New York Farm Show

At Syracuse today. I would give you a link, but the link won't work. See you later.

***Here are a few pictures from the show. I will have more tomorrow. We had a great time!

Alpacas of New York

The Caterpillar race car

Our feed folks were there

I use a currycomb on our cows...or my broom. On the big farms they get just a tad more high tech

Cows, Column, Accounts and Company

Are on the list for today. One milking down. One newspaper column down. Bookkeeping done and backed up. Depreciation list updated. Company to arrive later...hopefully by then the house will have reached the appropriate level of clean for this particular visit. (There are levels of clean at Northview, ranging from best friend clean...some surfaces are dusted and you can get through the dog hair without a guide....... to in-law clean...which is a height we rarely attain.) The clean required today is a fairly low level, somewhere around best friend clean. We aren't there yet.

Brought to you by ice

Still to go..a trip to bank and post office, picking up Becky at college and night milking (including remembering to turn on the tank). Night calf feeding. Nighty-night (which will be most welcome).

*****Check out Pure Florida for today...your hair will stand right on end

Sinopa and Max

Good morning

First coffee, sharply fragrant, (although just now it is all about the caffeine). Second coffee is never as good no matter what you do to it. First rooster crowing at something even though there isn't one single glimmer of light in the east...except what comes from the lights at the county jail. (Speaking of which, the penny just now dropped as I was writing, why we see UFO's down there all the time. Those weird lights in the sky are either helicopters searching for escapees they don't tell us about or dropping off or picking up. I can't believe it took me so long to figure it out-lousy sense of direction I guess...always thought the lights were the city.)
I also used to think that roosters had some special connection to the sun and crowed because they felt it coming up. Now I know that they crow at lights on the Thruway, the moon, flashlights and fireflies. Guess they just like to crow.

Even though it is pitch dark I can tell it is going to be sunny today, at least early on. On cloudy days I can barely drag myself out of bed in the morning, but this day I am wide awake already. We had a little sunshine yesterday (and by little I mean in thirty-second increments) and it was wildly invigorating. Whenever it peeked out I felt like cleaning the house from attic to cellar, starting my whole garden, and writing War and Peace (fortunately it only slipped out from between the clouds a couple of times). Guess that is why they call it spring...it makes you feel springy.

Still no robins although I thank the folks who have written or called to share theirs. There were a couple of pale Canadian birds about four miles down the road (right near the jail in fact) on Sunday. Wish they would take a tiny detour in their Northward journey and fly down here for a minute. It is Northview after all....they COULD stop by if they wanted to.

Energy IQ Survey

This survey astounded me...want your preconceived notions deflated like an overinflated balloon when bounced upon by a border collie? Then check this site out.

HT to TFS Magnum

Another beef recall

The largest in history. Strangely there is nothing wrong with the meat. Makes me glad we grow our own though (see post below). We know everything possible about what is inside our freezers, right down to the first names (and last) of the guys at the slaughterhouse, what their kids do for fun (motocross), where they live, and who the inspector who stands watch over them is. We have known him for years and that channel runs both ways...he has known us too. We know that they take care of our animals and of us...and I am grateful for it. Can't say as I am a believer in organics, BST-free milk or any of that hoopla, but locally-grown (and home grown is as local as it gets) looks better and better every day,

Overdoing it a bit

On the pork thing. Over 700 pounds. This is one of two freezers.....oh, cryovacced frozen pork chops for sale...and boneless roasts...and ham steaks. Four dollars per pound....

Friends and family

Sometimes winter starts to get me down...usually along about February. I know it is the same for a good many other folks too. I have one I-friend in Calgary who has been dealing with temps of minus forty and lower for over a week now. Other friends in other places have their share of weather and illness related woes too.


This week though people have done me such kindnesses that I feel as warm as if it were a humming June day with robins and thrushes singing the dawn chorus to the mornings and the garden springing up in green shoots like punctuation in the dark, rich earth.


First a dear friend stopped by to vaccinate kitties and to give me a beautiful little stained glass border collie, which somehow captures the very essence of border collie, crouched, intent and staring....giving the world "the eye." I hung him where he can peer down the driveway through the big front window, watching for whatever may appear there. He is so perfectly collie that I get a little thrill of delight every time I see him.....thank you!

Then another friend gave us all little boxes Valentine chocolates, literally a sweet thing to do...thank you too.

And last night, when we came home from the Farm Bureau meeting someone with whom I have conversed on the Internet since 2001 (and been shellacked by at Battleboats and Jamble many times as well) sent me a short video clip. Everyone was shouting around me (we are a loud lot here when passionate) about some horse they had seen along the road and I couldn't hear what was going on in the movie, but I could tell it was something special. Later, when all was quiet, I turned up the volume. To my throat-tightening amazement, the video featured his "bingo ladies" (he calls bingo where he lives) wishing me a Happy Valentines Day. Imagine a whole room full of people in a distant city, all of whom I have never met, getting together to do such a nice thing. I was at a loss for words....except thank you from the bottom of my heart. I have never had a nicer Valentine.

Last, but not least by any measure, when I awoke this morning (later than I had any right to having been up way too late at a the meeting) unfamiliar lights were shining over from the barn. Liz was up working on calving in Char, number 116, who is still, even as I write, taking her sweet time having her baby. She had been up at two and again at four and was still awaiting developments....thanks Liz for the extra sleep and freedom from worry. It is pretty special and will be missed.

How can I be gloomy? Thanks again to all the good people who are kind enough to think of us and help us get through the doldrums of February in such special ways.

PS...... I requested in the Farm Side this week that someone send us robins if they saw any. Before it even ran in the paper (it runs today) Liz spotted a huge flock down on 30A...so thank you too, whomever was kind enough to share their spring harbingers with us....we are most grateful!


****Update: Naturally it is a bull...check out that weird ear!



****Mrs. Mecomber sent me a meme. I will do my bit here

Out of Salt

Wow! This does not augur well for the rest of the winter. Another storm coming our way next week....I sure hope they have enough salt left to cope with it!

Bloggers in Agricultre

Linda, at Just Another Day on the Prairie, is setting up a site that will link to bloggers involved in agriculture. I think this is a great idea. I am grateful to her for doing the work of setting it up.

She has links set up now to join and to link to the site if you are interested in adding your blog or webpage to the group. This could turn out to be a wonderful resource for those of us in the industry!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

But we have indoor lettuce....finally

On the Menu for Today

ICE

Bareback reining with no bridle

I don't usually cry when I watch someone riding a horse, but I did when I saw this video



Sorry folks who still have dial-up, but this is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen!

HT to One cowgirl, who saw it first.....

Ice on the river

The river is high for winter and racing with ice floes. The only place I can get a photo is from the gas station in town, but you can get half an idea of how fast it is flowing. Usually this spot would be seething with gulls, crows, ducks and geese. Now there is only speeding water and blocks of ice

Bunch of birdbrains invades Philly High School

I would never advocate any activity such as this..I feel sorry for the chickens and the folks who have to clean up after them.....but I can imagine something similar happening around here.....Senior pranks have a way of taking on a life of their own. I hate to even mention them, because I have heard some awful things (second hand) that have been proposed...and thankfully never realized. It is scary what kids think up at that age.

I like the district spokesman's comment on the fines faced by the perpetrators when they catch them, "It's not going to be chicken scratch,"

Close call

Mom had a little get together to celebrate Becky's birthday yesterday. There was a wind advisory posted but it wasn't too bad when we set out. However, as we were tooling down route 29 right in front of the farm where I used to work (and where my little pick-up truck was once run over by a tractor trailer) a car suddenly screeched out of his lane and came hurtling down the highway right towards us.

180....Fishtail....360....looming larger by the second....I pulled over against the guardrails and watched him come. No where to go to get out of his way on the busy highway. Nothing to do but watch in horror as he flew towards us, out of control.

Then he spun one last time and nosed into the guardrails right in front of us.....now facing the same way we were.


All I could do was tell my phone-bearing offspring, "Call 911".

Liz did so and reached an operator who had a terrible time understanding where we were. It was hard to convince her that aid was needed in Johnstown, not at the home farm. The man who had nearly met us head on got out of his car and went over to the car that had evidently rear-ended him (we didn't see that part of it) calling on his own phone. I don't think anyone was hurt, but we could not stay on the side of the road where we had stopped even if we had been equipped to offer assistance. Traffic was simply insane. No one even slowed down, just sailed between the damaged cars at sixty or more. I needed to move my car so they would see what had happened and slow down. So we proceeded to Grandma's house.


It was hard to settle down and eat birthday cake. To see such a wreck at almost the exact spot where a tractor trailer once ran over the cargo section of the truck I was driving set my heart a-pounding for a long time afterwards. Then we had to drive home in a near white-out as the promised wind showed up with a vengeance (we were lucky and got behind a plow truck that was winging shoulders and spreading salt).

BTW, this is one person you will NEVER see in a moving vehicle without a seat belt. In that long ago accident, every single thing in the cab of the truck with me went flying off down the highway through my broken windshield. I never did find my hairbrush. There was nothing left in that cab when my poor little Chevy came to rest....Except me. I got off with a cut on my head and lost a few hunks of hair.
Which grew back.

There are no accident reports to be found on the net or in the local papers so I guess yesterday goes down as just another weather-related minor accident. It scared the heck out of me though.

TDS.net

50,000th visitor from Madison, Wisconsin...thanks!

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