Actually I have been working on something along these lines, but John Gray said it better than I ever could in this opinion piece in the Troy Record. I guess I will scrap mine and defer to his.
Good job Mr. Gray! Thanks for saying what a lot of us New Yorkers are thinking!
And here is a link to a story about how PeTA saves animals...or not.
Have in common? The answer to this pressing question: Alan is the common denominator. He got the chaps thrown in the deal with his new saw and he made the hats. Becky taught herself to crochet from a little book while home on break this winter. He was watching her, decided to try it and made himself the light green hat. Then he made me the dark green one, which will henceforth be my Sunday-go-to-meeting hat. Great answers in the comments though! I especially like Steve's offerings (freste).
Mike is fascinated by the newbie, wagging his tail with approval
The new baby, who is still in the house at this moment, (but probably won't be for too much longer), is probably the nicest looking Jersey calf we have had born here at Northview....She is long and tall and straight....which is just a little weird. Years ago, back when we were occasionally making enough money to do so, we bought Dreamroad Extreme Heather, an exceptionally well-bred Jersey from a nationally known breeder to pay Liz for a summer's work.
Right from the get-go Liz has chosen the bulls she bred Heather to, as well as making the matings for her offspring. (And there have been quite a number of those, as she has been very lucky in the heifer department.) The resulting animals are nice ones and she has done well in the show ring with them. She has used well-respected bulls, such as C'gar, Mecca, TNT, Top Flight, and Moments.
This year she didn't have a chance to pick up any top-notch bulls for two of her girls so she bred Hooter and Hazel to a bull we had in the tank for use on small first calf Holstein heifers. We sometimes buy very cheap ones for this purpose and we happened to have a five-dollar critter named Duce in the tank. Who would have expected that this random, cheapest thing the Select Sire Power guy happened to have in his tank, bull would make such a great looking baby? Sometimes randomness works I guess.
This week's challenge was sunrises and sunsets. Didn't have one single pretty sunrise, except after I was over at the barn and couldn't get a pic, so these are all sunsets.
Becky found our old sheep BS dead this morning. It was no surprise, but we are still sad about it. She was at least thirteen years old....we got her from my cousin when Mike was a young dog to be a training sheep along with several other sheep. Over the years we sold most of them.
Up until today our remaining flock consisted of just old BS and her daughter Freckles, both so old we have to keep them in with the pony in the winter. Last week BS stopped wanting to get up, but she kept eating and drinking and seemed pretty cheerful, and yesterday she was working on getting on her feet. We figured she had turned the corner for the better. Sadly it was not to be.
5:45 AM Get up to a cold house. Really cold. 6 degrees outside and the stove wood bridged. No fire. No heat. Thank God for the oil furnace (and the boss who put some oil in the tank the other day). Fire 'er up. Old dogs out. Old dogs in. Nick out. Nick in.
Get everybody out of bed early and chase them out to stove and barn. First coffee, no time to drink it...take it to the barn. The two springers we have been wanting to get inside are right at the door. Tanker day, we have to milk early. But they are right there at the door. Move Email to a new stall so we can use hers for a heifer. Move my brand spanking new Citation R Maple baby down to the stall next to England. (My incredibly generous son knew how bad I wanted an R Maple heifer so when his heifer, Bonneville, had one yesterday he gave her to me. What a kid.) Find a collar for Broadway as all that is open for use is one stanchion (now that Email is moved) and one tie stall.
Liz, the cow whisperer, tolls the new ones in and we put them in stalls. Thank God she has that magical way with cows. Neither of these two have had a hand on them since last spring, but they follow her gentle cajoling and the grain scoop right to their stalls. Broadway even stands while she buckles the collar on. I feel better now that they are in.
Start milking. Bed cows while milking. They were bedded up good last night, but it is extra cold so they get extra straw. The new stall is way too cold for the new R Maple baby. The guys nail up plastic over the cracks around the heifer pen window and then build her a little house out of insulation board. Better now. After her bottle she curls up to sleep in about a foot and a half of straw that her overindulgent new "mama" put down.
Voldemar, the second springing heifer, can't stay where we put her. She is a moosely behemoth and is stepping all over Pecan who is a nice little cow who deserves better. We have to get a new stall ready. Alan goes out to the stove some more and cuts up some pallets to get it going. (Handy that we just took them out of the stalls the calves were in so we have them right there for him.)
The girls get down more straw while I finish milking the regular string. Calves are getting hot bottles of milk whenever anyone has a minute between cows. We build a wall of straw next to some other new calves and put insulation board in a couple of drafty windows so they will be warmer. Even with calf coats it is horribly cold. It is such a tight rope act keeping an old barn comfortable in this ridiculous sixty one day and ten below the next weather. The cows need ventilation when it is warm, but the babies need warmth when the temperature drops. Geez!
Spruce is off feed when Liz grains the cows after we milk the two bucket cows, a new heifer (Bonneville) and old Beausoleil. Liz takes her temp. Lowish. Give her a bottle of calcium and put her on antibiotics because it looks as if she has an uterine infection. I won't go into details about how we know....trust me.
Set up the pipeline cleaner while the boss works on a stall. Milk truck comes, "Hi, Mark, Happy New Year, cold enough for you?": Continue chores around talking to Mark and letting him measure the milk and pump it off. He is a really nice kid and we are lucky to have him as our new driver.
Move Voldemar to a new stall. Fun, fun, fun. She now knows that if she puts her head in the stanchion she can't get it back out. The boss is smart enough to halter her and run the rope through the two stalls so she at least has no choice but to go where we want her. If she goes anywhere at all. She would prefer not to and throws her head at me, flinging the grain scoop ceilingward and jumping back into the gutter. Alan hauls her by main strength into the new stall, where once there she falls to eating as if nothing had even happened. Alan takes hay over for the pony and sheep and puts more pallets in the stove.
By then it is after ten AM. We chase Alan in to get some food for himself (for some reason having to do I guess with being a very hard working teenaged boy person he needs to eat promply and well and he is starving by now.) He wolfs five eggs and some toast and goes back to work. (I think Governor Paterson should have to follow Alan around for just one day. Just one. Maybe he would shut up about fat taxes and such.)
It is almost 11 AM now. The men are feeding cows. The girls and I are having breakfast. The poor boss has been out since six and hasn't eaten yet. Normally the cows get their main feeding after breakfast (they get fed grain and corn meal first thing) but what with the cold and the boss wanting to sit down for a few hours today they are feeding early. Sort of. Because with all the extra stuff this morning it is actually late.
Anyhow, Happy New Year. Thanks for being friends all through 2008! I am hoping you will all hang around through 2009 too and that I can visit all your blogs and read about your lives as well. Have a good one!
I am definitely an "ornery, self-obsessed, unhealthy, consumer-driven, gluttonous, idiot-box- watching troglodyte"
Or if I am not, I wanna be. (Actually I rarely watch TV, but I do read trashy novels and surf the net to excess.) I also wish I had written this on the nanny state and its ridiculous, nearly religious, all encompassing, regulatory fever.
However, David Harsanyi has done a great job, so you can just read what he thinks about outlawing loose fitting slacks, sin taxes and the loss of personal freedom in the name of government induced utopia.
Jeffro has some really amazing pictures of tractors and similar machinery that met with unfortunate circumstances. REALLY unfortunate circumstances. It is from an email, but still...... One shows where folks got a spray rig stuck in an obvious wet hole of amazing proportions. They put another tractor on the front and got that one stuck. Then another. And another. Then a big digger. Go look.
The boss bought me a tripod a very long time ago. It is a nice one. I have never used it.
However, I like to take pictures of the moon and stars and such night time type stuff, so a couple of days ago I dug it out and began going out before night milking to attempt some pictures. Nothing spectacular yet, but I am learning how so when we get some neat night sky stuff I can get it......I hope
We had a great time Saturday. The truck stuffed was with kids and grownups...a tight fit, but fun just the same (of course since they let me ride shotgun in front I probably had a better time than back seat folks.) It rained almost all day and what with riding with the window down I got pretty wet, but I can't say as I cared. We saw blue birds, more cedar waxwings than I think we have ever counted and a solid batch of the usual common birds.
There are nearly always turkeys in this field and across the road from it. This year was no disappointment as we counted a small flock in the latter.
Our greatest finds were a red shouldered hawk, (which we didn't think was any big deal but it turned out to be the first on the count,) blue birds tearing staghorn sumac apart and almost 150 mallard ducks ling the curving banks and floating on a tiny stream. The group counting the circle totaled 50 species and I think our family species count was in the twenties.
This group of ducks actually number a definite 145 and possibly more as they kept taking flight and returning making a perfect count a challenge.
Our little section of the circle is mostly rapidly developing farm land, full grown housing developments, old land fills and suburbia with a few city streets thrown in. Still if you know where to look you can find the wild places and after a couple decades of our family counting this area we know where a good many of them are.
This little pool has netted us a couple of kingfishers and some ducks over the years but this year it was barren.
Alan, Becky and I are off to do 'er today, with the brothers and family and all. Our family has a small section of the Johnstown circle, Mayfield South, that my dad started doing before the boss and I were even married.....one of our favorite holiday traditions is to drive and walk all day counting every cardinal, chickadee and other avian critter that we see. Sometimes we get so desperate for birds that we count the golden eagles on garages and blue birds on mail boxes (we don't turn them in to the offical count though.).
We do our part of our family Christmas celebrating today too, which is why yesterday was an insane whirlwind of sewing, quilting, wrapping...... and interruptions. Phone calls...you would think the darned thing was possessed the way it rang. I'll bet I jogged off five pounds of Christmas cheer jogging and dodging dogs to answer it. One call was the milk tester so we had to test last night. While we were trying to get the testing done twin calves were born almost two weeks early. Heifer and a dead bull. All you farmers know what's up with heifers born twin to a bull...usually they are freemartins and will never breed. So that was exciting.
Had a first calver have a little bull in the morning too and she was insane....wait a minute, let me write that correctly. INSANE! I have been milking next to her for a couple of weeks and we are talking hand-raised, much handled animal here. Still even with the "kickers" on and me holding her tail, she kicked the boss right in the head. Before we got her milked it took FOUR of us to hold her still....and we were at the same time trying to finish up a night's testing. Way too exciting.
She has two sisters in the herd, by two different sires, and they both are challenging as well, although one is drying up for her second calf and the other has had a bunch of them. The pundits say temperament isn't hereditary. I say hah! The original cow in this family, old Cubby, was the sweetest thing you could imagine.... a really nice, gentle old cow. Every single one of her daughters, granddaughters and auxilary offspring is miserable. Every single, solitary one of them. This new heifer, a Straight-Pine Elevation Pete daughter named Cider, stands in my line. I can barely milk old Zinnia who stands in the stall next to her without Cider kicking me. I dread the day I have to start milking the heifer by myself......
At the end of all this is a video of Lizzie's rooster, Mr. Fluff, given to her by Teri last summer. She went out to film the duck...oh, that's right I forgot to tell you about the duck.......and asked Fluff to crow for the camera so he did...do play it, he is quite a chicken.
Photo by Liz
And about the duck.....besides the phone calls, trio of calves, assorted furnace fan belt emergencies and milk testing, somebody showed up here with a big, fat, white, part Muscovy duck in their car yesterday. They said it was running down the road in front of the farm, so they brought it up to see if it was ours. It wasn't. They left it with us anyhow.
We are not exactly equipped for duck husbandry, (the turkey is still running loose in the feed room part of the hen house) so the boss took it up to Hand's and gave it to one of the girls who had lost her hen duck a few days ago.
Anyhow my word for the day was arrgggghhhhh.....but I must admit. I truly hate to be bored and really never allow my mind to get into that state if I can help it. Living here, what with people dropping offpoultry and all the other stuff that goes on, is a big help with that situation....a really big help.
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