open the edge of the curtain, and peer right into the center of it. (Voyeurism of the best sort.)

On the not so happy with the birds front, crows and mallard ducks are marauding the ag bags to pick out corn. I am perfectly happy to provide fifty odd pounds of black oil sunflower seeds over the course of the winter. It keeps the birds happy with me and I with them.

Hundreds of tons of corn from our winter cattle feed being ruined is another story. Ducks can spread salmonella to cows when they leave droppings in feed. We chase them away whenever we see them. I don't feel too sorry for them either. They have a whole darned river to forage in, plus plenty of corn left on the ground in more open places where the wind has blown the snow away. I used to take Mike up to herd them out of the bags, (which was a lot of fun and pretty near as effective as the Cooper's on the pigeons). The first day I tried it, it was stormy and when we got to the bag fifty or sixty turkeys, maybe two hundred mallards, and crows and starlings too numerous to count flew up in a tornado of black and brown in front of us. My intrepid dog, who thought nothing of grabbing a bull by the nose and hanging off until the bovine reprobate changed his mind about where he was going, was terrified by the uproar from the birds and almost quit me for the house!

*** I ain't not supportin' nobody yet, but have you noticed the photos on the front page of all the papers of the winners of the Iowa caucuses? Gigantic color shots of Obama...itty bitty snaps of Huckabee, or nothing at all. Hmmm, any favoritism on the part of the media? Nah, couldn't be, they are merely unbiased reporters of history in the making.

A Pure Florida antidote to this gripping cold

Arrived in today's mail. It consisted of pine fatwood that Florida Cracker, writer of the amazing blog, Pure Florida, was kind enough to hunt down in his woods, cut up, split, and ship to the frozen north.

This is the container.....

The minute my knife breached the paper covering an incredible pineyness filled the dining room. (Liz wants to save a piece just to sniff.) I wish you could smell it too.

Essence of Pure Florida (Thanks, FC)

I am going to save this wonderful stuff until I need to build a new fire. (FC says half a piece will start a fire with dry wood.)

***Well, maybe I will take just a little sliver out to see what it does.... it is awfully tempting. For now I am just letting the open container sit on the dining room table. You see.... my computer is in the dining room and I love the smell of the pine woods....

Brrr

This is a completely unadulterated picture of the ice on the windows

This is another

This is another picture of a happy person with a Christmas present

Looking for something to put in the coffee

(Besides sugar and milk that is. It is so cold that anything that might add warmth would be welcome.) Yesterday afternoon you could feel it coming in. The cold I mean. Bone chilling, heart stopping, rottennasty, miserable cold. I moved the tender house plants in the parlor away from the windows and grouped them around the heat register and piled blankets, old coats, pillows, and anything else I could find against the windows. It may look dumb, but it works...sort of. (This house was built for summer and I don't want to staple plastic to the golden oak, hand carved woodwork, so when the north wind blows...brrrrr.)

Alan and I taped the kitchen door shut, like Grandma Peggy used to do. It made a big difference too, as did the heavy cloth objects piled against the bottom of all the doors. Extra blankets on every bed. 3 liter soda bottles filled with extremely hot water tucked in every bed before milking. Then they will be semi, sorta, kinda warm when we get in em. The boss fired up the oil furnace to supplement the wood, but it smells so bad that everyone begged him to shut it off. The wood furnace is mostly keeping up, and it is not too bad this morning. If you wear enough clothes that is. I really should go out and throw in some wood, but I am honestly afraid of falling out there in the dark before anyone gets up to miss me. It is really icy.

When the sun comes up I will get you some pictures of the amazing ice on the living room windows. It glitters right now in the light from the office like Christmas lights and fireplaces and things that are warm...which it isn't. Meanwhile here are a couple quick shots I got of the really wonderful Christmas presents a certain pair of someones gave us.




Note the shirt with farm name, cow and person's name...we have wanted to get show shirts so we all look smart at the cow shows for years. Now we all have 'em. Note the board game, Farmopoly. This game started as soon as Alan got out of school and continued until bedtime (with a couple of intervals for chores and milking). The rules kept bending until it sounded more like a casino in here than a version of monopoly for farmers, but they sure had a great time. There are some other pretty special things as well, including the coolest tractor pulling video I have ever seen. I generally don't watch TV, but I was glued to it when the guys watched it the other day. Made by a local guy and he is GOOD
.



And, no, Becky has not been hitting the stuff I want for the coffee. She was just telling me that if a picture of her showed up on the Internet I was in trouble. (Oops)

The little chickadee in the top photo is enjoying our Christmas tree, which migrated outdoors on Tuesday. The wild birds love it! There were birds in it before Alan even got back indoors from tying it to the swing set where I feed them. Now they huddle under it and skip around through the branches just as if it grew there. Nice

Links

Here are a couple of links for your head scratching puzzlement. One is about offering a day off for cows. Believe it or not, a pasta company has put calcium in their macaroni so cows can have a day off. What a thought...time off for cattle. They even have a bovine sellout...er, ....spokes "person" thanking them for their "generosity".

The knotheads!

If you give cows a day off from milking their udders rapidly fill with excess milk, to the point of extreme pain. They bellow and scream to be milked and thrash and bang their stanchions. If left more than a few extra hours without milking, they can develop painful udder infections, from which some could die. We dairy farmers don't milk every twelve hours because we are super Vikings or like being perpetually tired or anything masochistic like that. We do it because it is necessary for the cows' comfort and health.

Milking machine equipment repair companies are available on a 24-hour emergency basis (they don't come cheap, but they do come when called) and most farmers own generators so if the power goes out the work goes on. As far as the Northview cows are concerned, thanks but no thanks Ronzoni, we will get our calcium from milk and continue to work every day as always.
Mooove along with your silly, selfish, city-centric ad campaign.

And this is a bit sad, but had me scratching my head; Elderly man hurt riding pet buffalo. That simply doesn't need any explanation...the headline says it all.

I am working on a post on some incredibly cool Christmas presents we received from someone who seems to know us better than we know ourselves. However back-to-back, big, bad snowstorms have put everybody into overdrive just getting chores done and when we come in we all seem to fall asleep in our chairs....but soon...

Happy New Year to All

Off to the barn, more later.....

Adventures in bull fighting

Today we loaded Promise for a one way trip to Dependabul to be drawn. From there he will be sold.

He didn't want to go. Luckily no one was hurt, but I do not EVER want to do that again. No more bulls, no way, no how. No thank you.

Peace

After a whole week of frantic housecleaning and barn cleaning and running around doing errands it is finally Sunday morning. My morning off, the one milking all week wherein I don't..milk that is. I still need to mop the kitchen floor (no point in doing it until the last minute as we have no mud room, but we do have mud -and worse-tracked in continuously). So I am spending my lovely, sweet, peaceful morning off skipping around reading all your blogs, which I have missed all week (it is good to catch up) and listening to shotguns going off. Again. Today they started half an hour before daylight. Weird and disturbing, but I am not going to let it intrude on my peace.

I hope your morning is peaceful as well.

This raises the hair right up on the back of my neck

Coyotes in Erie Colorado came right into a backyard and grabbed little dogs (with intent to gobble) and bit their owner. That is way too tame for me! We have a LOT of these around this year, but they meet a little different welcome than banging pots and pans and yelling.

HT to A Coyote at the Dog Show (who has a lot of other good stuff up right now, so head on over if you have a minute).

Crazy day

It started out as ordinary enough though. We milked the cows and fed the calves and the boss cleaned the stables. Then while we were working we began hearing gunfire all around us. The boss went outside to look, but thought it was across the river.

We decided to move some calves outside before we went in to eat. Big rodeo. They had not been led for the most part and jumped all over Liz and tried to run over the rest of us and leap through the gates and generally gave us a rough time. Heard more shooting, this time up behind the house. Went in for breakfast. Heard still more shooting. Boom, boom, boom..clearly a shot gun,...glad I am not buying their shells as there had so far been at least 20 shots.

Suddenly I heard a LOT of shooting and it sounded like it was right over in the cow pasture. The boss, Liz and I took off right away as we had put the springing heifers out there while we moved calves. By the time my slow, old self got up there (visions of all kind of bad possibilities dancing in my head) the young stock were coming back up from where they had bolted down to the barn gate. We never did find out who was out there or even just where they were, but after we went out the shooting at least stopped. I found one of the heifers hiding by the big tree in the upper photo and thought it looked kind of interesting.

Spooked but interested in what I was up to.

Soooo.....we went back in to try to finish our breakfast. While we were inside the corn meal that was delayed by yesterday's storm was finally delivered. Then a fellow that is interested in buying some semen from the shorthorn bull when we draw him arrived unexpectedly to look at him and check out his daughters. Guess he liked him because he wants to buy some when we get it back.

I had to kind of hustle him along as we had a big day of cleaning mangers planned. I felt bad about it, but my help was needed. It was a major task as we have been behind since the boss got hurt. We mostly got it done anyhow and the guys built a real nice feeder for the calf pen where we put the ones we moved. Cows got fed pretty late, which made milking a bit late too, but we were still back in the house by just after eight. I had cooked a roast and some potatoes and carrots and everything was ready when we came in, for which I was grateful as I was just plain ready to be done. It was about as busy a day as we have had in a while and I sure would like to know what was going on with all the shooting, but we got a lot done so I won't complain....doesn't pay anyhow. Now I am going to go take a shower so I don't smell like bad feed and cow manure and get all rested up for tomorrow's dose of fun on the farm.

Running errands yesterday

Was really not much fun

Ducks liked it though

Really cool Christmas gifts

Really lousy photographs