How About Blue

Sunday Stills...the Color Pink

Almost nothing but trees in bloom yet here, so this is the best I could do.


For more Sunday Stills.....

Farming

Is that puppy tied up?

We still are. Or at least the boss is. He mowed the first hay yesterday in the Old Spreader field and we are hoping for enough heat and wind to dry it so he can bale it. If not he will chop it. We've been buying feed for months and although the cows are at pasture the heifers still need to be fed. It would be nice to have our own.


The robins fledged this morning. Must have been very early as they were gone when I went out to sit on the porch and talk on the phone with my boy who is working in the city today. It sure is interesting to hear his tales of life and construction in the Big Apple. Whole nother world down there.


I guess I will keep this rural, bright green paradise of a world for now, despite the money to be made in the city. Our tire guy (who is a real nice fella, as is his whole family) stopped by to pick up a forgotten tool yesterday and remarked on how peaceful it was out among the green trees and fields and how much he would like to live here. Sometimes it is easy to forget all that when the snow is blowing and stuff is breaking down right and left. Takes somebody else's eyes to remind us.

O is for Oriole

This female Baltimore Oriole decided to be friendly after the catbird chased her away. Maybe she figured that I would keep him off her oranges.

Darth Catbird

I was wearing the camera around my neck when I went out to hang up laundry.
I was rewarded by this lovely lady eating oranges.

Suddenly, as I was click, click, clicking, Darth Catbird swooped out of the sky and pounced. 
She was gone in a flash. 

The catbird seat

Sometimes Red

Is my favorite color....or at least Broadway is my favorite cow. (click to embiggen my dear old girl)


**I actually prefer blues and greens, but I love them red cows

Caption This

In the comments, please. Thanks

Late

Or at least a lot later than usual. Hay delivery this morning. Man putting tires on the skid steer now. Place is so busy you don't even know which way to look.


We dodged a big bullet with the storms last night, which went about everywhere but here and included hail and lots of bad wind and really strange cloud features. We just got a little rain and some minor wind....and I am very grateful.


And that is about it for today....sorry....

Robin Song

 Nobody knows....

 The trouble I've seen....

 Nobody knows..the trouble I've seen....

 Glory hallelujah! Nobody knows....

 Oops, oh, hi dad....

And you call yourselves thrushes! I'm hiring a music tutor today!

Twenty Feet

From the clothesline a buttercup-bright yellow warbler collects dandelion fluff til his beak looks like a pillow fight. Somebody is sure going to have a cozy nest.


Then the line jumps in my hand....a song sparrow lands, right beside me. He glares and grabs a sunflower seed and jumps back into the sky. 


And that is what I get for leaving the camera indoors.

How to Gut a Small Town

Is our goose cooked?

Somebody in Cleveland has it in for tiny Fultonville.
 Key Corp. is closing our little hometown bank. This particular bank has won national awards for customer service and is a wonderful, friendly, and comfortable place to do business. The folks who work there are competent and caring, always helpful, and darned good at their jobs.


Fultonville itself is a neat little village, composed of around 700 folks, and it has a lot of home town, small town character. We lived here for a few years when I was a kid and I have always loved it. I was delighted to move back when I married the boss some 27 years ago. It has survived massive multi-year construction projects that shuttered stores and choked traffic for months.


 It has gotten by when its industries closed their doors and moved away. It managed to continue after being split in half by the passage of the Thruway, suffered through the closing of the railroad tracks, and dozens of other metamorphoses that might have killed a weaker place.


It is a town surrounded by dozens of farms, powered partly by the machinery dealers that support them, and a central hub to a rapidly growing Amish population. For such a small place it is pretty darned vibrant.


The bank, which has metamorphosized a time or two itself, has always stood strong in the center of town, right next to the post office and a popular diner. My first bank account was held by that bank. Our kids have had accounts there since they were born...literally....We do all our business there now.


However, somebody in Cleveland decided that we can now drive to Johnstown, a city to the north of us....a nice enough city, but not home, through still more construction (it is nothing to sit in Fonda for an hour waiting for a flagman) to do business with strangers. 


People in town are horrified, angry, and hurt by this cavalier decision to tear the heart out of the center of our town. If the way our phone was ringing yesterday is any indication, this is not going to be forgotten quickly. There is talk of protest walks and plans for irate phone calls to a certain city in Ohio.


Shame on Key Corp for not taking a closer look at the importance of the bank to the surrounding community and acting accordingly.

Weird, Just Weird

Lovely Lovage, my favorite herb...kinda...

Of course it is raining again...still...whatever...good people in other states are working themselves to the bone trying to get irrigation water on their land while we drown in more water than anyone could possibly need. What is up with the weather anyhow? It's weird.

Sounds are traveling so oddly. I just jumped up to see who had pulled their car up next to the house and gotten out....and the answer to that question is nobody at all. Same as it has been all morning, car after ghostly car, nobody there, nobody anywhere...weird.

A little earlier a huge flock...maybe 150 or 200...of something flew west up the river, really, really fast. They were too small for geese I think, and wings were beating too fast as well, but I have never seen such a gigantic flock of ducks lined out in loose multiple Vs like that. They were traveling so fast that I never got the binocs on them enough for a good ID. 

But they sure were weird.

I am hoping that endless monsoon rains are not our new normal, but it sure is beginning to look that way. Ah, well, just about time to go vote on the school budget....speaking of weird.

Rain with Orioles

 Growing up and beginning to outgrow some of the helldogginess.

 He will now sit at the pointing of a finger..........sometimes.......

Kinda creepy out, low-hanging clouds leaking slowly, spreading gloom and mud in their wake....a plane is rumbling by, seems to be flying very slowly, or maybe just the sound is going slowly. The Orioles are stabbing the oranges, ripping out the red-gold hearts-how cool to so perfectly match the food....although I don't suppose that I would like to resemble either a steak or a potato...oh, wait.


We keep Velvet in the barnyard every night, so she stays out of the swamp in the night pasture. Thinking about running a temporary fence around that puppy. Never been a problem before, but years of rain seem to have changed that.

One of the reasons those robins get so emotional when I go out on the porch

At least it is green, an almost eye-searing green, I can't stop looking at it.


Stay dry!

Happy Mother's Day

Love you mom! Thanks for a lifetime of positive influence...so very rare among us negative, glass is entirely empty, Montgomery folks. Hope your special day is wonderful! Dotter

Hey You

Yes, you!

You grumpy old, frumpy old, mean old lady in the bright yellow sweatshirt!

Yeah, you're the one I'm talking to.

Get offa our porch and get inside so we can sit on our egglings. It's cold out here you know....

 Now getchu gone!

Oh, No

John Bunting, who is perhaps the dean of dairy bloggers,  certainly a man who knows more about the dairy industry than almost any one I have ever met, is seriously ill. Prayers have been requested. 

Humble

The kid is back in the Big Apple, away at his off-farm job, and so very not here......... although through the wonders of Net and cell phone we keep pretty close all the same.


The other day job training took him to the World Trade Center site. He said that, as he walked down the street by the site, he felt humbled and awed and thought a lot about all the good people who lost their lives there. He wants to take me down to the city so we can look for Carl DiFranco's name on the memorial.


I was humbled that he even reads this blog, and that, while he was doing such exciting new stuff that is going to be so big in his life, he remembered that other young man, so tragically murdered along with thousands of other innocents, by enemies of our nation and our way of life. And touched...I was touched....


I hope I get to make that trip....seems very fitting somehow....

Habit

Right now we are using two pastures although we will soon open a third. The girls go to the old cow pasture in the day time and the heifer pasture at night.


They have been doing this since the men got the cow pasture fence finished.


Now, even if given the choice to travel to the larger, grassier, shadier and all around nicer cow pasture at night, they will not go without a fight.


The other night when the girls were bringing Velvet down, we had planned on putting them in the day field at night, so they wouldn't stomp the poor little critter any further into the swamp.


They had other thoughts and as soon as the gate was opened they charged up the lane to their accustomed night time accommodations.


Then the boss forgot to close the gate to the day field last night, so when we turned out, the cows could have chosen to go that way, while the heifer field gate was shut. 


They were so eager to get into the heifer pasture that I had to jump out of the way of old Lakota when I opened the gate. You sure don't want to get between them and where they are going in all this mud. Your feet can get stuck and if they brush against you, you are down.


When we were digging Velvet out Liz got stuck and twisted and fell and I thought sure she was going to break a leg. We have a lot of clay soil and it sure is gummy and sticky. Thanks to lots of milk though, her young, strong bones held up to the insult though.

WW

Mud Bogging

With cows is not much fun. Little Velvet of near death fame did it again night before last. When Liz and I brought down the cows for morning milking yesterday, she was found up to her elbows in muck in a swampy place and absolutely unable to move. There was no way to get a tractor or skid steer anywhere near her because of all this lovely rain so the four of them...boss and kids...pulled her up on dry ground by main strength. (Other cows have been walking there for decades.....)


Once again she wouldn't get up.


Come evening chores the girls went up and rolled her up on her chest. Still wouldn't get up.


After milking they went up with some medicine for her. She took one look at the syringe and calmly clambered to her feet....effortlessly..... and strolled down to greet them. They took her halter, led her down to the barn, hand milked her because she wouldn't step up in her stall, and locked her in the barn yard for the night. She was entirely content to munch on a big pile of Uncle Rich's best hay and commune with the pen heifers.


See these grey hairs? My kids didn't do it. It was cows.


Meanwhile, the boy is back in NYC and much missed. It is pouring and predicted to do so for a good while. (I shudder to see it rain. Wasn't last year bad enough?) 


Still I am sitting here at the kitchen table with the door open and cold, wet air rolling in, listening to the birds calling (no peacock cacophony today )and enjoying the fresh, bright way it smells. I have seen 27 species of birds in the past week without ever leaving the house and barn yard. Pretty cool.