TDS.net

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Weather

As I click around my favorite blogs and talk to my friends at It's Your Turn this morning, the weather seems to be a common theme. While what is happening outdoors as far as wind and clouds and precipitation makes headlines on the news, it also makes inroads into our lives. Here in the Northeast we haven't seen the sun in so many days even the faintest glimmer in the sky is cause for rejoicing. I don't have exactly a full head of steam on cloudy days, which is why posting has been both lame and lean.


Out west many folks are calving cows. My heart goes out to them, having to be outside night and day in the kind of rough weather this winter has brought. Here at Northview we mostly calve indoors in winter and only let the cows have their babies outside in summer (that is when things go as planned, and Toots to the contrary). This does make life a little easier for us than if we lived in the west and raised beef. On the other hand dairy babies are nowhere near as hardy as beef calves and dairy cows are not generally as good mothers...if they had to calve outside I don't think they would do very well. Even calving indoors is tough enough because cows have to be checked on at whatever hour you think they might give birth. It's an inexact science, but after a while you get half way decent at thinking (sometimes even accurately), "yeah, she'll probably come in around midnight...." or, "Not for another few days.."


They still fool ya. Often. I have walked into the barn to find a calf toddling around and wondered where the heck it came from...or on the other side of the coin found a cow that had obviously calved and no baby. We spent the whole milking one morning looking for a little half beef baby that we finally found curled up all snug in a pile of feed bags behind a bin...those little beefers are smart indeed!

Right now I am dreading the first of March as if I was going to get an involuntary, no anesthesia, quadruple root canal and have to go on a 500-calorie a day diet, both on the same day. Liz starts her internship then. She will go to another area farm and do what she does here....plus probably learn some new things and have some fun. It will be good for her and is required to finish her last degree requirement. Still....we have just gotten used to having her home...helping. And more than helping, taking a hold and doing what needs to be done and doing it with the fresh vigor of youth and the benefit of a college education. Four months is going to be a long time to do all her chores. She has the cows up about five hundred pounds of milk every two days and doing good otherwise.

And worst of all, she willingly, eagerly, and with great enthusiasm, calves in the night cows for us. She is good at it and rarely needs help. I don't know how many babies we are expecting in March, April, May and June, but it is a bunch and I am not looking forward to a single one of them. I am getting too darned old for this.

From Linda and the Dennis Ranch

More on global warming.

HT to Just Another Day on the Prairrie and the the Dennis Ranch

A Valentine treat

As a treat for readers, Rosie, at Smokey Mountain Breakdown is posting a new short story each day in February. And what stories! Fewer than 1000 words...yet she sets the stage, develops the characters until you feel like they live next door, then brings the plot to a fitting climax. You are left wanting more and eager for the next day's offering.

Go. Read. It is like being given a wonderful box of chocolates.

With no calories!

Hi chickadee

Finally! Somebody filled the feeders!

More Herkimer Diamonds

Cammo

A team of white-throated sparrows, chickadees and some dark-eyed juncos were scouting the bushes near the house yesterday. It was a dull day and they are not so bright colored, so I could barely see them in the view-finder. I heard the first Sam Peabody call from the white throats the other day. Guess they are wishing for spring as well.

Research

I find the best stuff while searching for substantiation for my opinions for the Farm Side each week....trivial, pointless and highly entertaining factiodal-type stuff I mean. The wealth of information available on the Internet, free for the asking, simply never ceases to amaze me.

For example, how about a study showing that farmers are five times less likely than the general populace to develop lung cancer? The apparent reason is that us folks who work with critters all day inhale droplets of aerosol manure. That stuff, as we all know, is full of germs. Scientists say that they inoculate us against the dread disease. (Of course my father had another take on it. He said we were all full of..ahem...sorry, I simply can't quote him here on a family site. I'll bet if you know him, you can just hear him saying it though.)


I also discovered today that our own home place, Montgomery County NY, was rated the number two best county to live in, among the top 100 rural counties in the Northeast region by a poll taken by Progressive Farmer Magazine. How about that? I knew that it is pretty here, not too many earthquakes, tornadoes or presidential candidates, even though our government leaves a little (oh, heck a lot) to be desired, but that was plumb surprising. And cool. Home, sweet home!

Bucket List

One Cowgirl asked a bunch of folks to try this and it seems kind of interesting, so I'll give 'er a go.

What do I urgently want to do before I die...hmmm.....

1) Write another, better book. Murder Along the Mohawk seemed terrific when I wrote it, but it is pretty darned lame now. I don't care if I get a book published, I just want to find the self discipline to actually finish (another) one. I sure have started a bunch.

2) This is hard...I have done most of the things I really wanted to....not a big goals person. Getting Becky to get her drivers license comes to mind (Beck, are you reading this? You REALLY need to learn to drive. Sooner the better kiddo.)

3) It would be nice to go to the ocean beach again...maybe Venice Beach to pick up fossil shark teeth. That was the perfect outing for a born treasure hunter.

4) This is really, really hard. I started out life with the goals of marrying a farmer and having a horse. I now have a perfectly functional farmer, and don't really need another; I acquired the world's greatest horse when I was about twenty and am too old and lame to raise another. And I learned to relish, delight in, and treasure what I am doing today, every day (well almost every day...) when my best friend died before she was fifty. Time to play now, not when the bad news comes...sorry that I can't come up with more unfulfilled dreams, but I just don't have too awful many. Most that I do involve digging in the dirt for mineral specimens and finding birds and amphibians. (Just call me a happy camper I guess.) I would love to hear from any of you what your bucket list would contain though. It really is fun to contemplate.

Lobby days

Liz is off to the capital today to participate in PX Days, wherein farm folks become lobbyists and talk to legislators about our issues. It is a lot of fun and very interesting. Eye opening too sometimes when you get to speak to downstate legislators (for downstate, fill in New York City). They tend not to think quite like we do...to put it mildly. I would love to go myself, but I don't walk fast enough to keep up with all those long striding farmers...plus someone has to milk the cows and get Becky over to school.

Here is the agenda (pdf) If Senator Cathy Young and Assemblyman Bill Magee speak, it will be very interesting for her. They are very knowledgeable about farm topics and are the leaders of the ag committees in the legislature.

We got up (at four thirty) to barking dogs, rumbling thunder (the reason for the dogs alarm), and pouring, torrential, tumultuous, buckets of rain. I wonder if this bizarre and miserable weather is an omen for Super Tuesday. Hope I can get down the driveway to vote anyhow. We saw a caravan of cars with big signs advertising Ron Paul parked in Johnstown yesterday. I wanted to get a picture on the way home, but they were gone when we came back by. Too much traffic on the upside of the trip. Not many folks were paying much attention.....I won't say who I am voting for...so far only one candidate even has a policy on agriculture. That is McCain and he is agin it.

Milking Bayberry, his favorite cow

Meme for me

And for you if you want to do 'er. (I never tag)

From New York Renovator

Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.

Finished this one last night between the end of milking at 7:30 and 11:30 a solid hour and half after I should have been in bed. (Do NOT under any circumstances start a Dean Koontz book when you don't have time to finish it. I had never read him before and didn't know.) And I did actually get breakfast before I started reading any of my three Sunday books....

"Some rocks directly below him, then the beach, the breaking surf. All of it fifty feet down. Too far for them to have jumped without injury...."

From Dean Koontz The Good Guy, Kill Me Instead

Asaki

Mrs. Mecomber gets to do the honors. Thanks again to everyone who participated in the naming of this baby.

Recipe for a perfect Sunday

Two books (top two on this list) I have been waiting anxiously to read BOTH came into the library and were just waiting for me to find them Saturday morning when Beck and I ran over to town. I know it was greedy to start the first last night and have them both finished by this evening's milking, but I really, really like JA Jance. What can I say? There are few better Sundays than the one I had today.

Keep the names coming

Pleas, please, please...they are great!

Name the calf

Time for a name that calf contest.
As always, all suggestions are welcome. Names submitted (in the comments please) are put into a hat, one is drawn, and the winner gets to name the calf.

Your exciting (????) prize is to have a purebred Holstein heifer go through life with the name you chose on her registration papers. Previous names chosen this way have been Hattie, one of our best Jerseys, Bama Breeze, Veronica and a couple of others I can't think of just now. This girl has potential as a show heifer so her name could be up in lights so to speak (well, really, just up in a little picture frame over at the show but....)

The particulars on this baby...her mama's name is Frieland LF Volcano. Her sire is a Select Sires young bull, Kingdom. This baby is a bit special as she is only the second red and white Holstein female we have ever had here at Northview. The other one is her half sister, Magma. You can see a rather bad photo of her here.

Have fun....the name chosen will definitely be one that you submit, as we are plumb out of names at this particular time. Happy naming!

If you don't like the weather in Upstate NY

Wait a minute....or maybe just a little more than that.....The first pictures, including the pink heifers, which is unedited except for cropping out the pink-for-minute heifer barn, were taken at 6 AM. At that time the sky was even pink in the west!

The last photo was taken just before ten AM. Same day. Almost the same spot as the first one.

Fiber Converstion Fire

The girls called from the road down just north of 20 and asked us to put on channel nine to see where the huge fire was. I looked out the window and was stunned. These photos were taken over several hours from the living room window....terrible! The smoke can be seen for many miles at least 30.

Another twenty-something and one fewer teenagers at Northview

Fittingly her gifts so far have been books, books, books and I hear tell there is another in the offing.

Almost a meeting

You will need to click to see how thick the snow was...

Liz and I ran Becky over to college this morning, after milking (and after the motherperson got up at four to finish the Farm Side for Friday), and then headed to Oneonta for a farm meeting (the boss stayed home to calve a cow.).

It was put on by our feed company.
With good speakers.
Brook's Chicken.
Great door prizes. We really wanted to be there.




We hopped on I 88. There was rain predicted. There was squally wind predicted. However, nothing that we heard prepared us. Or not enough anyhow. It was a boy who cried wolf sort of thing. We have canceled several tempting outings this winter because the forecasters called for blizzards and other apocalyptic weather conditions and nothing happened. We decided to ignore them (or I did...Liz wanted to stay home) and we paid the price. The wind was so fierce on 88 that Liz could barely hold the car on the road. We got off onto 7...not much better. We made it to Richmondville, called Becky and told her to skip class, picked her back up and headed home (with a quick detour to Wally World for dog food.)



What followed was 30 or so miles of the worst driving we have seen this winter. It was bad. I have pictures. I didn't take them until it had actually let up some.....The snow was horizontal! Now that we are home it is sunny again.....

****Update...to add insult to injury, not one, but two milk inspectors just stopped in to tell us that our milk hauler will be charging us another $300 bucks a month to haul our milk and we can't change haulers. Milk is about the only commodity where the producer pays the hauling to the buyer. (Everyone but milk buyers pays their own darned shipping and handling.) On the positive side (and there always is one) one inspector said that the barn looked good. Milk inspectors NEVER tell you that your barn looks good. (I think they just didn't want to get us any madder than necessary.)

Blond joke

Someone dear to us sent me this and I thought it very fitting for this weather so.....

As a trucker stops for a red light, a blonde catches up. She jumps out of her car, runs up to his truck, and knocks on the door.
The trucker lowers the window, and she says "Hi, my name is Heather and you are losing some of your load."

The trucker ignores her and proceeds down the street.
When the truck stops for another red light, the girl catches up again.
She jumps out of her car, runs up and knocks on the door.

Again, the trucker lowers the window. As if they've never spoken, the blonde says brightly, "Hi my name is Heather, and you are losing some of your load!"
Shaking his head, the trucker ignores her again and continues down the street.

At the third red light, the same thing happens again.
All out of breath, the blonde gets out of her car, runs up, and knocks on the truck door. The trucker rolls down the window. Again she says "Hi, my name is Heather, and you are losing some of your load!"
When the light turns green the trucker revs up and races to the next light.

When he stops this time, he hurriedly gets out of the truck, and runs back to the blonde.
He knocks on her window, and after she lowers it, he says...
"Hi, my name is Kevin, it's winter in Upstate New York and I'm driving the salt truck!"

Something's brewing

We crawled out of bed a little early this morning because Liz is going to help out on a Farm Bureau membership drive a little later in the day. We were nearly done milking when the sun came up. Its rising was at once ominous and glorious. At first there were bands of purple and sandy tan. Pretty enough, but in a Martian sort of way...the colors were simply not of this earth. Then the strange dullness slowly dissolved into a sea of red so bright that it shone right through the house from the living room to the rippled old glass in the dining room windows. There the red was exuberantly bubbled and wrinkled by the ancient panes until it looked like lava flowing down between the curtains.

The milkhouse wall was stained bright pink for a few seconds too, like a sunlit villa tucked against a hillside somewhere on the Mediterranean. I hurried back into the barn to call everybody out to see, but by the time I turned again the color was gone and the sky had faded all to grey. Because Liz was in a hurry to get Becky over to school (the latter is paying the former for chauffeur duties) the breakfast above is not what we are having today. However, a week ago Sunday was another story altogether. Anyhow, between the red sky at morning and the weather forecasts I guess we have a storm brewing. Sleet. Freezing rain. High wind watch. Bah humbug!

*****Visit Pure Florida today to see the kind of photos of Herkimer Diamonds that someone who knows what they are doing can produce. Mine are feeble by comparison.... even though the stones are just as bright and even somewhat larger.
It is kind of neat to walk outside with a flashlight here at night, as all the Herkimers and slabs of mica from Richter's Mountain sparkle like, well, like diamonds in the night....maybe someday I will get the knack of photographing them.