More Tales from the Key Drive

First and foremost, Happy Birthday to Paintsmh, our especially wonderful Lizzie person! Yay, Liz, have a great one kiddo!

This one is from '06

Getting ready for the fair in some ways resembles a landslide on a jagged mountainside. It starts with a single pebble click, click, clicking as it falls. It is hard to believe that it will soon obliterate every other aspect of farm life, taking on the semblance of an all-consuming pile of quicksand.

The earliest event in the fair-ward journey is no more earth shaking than that first pebble. While we are milking, someone asks, “Which do you think looks better, Medina or Mendocino?”

A discussion of the relative merits of two calves begins. It is not too heated as it is long before the fair; no one needs to decide anything. Yet.

A totally irrelevant picture

Then as the weeks roll by the rumbling of the avalanche grows ever louder as fair preparations threaten to take over our lives.

The trucker must be called and decorations planned, purchased and assembled. Once chosen, calves must be trained to lead, bathed and clipped. Oh, and hopefully registered in time for the papers to be back before the show. In the case of Mendocino, who was selected over Medina based on pedigree (daughter of Fustead Emory Blitz, bovine equivalent of Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp rolled into one), greater height and sharpness, wider chest floor and the all-important fact that her mother is Lizzie’s favorite show cow, bathing takes on epic magnitude.

She is nearly pure white, not an auspicious color for a show calf. And not to put too fine a point on it, she is a hawg. Show her something brown and she will lie in it. She will dabble her tail in it too and paint her sides as far north as it will reach. (Of course she has a long tail.) If she can’t find something brown to lie in, she is a determined do it yourselfer. So every day, I say to the calf washer, “Throw that Blitz on the wash rack and let her soak while you’re clipping the other calves. And give her some bedding for Pete’s sake.”

This is futile as she eats any and all bedding, then looks around for more.

There is an intense competition between proponents of the little brown cow and fans of the big black and white ones here at Northview too. And of course sibling rivalry must contribute to the thunder of the developing landslide. Thus Alan snidely calls to Liz as she scrubs on Hazel, this year’s Jersey junior heifer calf, “Rub harder, maybe you can get all that brown off.”

He also takes me aside and suggests (quite loudly of course), “I know just what to do for Liz for Christmas this year. We’ll get some black and white paint and paint all her Jerseys. Then at least they will look like real cows instead of pasture lice.”

I shake my head and wonder at the wisdom of a lad who insults his sister’s favorite cattle while she has a fully charged water hose in her hand. Especially in light of the fact that the fair starts next week and she has a driver’s license and he doesn’t.

Ah well, as the number of days between now and truck-in day decrease, the spirit of cooperation increases, out of dire necessity if nothing else. There had been a vociferous battle, with many verbal stones thrown, over whether Alan’s two-year-old heifer, Bayberry, would go to the show or not. Like many boys he has sometimes used the necessity for him to go to the fair to care for his critters as an excuse to hit the midway with his buddies. This leaves big sister with his cow to work with along with her own. Not a popular phenomenon. Threats and imprecations are uttered on this topic.

Then terrible weather intervenes. There is no way Alan can go to the fair every day to pamper a cow. He can get over there for show night but otherwise he is needed at home to make hay. If the sun shines.

His sister has the choice of taking Bay herself or not having enough milking entries to qualify for Premier Exhibitor or Master Breeder.

Bayberry is going. Liz even rubs liniment on her sore stifle every day. (Poor thing slipped and fell a couple of weeks ago.)

As fair time approaches even the house begins to show the effects of the uproar. There are artificial maple leaves, fake wheat and a bunch of other funky stuff sticking up out of the mismatched sock basket and surging up from the cushions of the couch as if growing there. A crisis emerges when it is noticed that the stall sign for Liz’s Jersey aged cow, Dreamroad Extreme Heather, reads Dreamroad Extreme Heater. However appropriate that might be this summer it must be changed.

Of course an ever-helpful sibling suggests taking off both “H’s” and calling her Dreamroad Extreme Eater.

At least this year Liz is clipping at home, where it is quiet and the electrical outlets work. She was raving today about how nice it is to have the calves all done except for their ears (had to make a trip to town to get new ear clippers yesterday). I point out that I have been suggesting that she do them at home for at least ten years now. She doesn’t want to hear it.

A new dilemma arises. It has rained three days out of the last week. The oats that have been carefully saved in the field to provide bedding for fair stalls are still standing. It is too wet to mow, let alone bale them. Ditto the special second cutting field set aside for show cows. And the first cutting.

Frantic discussion of where enough bedding for ten head and good stuff to feed them can be found before next Monday ensues.

As piles of sand and gravel from the clattering landslide rise high enough to cover my ears, I pray for sunny days. Soon. Oh, and a little extra patience wouldn’t hurt either.

Yet another, equally irrelevant picture, taken at the same time.

*******Thankfully, our first fair isn't until August this year. Neither Bay or Heather are in the running to go. Bay's not bred and Heather lost a quarter.

As per request

****** Tomorrow I will tell you about actually getting to meet another blogger...first time ever and way too cool!

Yesterday the garage sales

Today the dirt. My goal in accompanying the girls on an expedition to the village wide in Tribes HIll was flower pots.

We got this picture from the driveway at one garage sale.
The Mohawk River at Amsterdam.

It was achieved. Now all I need is to go get dirt. I mix composted oats from the great oat fall with sand and composted horse poo. Makes a decent mix and the price is right.

My porch deer

Elvis

Behold-the box

Behold-the boxer

You can see why we named him Elvis. He always has to have center stage.

Senior moment

Who is that handsome boy playing tympani?

And singing in the chorus?

If you don't know, don't feel bad...evidently the band director doesn't either. There are three sections in our high school band, concert, wind ensemble and jazz band. It is a time honored tradition at our school for seniors to be acknowledged during their final concert. In fact Alan wanted to drop band this year and fill that slot in his schedule with something more useful for college. I encouraged him to stay in so he could enjoy his moment of glory as a senior with 8 years of percussion behind him. He did so.

Then last night, the director who shall remain nameless, gushed all over how wonderful the seniors in jazz band were. Raved long and loud about the seniors in wind ensembles. They took bows and got buckets of applause and I am sure were delighted with the attention they received.
And then, completely, totally (and unfixably-this is their LAST ever high school concert after all) forgot the three seniors in the concert band.

We waited and waited for their special moment but, oops, no such luck. They just filed offstage unnoticed. I won't get into the way this particular director has taken what used to be a fun music program and made it technically excellent, yet miserably boring, (instrument of torture comes to mind) for the audience. He likes that weird kinda music and he is the boss. We can suffer through a few hours of really painful music a couple times a year; we are after all adults and all....but to slight kids who have been in band for so many years, since before he was even hired. Well, to me that is inexcusable.

The highlight of the night was wonderful though. Alan's good friends' younger brother (you didn't hear about the helping with the sneaking of a piano into their house for him for Christmas this year because I had to keep Alan's part in that operation a secret for obvious reasons) COMPOSED one of the numbers last night! And it was awesome! One of the two best pieces all night. Lively, dramatic, exciting! (Everything the rest of the program wasn't...no slight to the kids, they play very well. It is just the directors taste in music that hurts.) The young composer got a standing ovation and he richly deserved it!
Then he went on to accompany the mixed chorus on piano completely from memory! Wow!

Anyhow, here is MY salute to 8 years in band. Hey, Alan, we won't forget and you or Anne or Rickie. As always you looked and sounded great last night. Good job!

Thank you key drive

For saving me on days like this....yesterday the crop insurance auditors (and the Farm Side deadline); today the last high school concert, a bittersweet milestone on the map of family life. This is a tribute to my late mother-in-law, which I don't think I ever actually published. I believe that I wrote it in 2002. She and I had our differences as any two cooks in one kitchen and women on one farm will do. However, I loved her and found out just exactly how deeply when she passed a way. Living here in her house a day never goes by that I don't think of her. I hope I somehow measure up to what she would have wanted...so here's to Peggy, one of the greatest women I ever met...

She was born in the town of Stark in the year fifteen. At first she was so tiny that her daddy, Frank, carried her around the house on a pillow for weeks. Her family wondered if she’d make it at all.

What an illusion that frailness was. She started helping Frank on his farm on Fiery Hill as soon as she could toddle. Milking cows by hand and doing fieldwork were as natural to her as breathing. When I met her she could still push her head into a big Holstein’s flank and make the milk fly with her small but purposeful hands. On Saturdays in spring she had to lead the big buckskin, Dan, pulling the cultivator up and down the rows of corn.

Later she told me how hard it had been to trust the horse not to squash her. She was fearful that his big black hoofs would stomp down on her bare feet and crush them into the hot dust of the cornfield or that he would drag the cultivator through the tender new corn. Still the work had to be done no matter how scary it was. She loved to ride him though, steering him with the driving bridle.

Dan was one of Frank’s fine workhorses, probably more a carriage type animal than a big, heavy horse like you see charging around the show ring today. He was so slow and deliberate in his tread that he never tipped over a stalk of the precious corn. He never did step on her either. She talked about him seventy years later as if he were still waiting out in the barn.

She started school in a one-room schoolhouse, when the teacher came to board at her home when she was three. We have a picture of her, bundled in a thick black coat, much shorter than the other students, but smiling hugely. She always loved to learn. Her education spanned eight decades and encompassed everything from gardening to a knowledge of politics as broad and deep as any scholar of the art. (There are those of us who learned to do our homework before we got into a political discussion with her. It was the only way to avoid walking away muttering and wondering what hit you.)

Frank was a renowned horseman in that area. His teams were called upon when no one else’s horses could get loads of ice or lumber up Fiery Hill. Whereas other farmers had to couple two or three pairs together, Frank could get the job done with one pair of his horses. We have a picture of him driving his yoke of oxen and, so in step are they, that it appears that there is only one ox, the off animal’s legs being totally hidden behind those of the nigh one.

Sadly, Frank was the one who was frail in reality and he died when she was twelve. As often happened in those days, the family was split and she was separated from her mother and sisters. She was sent to live with an old friend of the family who needed extra care, then later found a home with a woman who owned a diner in Booneville. She loved that restaurant and remembered the people who worked with her there very fondly. Roy, the irascible cook dominated the kitchen like a king and kept the girls on a run. She gave him his comeuppance one day when he bent over to check something in the oven as she pared potatoes nearby. She reached out with the razor sharp paring knife and nicked every stitch in the back seam of his trousers. He laughed and gave her hell.

There were some famous patrons among the simple farmers and loggers at the diner. Walter Edmonds, author of Drums Along the Mohawk and Rome Haul, was a regular summer customer. She said that he loved the strawberry shortcake and often stopped in for some during the season.

The loggers came in hungry for fine food after months in logging camp. Hobos were never turned away without a hot meal and a sandwich for the road. There was even a special, substantial dinner that was laid out for any itinerant who called at the back door, with lots of hearty bread and potatoes and gravy to stick to the ribs.

The good cooking she learned at the Brown Derby never left her. She could turn out apple pies with crust as moist and light as the early morning fog at the beginning of a perfect July day. She taught my girls and Alan to cook too. It’s scary. Liz is fifteen and teaches me new recipes. They even inherited her special ability to never use one dish when two would do. When they finish in my kitchen I start looking for the tornado.

She married a local dairy farmer in forty-three and later had two sons. They set to farming with a determination few today could imagine. They raised strawberries and pigs to pay the mortgage. Then they bought a second farm next door. When milking machines came in, her husband milked his string with the new invention while she milked twelve cows by hand-twice a day. Even when her hair was snow white and her steps had slowed enough that toddling grandchildren could keep up with her, she could still send streams of milk drumming onto the floor when she hand-stripped a cow.

At eighty-three, she was still milking cows. Even when she slipped on a grape dropped by an errant grandson and broke her arm; she went to the barn and washed cows with the good one.

She wouldn’t stay in the house in any weather. Snow, ice, it didn’t matter. It was a good thing that the old dog, Beethoven, would let her use his fur to pull herself back up when she fell, because there was no getting her to quit.

Last September, just eighteen months after her husband passed away at ninety, she had a massive heart attack. Nine months later, she died on my birthday, July 4th. It’s pretty empty in the old farm kitchen now. There is nobody to tell me how to grow cannas or cook ham or stuff zucchini. I miss her more than she could ever know.

More tales from the key drive

2004 Farm Side this time and much in the same vein as one a little while ago. Sorry about doing this but we are so insanely busy these days....that pesky internship will be over soon though.

Last night

Back in 2001 I told you about some types of cows that grace the average dairy farm, from Feed-Flinging Freda to Light Foot Lucy. Recently I realized that there are personality types among calves as well. You might notice this especially when, for one reason or another, (such as the regular stalls being full), there are baby cows tied in all sorts of weird and wonderful places around the barn. A very common and painful calf is the Knee-Buckin’ Biter. These little darlings know darned well that anything human probably has a bucket of milk secreted somewhere upon their person. KBB’s obviously believe that if they grab that human by the side of the leg, dig in their lower front teeth, and punch very, very hard with their flinty little heads, the bucket of milk will instantly be forthcoming. Actually the only thing forthcoming is the howl of pain produced by the poor human when their knee is chopped from under them while several precise curls of flesh are gouged away by chisel-like baby teeth. One of the twins that was born last week is a ferocious Knee-Buckin’ Biter. I have learned to squeeze around her, just out of reach of her eager mouth, but she nailed Ralph good this morning, much to his painful dismay.

Then there is the High-Kickin’ Heeler calf. A calf of this persuasion will stand quite still, calmly munching grain, as you walk by. Molasses wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Then just as you get almost past, but still nicely in reach, she will thrust both hind feet skyward, as if performing the Highland fling before an audience of thousands. Hoofs will flash past your head making you flinch in terror and manure will splatter all over you. And that’s if she misses. If she connects, well, all I can say is ouch.

More of a nuisance than a danger is the Rope-Chewing Chaser. These calves can’t seem to get enough fiber in their diet, no matter how much forage they eat. If they are tied properly with collars and chains they cause few problems, but woe betide the farmer who ties one up with some handy dandy bailing twine. Sweet little calfie-poo will gaze introspectively ceiling ward without a care in the world, all the while contemplatively chewing and eating the rope that ties her up, the one that holds her water bucket, and any loose twine she finds lying around too. Besides being the one that is running gleefully up and down the aisle every time you come to the barn, she is also the one who has all kinds of tummy problems caused by eating string.

There is a whole subset of calves that become apparent when someone begins training for the show season. First is the Thick-Headed Thrower calf. These little fools don’t seem to realize that the most pampered and beloved calves in the world grow up in a show string. As soon as a calf of this type has a halter placed on her noggin (which is apparently empty) and is asked to come along quietly, she revolts ala Gandhi.

She rolls her eyes, tosses her head, throws herself up side down (preferably in the gutter) and lies there as if taken suddenly dead. No amount of pulling or cajoling will induce her to stand up until she is positive that she has won the battle. Calves of this sort miss all the fun of going to the fair and being patted, puffed and coddled all together.

People-Pinching-Punchers are an alternative form of show calf. They are all too happy to move, but are lacking in both braking mechanism and spatial judgment. A PPP calf will squash you flat against a wall in the blink of an eye. She will also gladly drag you to the wash rack at a canter without regard to obstacles, such as people, baby strollers, Hereford bulls the size of semis, or mounds of hay bales belonging to someone else. PPP’s will clear lawn chairs and leap tall buildings at a single bound. Nobody likes them; everybody has them.

Then there are the Toe-Tapping-Topplers. These little sweethearts neither play dead nor run over your prone body (after they render it that way). Instead a TTT bides her time, strolling elegantly around the show ring, head held high and proud, looking like the star of the show that she knows she is. Then, just when the judge, (and all the spectators), are looking right at her (and you, of course), she steps firmly on your foot anchoring you solidly in place. She then nudges you firmly with her shoulder, dumping you neatly into the shavings in the ring. (At least you hope it is only shavings.) Every one laughs and you look monumentally silly. Your foot hurts like heck too.

The garden pond is beginning to shape up a little

Naturally, not unlike the Plain Old Polly milk cow, who does her job day in and day out without theatrics or fanfare, there is the Lovely-Little-Lady calf. LLL’s don’t kick, bite, or run rampant through the barn raising Cain. These ordinary critters stay where they are put, eat cow feed instead of body parts, and treat people with respect and affection. We have one of those right now; a KPat daughter named Frieland KPat Evidence. (We call her Evie). One of Becky’s babies, she stands tied on the corner of a busy walkway, right next to the curb where we like to sit while we wait for the last few cows to finish milking. We avoid tying calves there when we can, as they turn into KBB’S or HKH’s very quickly and make everybody miserable when they sit there resting their tired feet. However, Evie just eats, moves her fanny out of your way when you walk by, and lays her head in any convenient lap (if ear scratches are offered by the lap’s owner). Needless to say I wouldn’t mind having a dozen Evies. However, like all barns, ours is full of all the other kinds.

***Evie is out at pasture now expecting her first calf. She will join the milking string next month I think. However, as in a normal spring we have a barn full of KBBs HKHs and several sweet little LLLS, notably November, Simple Miracles, Egypt, Dalkeith and Asaki

Tales from the key drive

Here is yet another Farm Side from 2001. Seems I have to spend the milk check this morning. And Alan did get to read Last of the Breed in study hall after I had a long, intense (very intense) visit with his well-meaning, but very young teacher.

It was one of those days. First the car wouldn’t start so the kids had to walk to the bus. Horrors. All the way down that long, winding driveway with no warm car, no radio, no mother to referee their tribal warfare. I’ll bet they were permanently scarred. Because the car wouldn’t start I had to go right back over to the barn to finish milking and cleaning up instead of sloping off to Fultonville to “move”. We are, of course, still moving and probably will be for the next fifty years or so. Most days I go to town after the bus leaves and pack still more of my hundreds of books into cardboard cartons from the liquor store. This is a big improvement over scraping cow deposits off concrete if you catch my drift. Anyhow, the mood I was in when I got the call from school was not pretty. Especially since, after we pushed the car across the yard to get it out of the way of a truck bringing in concrete, it started just fine.

A stern voice informed me that one of my evil little brats had failed to bring a swimsuit for gym. Three times. I was horrified. That kind of malfeasance ranks right up there with armed robbery in my book. I pointed out (obviously wrongly); that I didn’t think that this was such a terrible thing. Swimming is supposed to be fun. Let the little wrongdoer sit on the bench and watch her buddies a couple of times and I’ll bet she’ll remember the suit next time. No such luck-she is going to be serving detention, and after school detention at that, for her outrageous transgression.

I had to laugh. What a truly horrible punishment for a farm kid. Staying after school. Wow, she won’t have time to water the horses or feed the sheep or turn out cows if she gets home late enough. Somebody else will do her chores for her and she’ll be forced to just sit there and read. Wanna bet that she forgets her swimsuit more often after this?

Same day. Two hours later. Another of my little monsters came home with the news that he will also be serving detention-the kinder, gentler, lunch commons kind, for bringing the wrong book to study hall. This is the kid we have been trying to convince to read for years. He rolled through most of Gary Paulsen’s survival and adventure stories like a rocket sled. Then nothing appealed to him until he stumbled across a Louis L’Amour novel that I had recently moved. It was a big, thick grownup book about the former Soviet Union. I rejoiced to find him reading it in bed instead of coming when I called him for supper. He hadn’t even heard me.

When he was punished for reading that same book, I was outraged. I called the school and demanded an explanation. I was informed that although reading in study hall was ok, specific books were required. He’d forgotten his.

And after all the school is trying to teach children about real life. What would happen if they grew up and went to a meeting and forgot an important paper? I pointed out that we were talking eleven-year-old here, not Bill Gates, but I guess he’d better start planning his corporate future. I became a little crazy.

Real life.

Come on, this kid lives on a farm. They don’t make life any realer than that.

Kids growing up on farms are smack dab in the middle of real life. They see it all from birth to death. Birth isn’t some sanitized Bambi scene on a made for TV movie. It’s pain and blood and triumph and tragedy. Real life, right there in living color.

Everyone on a farm is involved in the process of life. Mistakes have real consequences far beyond eating lunch in the detention room, for death stalks the barns and pastures as well. If you have a hundred or so domestic animals in your world, not to mention thousands of wild ones, some of them, sometimes, will die. And they don’t go away to Tarzan’s elephant graveyard for a tidy, sanitized little secret death either, they do it right there in front of you, sometimes right in your hands. This summer one of the kids’ calves was born with a congenital defect and choked on her milk and died right there in the barn aisle at feeding time. There were plenty of tears and sadness, but the rest of the calves still had to be fed, so everyone, children included, picked up the pieces and went on.

Old cows die too, or are sold. Coyotes eat the barn cats. Sometimes they eat calves too and chickens, bunnies or anything they can find. That’s real life. Unfortunate, but real.

Our kids are a part of our business as well. When times are rough they know it. When things go well they share in the joy. Their help is important to us and they know that too. If a farm kid forgets to water the horses, then somebody has to go out with a flashlight, couple up the hoses and do it in the dark. If they serve detention and get home late, then someone else feeds their dog or hauls a wheelbarrow of hay to the sheep. My terrible little book-forgetting boy sits down with me when I’m doing the farm bookkeeping and writes checks, addresses envelopes and posts the checks on the computer. He drives the skid steer better than I do. I suspect that these activities will get him ready for real life in a way that in-school punishment never could.

It’s an everyday thing for a farm family. Our life, you might say.

And it’s a meaningful life too. Full and rich and satisfying.

My farm kids may forget to bring their swimsuits to important meetings or take the wrong book to the pool, but they’ll do the real stuff well-they always have.

A guest

We have been waiting...and waiting..it is so darned cold this spring. Oh, yeah, we had that one week of seventy degree temperatures that brought out the flower buds. Then the cold came back and froze them. Since then average temps are about twenty degrees below normal. Hard on the bees, rough on the woodpile and not so popular with the hummingbirds.


Which have been so very late in showing up this spring. I have had the feeder out and been changing the food in it for over a month to no avail. I notice that the neighbors have theirs out too. Then yesterday, as we all sat in our Sunday chairs, a little female came to the big window and hovered in front of it as if to announce, "We're here!!" (I honestly believe that the hummers know who fills the feeders.)



She was gone in a flash, buzzing off to the front porch feeder. Then when I looked out through the porch doors this little guy was sleeping there on a flowerpot handle on the porch about three feet from the living room door. I think the hummingbirds may have had a rough migration or the cold and rain is giving them a tough time. Anyhow my photographic efforts made him buzz off to the mountain ash tree where they usually hang out (sorry about that).


However, this morning at just before sun up I looked out and there he was again, same flower pot, same pose. Poor guy looked about half frozen.




What an honor to have a hummingbird share our shelter. If I thought he would come inside I would prop the doors open. However, this time I won't disturb him, but rather let him sit there until the sun warms him...if it warms up enough today to do so.

***Sorry about the blurry shots, taken through both storm and regular door.

The coolest thing

Here are some folks moving their church and doing it in style too!



HT to John's World

Road trip once again

My Brand new chauffeur

Bought these to plant beside the front flower bed

Sat here for a while while the chauffeur loaded some hay.

The boss went out to plant corn yesterday and left Alan a stack 'o chores...go to Fort Plain Agway and get barn calcite. The cows are going in and out to pasture now. (You should have seen the rodeo the first day they went out...you simply wouldn't think that dairy cows could or would get up to such stuff. Made the PBR look tame. We don't want them to slip on the floor.) Then head up to the farm where we buy hay and get a load. Not any huge tasks, but a busy schedule just the same.

Anyhow, the kid asked me to ride along. There were any number of reasons why I should have stayed home. The house has been virtually entirely neglected the past few weeks while I have been helping with cows and playing in the garden. My beans need to be replanted as the first planting failed. Ditto potatoes. I could go on and on. But then, how many teen aged boys want their mother along when somebody turns them loose with a pick up truck and a tank of gas?

I climbed in, rolled down the window and away we went and it was so much fun. The sun was shining, it was just warm enough to feel like summer might be coming and the grass was green as Ireland. When we picked up the barn cal, Agway had some fat sassy marigolds for sale. I'd been wanting some for a certain flower bed so into the truck they went. Then there was the aquarium store in Canajoharie. (They have guppies you know.) The kid was delighted to stop in for me. Some women may consider diamonds a girl's best friend, but I am much more fond of sparkly little fish. We bought a pair with white shiny tails and a couple of black snaky patterned ones.

Then we headed off down the winding back roads to where we are buying hay from some friends. Everyone is planting corn apace and the fields look better tended than my living room rug, with the rows from the corn planter still stamped on the smoothly crumbled soil. Our friends live well back in the country, away from all the trains and the Interstate so it was sweetly quiet sitting in one of their back barn yards watching the swallows swoop by. (That is a small part of their place above...took the pictures out the truck window.) Alan hooked up the hay elevator and had the truck full in no time.

All too soon it was time to take our booty and head home. We spent the rest of the afternoon companionably working out in the yard....him tearing down the DR string trimmer that belonged to his grandma. Me planting marigolds and weeding. The dishes didn't get done. The lilac bushes didn't get planted. The DR still doesn't run. (Even after a new spark plug, a cleaned out fuel line, all kinds of priming and pumping and pulling on the starter cord.) Other than a stack of hay and a couple boxes of orange and yellow we didn't have much to show for how we spent our time when the boss came down (and of course HE got a third of the sixty-acre lot all planted.)

However, I couldn't have asked for a better day. The kid and I had a heck of a time...and all that other stuff can get done today....or maybe tomorrow.

***Not to mention, later on I ran in the house during milking to get some bread out to thaw and Liz was right smack in the middle of watching the Preakness. Got to see Big Brown romp as if he was out for a sleepy morning gallop. What a horse!

Saturday

Hal Ketchum

Thanks to brother number one Liz and I were able to get tickets to his concert at the Egg last night, sort of as an early birthday present for her from me. It was a great concert; we had a terrific time....but it was a little weird in a way. Most of the audience, there is no doubt in my mind, take the same multi-vitamin that I do...you know, the kind that are sort of grey only they call them silver. Add to that the fact that the Egg is a very genteel venue. There were ushers and rules and all that stuff. However, then you had to factor in that Hal and his band play very powerful rock and roll, blues-type country music. Everyone sat very quietly through each song as if at a performance of a nice Beethoven sonata.

Then as soon as each song ended the crowd erupted in whistles and screams and barrages of clapping. After the last song there was at least a five minute standing ovation (which achieved the desired result of us getting to hear Small Town Saturday Night, without which the evening would have been somehow lacking.) My favorite song was Past the Point of Rescue, which has always been one that I really liked even before I knew who Hal was. We also really like a new (to us) song, Yesterday's Gone.

It was a great night, worth the insanity of hitting exit 24 at rush hour (remind me to tell you about the loonies in 2 little cars that squirted through between us and four solid lines of flying traffic. . It was like a billion-dollar thrill ride in some macabre theme park. (Thank God for Lizzie's youthful reaction times.) I felt exactly like those folks you see in advertisements for the world's biggest roller coaster, white-knuckled-clingingto-the-door and all. I had my eyes shut most of the way. Liz wanted to close hers too.....however it seemed as if one of us should keep them open...and she was the one driving.)

Even the time we spent waiting for the show to begin was entertaining, thanks to some folks sitting behind us...we now know more than we could ever ask about how comfortable men's undies can be for women and several other topics that extended my cultural outlook immeasurably..

Guitar player Kenny Grimes

Bassist Keith Carper

***Pictures were taken with the little camera. An email to the Egg said some folks allow cameras, some don't. I figured the little one was more discrete in case Hal was a don't kind of guy. Of course he wasn't. Wish I had taken the big one...as you can imagine from the quality of the photos.

Here is a review
The reviewer kind of whined about Hal's story telling, but Liz and I loved it. He was so very funny. Little things like the wonders of modern technology in the studio and liquid song enhancement, along with tales of his youth here in upstate NY

Video from some other year at the Egg

Another shot, also showing drummer Nico Leophonte

****My humble apologies to anyone who read this while I was milking this morning. I got up at four to check a cow that calved last night and I simply wasn't in any way capable of coherent editing...not that I am now really, but at least I can see.

Nothin' much

Going on around here. Everything is turning green and it is most welcome. It is finally nicer to be outdoors than in, although today it is raining a bit. This morning when I walked over from the barn a robin was singing in the honey locust by the kitchen, a baltimore oriole from the box elder by the back door and there was a mockingbird on the swing set....not to mention a couple of titmice and a contingent of gold finches. As I said to the boss, we may not be have money, but we sure are rich. The wrens are back in the pillar on the front porch too. I treated myself yesterday and took the plastic insulation off the stained glass window doors so I can open them to watch them. I usually pull the plastic down in April, but it has been really cold this spring.




My dad likes to give me chairs. (And I like to get them.) These are two of several rockers and parlor chairs he has found and donated to me over the years. I love them all, but these two are particular favorites.


Besides their inherent beauty and sheer comfortableness, there is the sense of history about them. Antique Boston rockers...you have to envision mothers rocking babies, grandmothers with one foot keeping a cradle in motion, and both hands winding yarn....or perhaps a tired father holding an ailing little one and rocking him for comfort.


And then there is the fact that my daughters like to sit in them to talk to me. (They are right across from my Sunday chair.) That is why they are positioned as they are in this photo...the girls sat here to chat about their days and mine the other day. It was nice.

Lilac rustlers

I was supposed to write the Farm Side today.

And I honestly tried.

But the house is abuzz with everybody home.

And the boss offered to help me rustle lilacs.

I mean what would you do faced with such choices? I am just inside to now to see if you can root lilac cuttings with rooting hormone. Web research says yes, so I am gonna give her a go.

We also got some rooted suckers. We had to clamber down a challenging, brush covered slate bank over by the barn, just beyond the old falling down house where the boss lived when he was growing up. I am all scratched up but I'll bet it will be worth it.

He planted those lilacs for his mom when he was a little boy. The house down in town is surrounded by a number of them that I rustled back when we lived down there, but up here on the Dimond Farm side of the place there are only a few plain purple ones and a dwarf pink that I brought up (all frost nipped this year). We are hoping some of the ones we brought out of the jungle are the reddish ones that were Grandma Peggy's favorites. There are some spindly peony bushes over there too, valiantly sending up buds, despite being shaded by dozens of invading honeysuckles and box elders and who knows what all. I think I will see if Alan will dig those for me.....and maybe get a piece of the forsythia the boss planted by the foundation when he was just a tyke....

Farm Romance

Another old Farm Side column from 2001. This is for Liz who is over at school, bored and needing something to read. (Love ya kiddo!)

At nearly eleven one night, on the way home from a milk-marketing cooperative meeting, I was restively dodging deer and drunks and desperately anticipating the toast that was to take the place of my long delayed dinner, when my attention was riveted. In the middle of a feverish mulling over of PPD’s, hauling and handling, and distances from distant cities, a catalog of one hundred ways to inject romance into your committed relationship assaulted my overtaxed brain. A dreamy couple on the radio suggested strewing a path of rose petals through the house leading to a romantic, candlelight dinner. This almost caused me to drive into the Erie Canal. Maybe I’m too practical, but my first thought was, “Where the heck would you get rose petals?” The second was that anyone who wanted to strew them on my floors in a discernible path would have to shovel out all the dog hair, sand and other debris that was strewn there first.

Then, if I attempted to serve a meal by candlelight, my significant other would fall asleep with his head on the table and catch his hair on fire. Just how romantic is a fire extinguisher anyhow? This is Spring Work time. He starts his chores at four thirty and gets done long after Liz and I finish milking. His idea of a romantic meal would probably be a McDonald’s fish fillet served on the fender of a tractor with a side order of bug repellent. Or maybe a citronella candle would seem more intimate than a can of Off! .

The radio show had many additional suggestions for spicing up a stale relationship, but, as I said, the marketing data I had been asked to digest in place of dinner had overheated my tiny brain. Therefore I went online and found Gregory G. P. Godey’s book, 10,000 Ways to Say I Love You

Here is suggestion number two. “Sign your letters ‘forever and a day’.” Since most of the letters I send to and receive from my spouse are instructions about farm work, this could be interesting. Here’s a representative sample. On a Post It note stuck to side of bulk tank: “Ralph, the vet said that number 39 had a retained placenta. You’ll have to pill her,” (the vet did NOT mean by mouth), “ The repair shop called about the tractor. They say it will be fixed as soon as possible. But they have to order the parts, Forever and a day.” Yeah, or at least it will seem that way.

Suggestion number 8, “ Place a heart-shaped sticker on your wristwatch to remind you to call”. Yeah, OK, if I can find my watch under the assorted, encrusted barnyard material. And call whom? The trucker? It would take more than a sticker to remind me to call him during the early morning, pre-school-bus feeding frenzy at this place. Try a note covering the entire computer screen-that might get my attention.

Romantic suggestion number nine: “Squeeze into phone booths together”. Now why would we want to do that? And where would we find a phone booth? Besides, we have a pickup truck and three kids. That can cause all sorts of close encounters. With a few sandwiches and something to drink in the cooler, pile children on your lap or have them sit on tires in the back among the fence tools, gas cans and bales of twine. Bounce frantically up the lane to wherever you are working. The kids can have a picnic while you chop hay and he hauls loads to the barn. Now that’s romance.

Which brings us to “His and Hers”. Our romantic list maker suggested “His and Hers” everything, from towels to Porsches. I’m happy with clean towels that I don’t have to pick up off the floor before I use them. Who cares about the monogram? What good would a Porsche be with our driveways? One trip and it would be marooned until July. I was thinking maybe “His and Hers” shovels. Then maybe I could find mine when I want to scrape off on my side of the barn. But then again, I tried “His and hers” screwdrivers. You’d be amazed how fast a man gets accustomed to shocking pink and florescent orange tools, when he can’t find his and hers are right there in the toolbox. My little pink-handled screwdriver is in the milkhouse right now, 1.2 miles from my toolbox. The big Craftsman ones that he bought me as a romantic Christmas gift are either on tractors or lost in the sand behind the toolshed. An orange-handled hammer that once belonged to me has been turned over to cow barn use, provided the old, loose-headed one in the kitchen stays in the kitchen.

Suggestion number 17, “Shoot your TV”. Now that I could really get into, as long as they leave my computer alone. I have yet to find anything romantic about John Wayne’s gravelly voice interrupting my sleep at some ungodly hour because the boss and/or the kids fell asleep in front of the infernal tube again.

“Get a bumper sticker that reflects his view of life”. Now there’s a suggestion. As long as he considers Border Collies to be the world’s smartest dogs, that is. I’ve got another good bumper sticker that reads, “Cow Dog Cadillac”, but there isn’t room for it on my bumper. Do you suppose that means that it’s time for a new car? Hint, hint.

Then Mr. Godey has a list of gift suggestions. He recommends all sorts of items from books to perfume and wine. As far as perfume goes, I figure all a farm wife really needs is a dab or two of WD-40 on her wrists and she’s good to go. Any parts manual will do for a book, or in our house, one of Horace Backus’ Holstein books always supplies smiles.

As you can see, romance on the farm just does not compare to the city version. We don’t have time for such nonsense. However, on the other side of the issue, we have sunrises and sunsets that rival drive-in movies for romantic value, birds that sing every chorus you could wish for, a family that shares our every activity and a sense of humor that allows me to write stuff like this and stay married, right honey? Honey?

Those were sure the days. If one of the kids sat on my lap now....but we still have a lot of fun together and farm romance hasn't changed a bit...now where is my WD-40......

More on the DFA fund transfer issue

From Dairy Today.

Other links: Dairy Alert
Letter (pdf) from management

Winding down way too slowly

Liz's internship that is. She will be done with being gone most of the time on the thirtieth of this month. Milking other cows, feeding other calves, driving strange machines, mixing feed and working harder than we have ever asked her to. Plus graining our cows, as she gets more milk out of them for less feed than anyone else even when she leaves a feeding list. Becky tried for a while, but we went through five tons of grain in ten days. Ouch. The boss did it for a while too, but we dropped several hundred pounds of milk. I know she is looking forward to the end too.

She has done a good job and the kind folks who took her as an intern keep joking that she has a whole month left or teasing me about keeping her. Even though I see her for a snatch of minutes every day I miss her with a gnawing ache.We all go about our business, but we don't laugh as much as usual. Normally some silly darned thing gets us going a couple times a week...like Napoleon...and we laugh until we cry. (In fact there has only been one liquid through the nasal passages incident among the offspring in months.) I keep hearing that it is all normal for kids to leave and this is a good way to start the process slowly. After all, her friends have interned in places like Utah. At least we do see her every day. However we are all so darned close that when anyone is gone there is a wrongness about the house. An empty place in the completeness and complexity of things. And she is just so darned tired I worry every time she gets in her truck to go.

We are going to have a celebration on the 31st, a lovely Saturday, complete with her regular morning off back. Pizza, favorite soft drinks, any extravagance I can think of. Then I hope normal will take over, although maybe the old routine is gone forever. Or maybe it will be better than ever.

Clan Montgomery and how to tell boy cats from girl cats

My mom and dad
Happy Mother's Day, mama!!!

The camera wanted to get a picture of my folks and they were right down in town for Heritage Day, so it led me down there yesterday. I was hoping they would be in full Scottish regalia (my dad cuts a fine figure in a kilt) as they often are when representing Clan Montgomery, but alas no kilt.




Which brings us to how you tell a boy cat from a girl cat. (This is much simpler than most folks believe btw.) Simply give the little critter the remote control and watch its reaction. (This one is obviously a boy don't you think? He hogs the remote even when there isn't any baseball to watch.)

And please excuse the blur. He doesn't ever seem to sit still.

Independent dog

A dog lucky enough to own one of these doesn't need his owner any more....except to pay the electric bill and run the can opener...(or maybe this little dog can run the can opener too.) This is certainly something border collie owners could get behind. Mike, for example, could have really used one in his younger days....back when he wore out several cans of tennis balls in his spare time.
HT to NY Cowboy

Growing lettuce indoors

Seems that Northview and my Garden Records blog both turn up often in searches for growing lettuce indoors. (I don't have time this morning to lookie and linkie, but if you want to read former posts on the topic a quick blog search will find them.) I will briefly repeat what we have learned about the topic, so searchers don't have to search further when they land here..

To simplify things: You CAN grow lettuce indoors. Easily. Very, very easily. Just sow some seed in a flower pot or almost any other container (we have even used a Styrofoam cooler), keep it moist until it germinates and either put it in your sunniest window or under a grow light. You can cover the pot or container with a bit of plastic wrap to help keep things moist until the seeds start to grow. (It will consume a pretty good amount of water once it is growing well too.) Then just wait a few weeks and your crop will be ready to eat.

We started doing this a couple years ago, just as an experiment, and have eaten lettuce all winter ever since. Even though it is summer now, I am starting some in hanging baskets to give away. I think a handy basket of lettuce right next to the back door beats having to walk down to the garden every time you want a sandwich, even if you grow lettuce there too.

I grow all of mine, even in summer, in cut off plastic barrels, keeping it clean, relatively slug-free and sorta-kinda-half way out of reach of marauding bunnies
. I wish indoor lettuce searchers good luck and lots of lovely salad!