Asleep at the......reins?

Liz and I made the grocery run today trying to beat the extreme cold that is expected to make the next week or so miserable. We wound up climbing a steep, blind, hill behind this gent. I am not sure that he was asleep, but he certainly wasn't worried too much about his driving. This is a main state highway and traffic bangs along at 55 through this area. He was doing maybe 2 at a very slow walk. His horse was tired and just plodded along, ears flopping, head nodding, almost asleep himself. We weren't in any big hurry and just pulled in behind and followed at his speed. It was certainly not safe to pass him as you couldn't see either around the curves or over the crest of the hill. I was actually kind of tickled to nab a couple of pictures of the rig.



However, there was a regular horse's pattootie behind us who was champing at the bit like he was on the way to the hospital (which if he had his way we might all have been). He ripped up behind Liz and kept jigging out into the other lane like he wanted to pass. (For you locals this is the big hill by Sowles. Not a place to pass unless you want to get up close and personal with a Wal*Mart truck traveling fifty MPH in the other direction.) He was quite irate at having to follow us and the Amish man up the hill. After a few more yards the horse driver noticed the trucks behind him, jiggled the reins and hurried the tired horse on up the hill. As soon as it was safe to do so we passed and went on our way with the impatient fellow right behind. We lost maybe half a minute of time from our trip.....had we tried to pass I suspect it might have been more. I enjoyed the quirky juxtaposition of modern and not quite so modern in meeting a horse drawn wagon on a state highway, which I suspect the guy behind us missed completely.

Spectacular Sky

We did Christmas with the brothers yesterday, with pizza, conversation and fun (and this is not pizza to be shrugged off lightly. I don't know where they get it, but it is awaited eagerly every year...pretty special stuff.)




Anyhow, besides getting to hug and enjoy lots of dearly beloved family members we were treated to a truly amazing sky on the way home last night. The sun was setting slowly, and the clouds were outlined with the most amazing glowing yellow I think I have ever seen. We were speeding along in the truck and couldn't stop so I just shot through the windshield, which of course, doesn't do any picture justice. Still you can kind of get an idea of how beautiful it was.

Sunday Stills.....Macros

See more at Sunday Stills

This kind of thing

Do click on any of these and you can see the actual snow.
It was falling amazingly hard!

Slows you down a little and makes indoors look good. This was a couple of days ago. It was supposed to be nice, but instead snowed so hard you could barely see the top of the heifer pasture hill.





This is a fraction of a huge wheel of gulls that was swirling over the heifer barn last night. It was so cold I couldn't seem to get good pics, but you can get an idea of how it was.

Absurdly Busy Friday

Farm Side Friday too.

This picture, however, has nothing to do with my weekly tirade. It is my kitchen floor just after it was painted a couple of years ago.
It desperately needs a new coat of this pleasant and inspirational green.
(I read once that green kitchens inspire cooks to be creative. No idea if this is true, but some amazing things come out of this particular room.)

Some Commonsense on New York's Fat Tax

(Or, I wish I had written this column)

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.

Pigeon Pillager

And welcome to them.

What do Chainsaw Chaps and Crocheted Hats

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).

Hooter's Heifer

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.

Who is That and What are They Doing?

The convoy




She looks happy, doesn't she?


I like this little bed somebody made here on the heat register.
I think it was meant for me!

Whose legs are these anyhow?

Oh, there is an alien being in the kitchen

I don't know what it is, but please take it back!!!!!


Hooter's New Heifer

More Pics of Hooter's Baby

First day on the new feet.

Nick would like to get in on the act

Wheat

With a little indoor lettuce thrown in.

Sunday Stills

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.




For more challenge photos go to Sunday Stills

Fare Well BS

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.

Here are some BS stories.
Sheepish
Wool
Weird
Shearing

Farm Side

Friday

Starting the New Year Off

Pretty much normally.

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!

This is blurry because of frost on the window

Yes, Yes, That's Me!

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.

Tractor Disasters

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.

Night Photos

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

More Christmas Bird Count

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.