Our daughter has two cats, and is entirely besotted by the younger one who she named Percy. He is a handsome tuxedo boy, He is very naughty, knocked over her television and busted it, and likes to make huge leaps into her garbage can because he likes the way the lid swings back and forth. He gets a lot of baths as a result, since he gets so dirty. He hides his toys in her bed.
The other day, daughter was expressing how much she loved this cat, and described him as her “Alpha and Omega”. I was surprised and gratified to hear her say that, only because it confirmed for me that dragging our children to church all those years was worth it. I guess she was listening and I didn’t even know it. I suppose I would rather she describe the Lord, and not her cat, in such terms, but it is a positive start.
What naughty animals have you loved in spite of themselves? Who has surprised you in a good way lately? What or who is your Alpha and Omega?
Cold again this week. The farmers’ spring excitement has tempered a bit this week. Next week it will be back.
Tuesday was such a nice day, Kelly and I went out and took down the snow fence we so carefully put up last November. The mid- December storms shredded up 80% of it and the weather turned too cold to fix. We had more snow in the road this year because of it, and it made me realize how useful the snow fence is and why we put it up every year. I was tired of looking at the remains of it and we got it picked up. The dogs helped.
The ducks have split into their summer groups; Mostly the fliers and the non-fliers, but there might be some other sort of grouping that I haven’t figure out yet. It makes it hard to get a good count on them. But I did see 6 mallards take off and then 7 more took off. And still got 2 poufs, 3 cream, 4 black… and some others.
The chickens are enjoying the grass again. And leftovers. And they like when I fill the bird feeders.
Kelly and I saw ‘Hadestown’ last week at the Orpheum. Boy, was that good. And my friend Jerry and I saw Colin Hay at the Pantages. Colin Hay was the lead singer for ‘Men at Work’ way back when. I saw them in concert way back when.
I should have found this picture of the barn for Wednesday’s article about selling the cows.
Dinner at Olive Garden Wednesday night was yummy
I know some of you read ‘Independently Speaking’ by Brent Olson. His latest article is in the same vein as I’ve written about lately. Getting machinery ready and being in town before the stores are open. We’re both still farmers at heart. www.brentolson.online He’s also on FB as ‘Independently Speaking’. He’s got great stories. Colin Hay told some stories too.
Pies, donuts, chairs, cows, dogs. We’ve had it all this week.
What’s in your fridge and what are you making for supper? What do you WANT for supper?
I have been reading up on Cesky Terriers, the breed of puppy we are getting in May. They are considered temperamentally different than the majority of terriers due to their comfort in being part of a pack. Your basic terrier is an independent thinker, bred to work alone and make its own decisions on how to deal with vermin and prey. Cesky’s are more reserved and standoffish, but very dedicated to their people.
The Cesky was developed by a guy in the Czech Republic who wanted smaller terriers he could take in a group to hunt prey on river banks. He started out with Scotties, but they fought with one another more than they hunted. He decided to come up with a new breed, and interbred Scotties with Sealyhams, a Welsh breed known for its calmness and lack of territoriality . The new breed he came up with was very good at working with other dogs, yet really good at flushing vermin and working as part of a team. I hear from Cesky breeders that they are not door darters like our Welsh Terriers were, dogs who wanted nothing more than to rush out any open door so they could explore the countryside and make their own fun. Cesky’s want to stay with their people at all costs.
It is important at my work to be able to work as part of a team. I guess I am more like a Cesky than I am a Scottie or a Welshie. It doesn’t pay to be a lone wolf in my line of work. I know that isn’t the case for everyone, though.
Are you a Scottie or a Sealyham? How well do you work as part of a team. What is your favorite breed of dog, and why?
I wrote this story 18 years ago when I sold the milk cows. Been a lot of changes since then. I don’t regret any of them. I notice I wrote my knees and shoulders hurt back then. Can’t imagine what they’d be like today if I was still milking. I just couldn’t; I’d have never physically been able to do it this long.
Nevermore
Today I’m not a dairy farmer anymore. Sold the milk cows. The cows were my friends and I was sad to see them loaded into the truck and leave… but it was just time. And I have to say that now that it’s over and done, I feel a million pounds lighter; a giant weight off my shoulders.
The cows were a big part of my life–and had been since, like, forever; I was always down in the barn growing up. Started helping Dad with milking when I was 10 years old. I was the fourth generation to be milking cows here. My Great Grandfather came to this farm in 1896. Built the old barn we call the granary in 1899. The first part of the dairy barn was built in 1924. Dad added onto it a couple times in the 1940’s and 50’s.
Mom and Dad built a silo in 1968, built another in 1976, built the pole barn, tore off part of the granary, built a couple machine sheds, and knocked down an old smaller silo. Mom and Dad also tore down the old house and built a new one.
You all know I gave my cows some rather… esoteric names… The auctioneer has a list of the cows coming in and sometimes he could read the ear tag and know who’s selling and other times I’m calling out names as they’re coming in: Erica, Louise, Lynnette, Kaylannii (auctioneer shakes his head), Comet, Antigone — which, of course he pronounced ‘Annti – gone’ and I had to say (phonetically here), “An-tig-o-knee; daughter of Oedipus from Greek mythology.”………. silence in the ring………. auctioneer says, “Ohh-kay…” Guy in front of me turns around and says “I don’t think they got that…” And Lynne Cow. The cow I named after Lynne Warfel-Holt, classical music host at Minnesota Public Radio. I told who she was named for and asked whoever bought her to please contact MPR and let Lynne know they were the new owner. They worked pretty hard at selling her. Kept saying she’s the only radio cow in there today. Ya know, I may not have had the best cows, but they sure had personality! And the auction people had more fun selling my cows then they did the rest of the cows!!
It was just time to do it. Kelly and I had been talking about selling, and weighing the pros and cons; definitely more pros to selling them than cons. (But the little voice way in the back of my head keeps saying “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”) Hey, supper at 6:00, vacations, maybe my knees will still function in a few years, doing more things with the kids, maybe my shoulders will feel better, VACATIONS, etc.
Primarily it was a financial decision. Milk prices have been in the toilet the last two years. I was low on cow numbers the last 6 months and the price of replacement heifers is — and has been for the last couple years — just insanely high and getting higher. Supply and demand principles for cattle I guess. I have bought some cows, and got some bargains, but there’s no guarantee that a $1700 heifer will milk any better than an $800 heifer. I bought 3 cows and 1 heifer last spring; paid between $600 and $825 for the cows, $1150 for the heifer. All three cows turned out to be duds and two were gone by fall. I still had one of the cows, but she had to have a C-section and would not be bred back. The fancy heifer I still had but she had been bred back 4 times and I don’t think she was pregnant yet. And in the milking world it all comes down to getting pregnant and producing milk. Last week was a new high price for heifers in Zumbrota; $2260.00 for one pregnant cow. The previous high price was set just the week before. [2004 pricing]
I went to Zumbrota last week to see how cows were selling and to let them know I was interested in selling mine this week. I met with the sales manager and he escorted me into the front office, shut the office door and took my information (how many, herd averages, stanchion cows (as opposed to parlor cows)) and then he made several comments about how this is what they were expecting now and my name wouldn’t be on any of the presale publicity lest we trigger any ‘radio bandits’; people that would try to buy them before the sale to avoid the sales barn commissions. I got the distinct impression that he was trying to emphasis how confidential all this was. I went out and talked with a trucker I know about bringing my cows in and he acted the same way. It was very surreal how he kept scanning the parking lot, talking very quietly; even surreptitiously gave me papers behind his back. … very strange.
I’ll miss that big glass jar in the milkhouse called the receiver jar. It’s what the milk would come into from the pipes in the barn, before being pumped over to the bulk tank. When I was growing up and Dad and I would go to other farms, it was that glass jar that I was just fascinated with; watching the milk rush into that jar, I knew I had to be a dairy farmer so I could have that big glass jar. When we installed a different pipeline system about 12 years ago [1992] the dealer wanted me to put in a stainless steel can. I said no way; I want that glass jar! If you haven’t seen it, it’s a tempered glass globe about 18 inches in diameter. There are four glass inlets molded into it about 6 inches long; one at the bottom that the milk is pumped out through, the one at the top is the vacuum inlet and one on each side connects to the milk pipeline that runs into the barn. The deal is you don’t mess with the connections between the glass jar and the other pipe; don’t want to break that outlet off the glass jar. Dealers were supposed to have an extra jar, but I never wanted to find out. Bad enough when a motor would quite at milking time and you had to call the dealer to make a ‘barn call’. Like a plumber in the middle of the night; it wasn’t cheap.
The night the cows sold we all went to Olive Garden for supper; that in and of itself no big deal. But we went at 6:00PM; ate like normal people. Got home it was only 7:30 and the kids still had time to shower and do homework. I took the kids to daycare before school this morning. Then went to Barnes and Noble (closed until 9:00) so got license tabs for the car, went to the chiropractor who was very pleased to hear I had sold the cows, filled the car with gas, went to Best Buy (closed until 10:00).
Finishing up here with aphorism’s that seemed appropriate for the time:
—One door never closes without another opening.
From the Tom Petty song ‘Into the Great Wide Open’ these two phrases:
—The future is wide open. —The skies the limit.
3/23/2004
What were you fascinated by as a kid that influenced you in your adult years?
It’s warming up. Last week I talked about the slope of our land and how bad it is when icy. Mud isn’t much better. After my shoulder surgery I’m being extra careful not to slip and fall. I was extra careful walking on the snow or ice, and now it’s mud and I’m trying to decide, should I put that hand in my pocket just to keep my arm down? Any suggestions? In a slip, it’s the sudden lunge with the arm—as well as the stop at the end, that I’m worried about. So far so good fingers crossed. As the weather has warmed up this week, first I unplugged the well house heater and put it up on the shelf. I’m really done with it for this year. Then I unplugged the heat lamp over the dogs’ water dish. Next day I unplugged the chickens water bucket. I haven’t had the tractor plugged in for a few weeks now. The only winter thing left is the heat tape on a water pipe down in the barn. I’ll wait on that yet for a while. I’m pleased the electric bill is going down.
Missing another poufy duck. Dang, I don’t know if it’s because they’re white they stand out in the early morning light and it makes them easy to pick off? Or are they just that slow moving so the weak get picked off first? You may notice I don’t comment on missing chickens. The ducks stick together for the most part, and there’s fewer, and they’re more identifiable and easier to count. Of the 40 or 50 chickens, some are in the nest boxes, some are in back eating, some are in the rafters, a few are in the bushes, a few are at the bird feeders, and a bunch are scattered around the yard. I try counting them, but they move too… so I don’t know how many chickens we have. Forty or fifty. I try to count them at night, but still, a few on the perch, a few in the rafters, a few in the pen, some over there, some over here… it’s a mystery! So, I don’t know if one disappears. Except the ones with the funky hair. The rule of thumb is the fancier the bird, the sooner it’s gone.
These didn’t last long.
Daylight Savings Time. Do the chickens care? Egg production is up so maybe they do. The other day there was 9 eggs in one box! They had a second level going in there. Never seen that before and I don’t know why they like that box so much. Usually, they spread out more. (see header photo)
All the animals are sure enjoying the lack of snow and they’re free-ranging all over the yard.
During the winter as we move snow, it’s not unusual to scrape up some gravel as well. And then come spring, as the snow melts, we end up with piles of gravel in the grass. It’s a bummer. The other day just before it got really warm, I had a thought: I used the loader and pulled the snow piles back into the road, so when the snow melted, the gravel would be back in the ROAD, and not in the grass. Seemed like a revolutionary idea to us.
We have one really nice day this time of year and all the farmers get excited. We know it’s a false spring and the ground is frozen and we haven’t gotten though basketball tournaments yet (there’s always a snow storm during tournaments they say) but suddenly we all think “SPRING! I GOTTA GET MACHINERY OUT!” and everyone gets excited. The parts guys are busy. I’m thinking about what needs fixing before spring planting. (I need to put new fertilizer openers on the corn planter this year. Got the parts last year and they’re sitting there. Thankfully, we got the drill fixed last summer) I’ve also started looking at Camera systems and options. Cameras have really become popular on machinery as a way to see behind things or be sure critical components are working. I’m thinking about putting some inside the drill grain box so I can monitor the seed level without having to stop and go look. Time is money! Plus, I could put them on the baler to know the strings are tying, which would save bales and time. This year I’m also thinking what I can actually, physically, pick up with my left arm. It will be helpful that I’m having the co-op do all the fertilizing as that will save a lot of wear and tear on my arm. (not to mention time. Notice I didn’t say “money” there…) I’m a little concerned about the reality of scheduling them. I’ll need to have all the fields worked up at once (all the corn, or all the oats or beans) and then hope for good weather until they get too it. Plus, at the college, as covid settles down, all the extra spring concerts are coming back, so I have extra shows to deal with.
I feel my stomach knotting up already.
Talk about your hair stylist or barber. Got a favorite hair style?
You’re giving a announcement to the press about a small asteroid that has managed to get through our atmosphere without completely burning up. The small space rock is named 2022 EB5 and hit above Iceland last Friday causing a boom and a flash of light as it whizzed across the sky.
You haven’t found any evidence of the asteroid actually making it all the way to the ground, but you want to make folks feel secure about how little damage it would have caused. So you describe the size of the asteroid as small, 10 feet/3 meters across, “half the size of a giraffe”.
What? I think a lot of people have probably seen a giraffe in a zoo and have a fairly good idea of how big a giraffe is but it’s certainly not the first thing I would think of when trying to tell someone the size of something. Especially when 10 feet or 3 meters isn’t that hard to imagine. But a giraffe…. actually HALF a giraffe?
Isn’t half a giraffe the same as a baby elephant? Or six dolphins? Are we picking on animals? Should we say the asteroid is the size of a Volkswagen Beetle? And even if we stay with giraffes are we talking half a male giraffe, a female giraffe, a dwarf giraffe? Are we talking head to halfway through the torso or halfway through the torso to the feet?
Possibilities are endless.
What do you think is a measure of size that the world is missing out on?
Our farm is in the “gently rolling hills” of SE MN. I have one field that is mostly flat and that’s on the low ground by Silver Creek and is in the Conservation Reserve program. The rest of the farm, the valleys, and the shape of our farm, is primarily the result of hundreds and thousands of years of water erosion. Its beginning was hundreds of millions of years ago and the seas that covered the area and created the limestone layers that eventually I played on as a kid. (Thank you Dr. John Tacinelli and the class MN Rocks and Waters for teaching me that). The topographical map in the header photo is part of our farm; the closer the lines, the steeper the slope. All those lines also mean our ground is considered highly erodible, which is why we use conservation tillage practices and crop rotation.
Also, when we get freezing rain, every step is treacherous. Everything seems to be downhill from wherever I am. Course then it’s all uphill back.
Those thousands of years of erosion are still happening… heavy rains or spring melt and there’s quite the stream coming down through our place. It’s impressive to think about the total area it might be draining; roughly 70 acres doing a quick Google Map distance check.
Last Saturday morning it was warm and the snow was melting and we’d had a little rain and I could hear the water rushing through the culvert under the field road down in the swamp.
Later in the day, the snow melt had grown in volume and was over the road.
The culvert is mostly frozen yet, so it didn’t take too much more to overload it. But since the ground was frozen it didn’t hurt anything. Later in the day the runoff slowed and it was back in place. When I was a kid there wasn’t a road here, we had to go off through the pastures to get to those fields. And my siblings talk about skating on the pond down there. I think I even caught a crawdad down there once. Then dad put in some old culverts and made the road, and when that washed out, I had a better culvert put in.
Sometime last week we lost two more poufy ducks. Then the next day one was back! Pretty beat up, moving slow, and all bloody, but back. We started calling him Lazarus. He’d be gone one day and back the next. We couldn’t get too close, but we could see he had something wrong with his bill. One day I went to get corn for the ducks and when I came out of the feed room, he was right there. I gave him some corn and got him some water. He seemed like he wanted our help. To leave the other ducks, go off by himself, and come that close to us… the ducks don’t normally do that. He drank some water; I used the hose and ran some water near him and sprayed a little on him. He seemed to appreciate that. Then he let me pick him up and I could see he had a chunk tore off his bottom beak. I didn’t want to try cutting it off yet. I put him in the feedroom with food and water so he could just rest. Kelly went down at noon and checked on him and talked with him, and I went down after work and he’d died. Shucks. I wonder if he came to us for help, or as animals do, was he looking to go off on his own because he knew he was dying? We hate to lose one, but it’s worse when we’ve been helping and we get attached to them.
Township elections and the Annual Meeting was last Tuesday. The second Tuesday in March is ‘Township Day’ and all 1780 townships in MN have elections and annual meetings that day. A township is the rural equivalent of the city council. Townships provide or coordinate road maintenance, fire protection, law enforcement, and whatever other issues may arise. It might be property boundary issues or animals at large. Usually, it’s a pretty low turn out and a pretty quiet meeting, which means we’re doing alright. When there’s a crowd, there’s usually a problem.
You’re up for election. What position did you win?
Pants! I’m wearing pants. I can’t button pants with only one hand (I’m not sure anyone can) so it’s nice to have two (almost) working arms again and have pockets and I have my flashlight and micro Leatherman and all my accessories. It’s nice.
Not much happening here yet. We are into the first mud of the season. Every time the dogs go out, they come back with muddy feet that need to be cleaned off. Humphrey is pretty good: he waits on the step, “foot” means he gives me his left front paw, “other foot” is right paw. Bailey sure wants to be a people dog, she loves people. Every time I come home she will be on the step with a paw in the air so she can climb in my lap; a problem when she’s muddy. Front door or side door, she runs ahead of me and gets up on the edge to look into my eyes. That’s her in the header photo. We got her from an Amish family. Her mom is a Blue Healer, Dad was a Pomeranian. She’s just over 3 years old.
Allie, the Queen of them all, finally used her new pillow.
She’s all attitude for 15.
The chicken’s feet are muddy which means the eggs are muddy (unless I get them before they step on them to lay another). They are enjoying the warmer weather and taking dust baths in the pen.
The driveway is getting mushy, snow is melting fast, and that one room in the basement has got a little bit of water on the floor again. I put the extension on the gutter downspout for a few weeks while the snow is melting off the roof and the water in the basement goes away.
The duck pond is getting bigger every day as the ice melts, but it’s going to be a month yet before I can reset the drain outlet and regain the 6 inches of depth they’ve lost due to a leak. It’s just a homemade pond, made when the tile guy was replacing a drain tile, he just excavated a hole and dumped a little dirt at the end to make it pond up. Didn’t take much for the water to cut a trench and to that I added a piece of PVC pipe, but it’s still hard to keep it sealed up at the end. We’ve got good green clay, known as Decorah Edge for the outlet. It just needs an hour with a shovel.
The other morning, I went out to do chores and the ducks were not in their usual place at the pond. Then they weren’t in their second usual place with the chickens, nor their third usual place under the trailer. I found them in their fifth usual place out behind the pole barn. And a few hundred yards beyond them, coyotes are howling. Saw a coyote some 400 yards away and took a shot at it. He jumped and spun in circles about three times and then trotted off. The ducks came home, back to the usual spot without any casualties. I wish you would stay closer to home ducks.
Spring also means the yahoo’s are dumping ditch trash; the township guys have picked up 2 batchs of trash in the last week. First load was just plain junk and trash. Second load was two box springs, two different size mattresses and a door. Idiots.
Which body part would you like to be bionic and what features would you have?
Last week Guinevere took a flying leap off the back porch steps in her never-ending pursuit of squirrel removal in our back yard. Not that this pursuit has ever shown any positive outcomes. When she came back in, she was limping a little and leaving a little trail of bloody spots on the kitchen floor. When YA and I wrestled her to the ground to take a look, it turns out that she had ripped one of toenails partly off below the quick. Ouch.
Neither I nor YA was brave enough to clip off the nail so YA carted Guinevere off to the vet where they applied a little anesthetic and loped it off. Of course that turned out to be the easy part. Guinevere, like most dogs I assume, just could not leave the toe alone. I’m sure after the drugs wore off, it hurt so she reacted as animals do. Licking. And licking. After not long a time, she had licked her little pad raw and she didn’t show any signs of stopping.
At night we were able to wrap her foot and leg up within an inch of its life (antibiotic ointment, bandage, sock, lots of painter’s tape) but during they day, she had the wrappings off within minutes. YA found a cone of shame up in the attic and brought it down to try to keep her away from the foot.
This turned out to be awful for the dog and for me (dog spends more time with me at night). When we put the cone on her, she was beyond paralyzed. She wouldn’t move, wouldn’t lay down and after about a half an hour, she started to breathe a little heavily. Her eyes said “please, please save me” and I couldn’t stand it; I took the cone off, made her get on the bed with me and re-directed her every time she took a lick. This went on for DAYS. And do we even need to say that repetitive noises (like a dog licking its paw) drive me up a wall?
Finally at the 10-day mark, she has mostly stopped bothering the toe. The quick appears to have covered over and her pad is now longer licked raw. I’m not sure who feels better about this – Guinevere or me?
Lost a few ducks the last few days… don’t know what happens: the dogs don’t seem to act like anything is amiss, yet there’s one less poufy and one less cream colored duck. And there used to be 19 mallard type and now there’s only 17. They’re still avoiding their pond for the most part, which is odd. Unless that’s where the “Disappearances” are happening. (They may be ducks but they’re not dumb.) There’s no signs of struggle, and the only tracks I see are deer. And bunny poop. The poor ducks; when it’s gets cold the poufys get to be looking pretty poorly. And one cream colored one had a frozen chunk of something hanging off it one day. Last Sunday was so nice the poufy ones got cleaned up and the frozen chunk fell off.
And then one day it was sunny and they were down in the pond over the noon hour and hungry and wanted to eat. You can see the duck butts sticking up as they eat corn off the bottom.
Maybe it’s just night time they don’t want to be down there. I’ve talked about the coyotes before and how many ducks and chickens they take. I heard some of the neighborhood guys were hunting coyotes and got 20 or so. Which you’d think would be good news for the ducks, but evidently not.
Our dog Humphrey- he’s such a good dog. And polite. He’ll take a drink, then come to us to burp him. It’s so weird. We pat his chest, he burps, and then he’ll go lay down. He does need the sensitive stomach food. We’ve always said he’s a delicate flower.
Bailey: she’s the one burying her treats in the snow or dirt and eating dead things and she loves playing in the snow.
My shoulder is good. I go to the doc Monday to get stitches out and start physical therapy. I’m hoping to lose the sling but I kinda doubt PT will say that yet. It really hasn’t been bad. I did Velcro myself to the wall one day. This thing has so many straps and so much Velcro and I sat down on the bench in the entryway and stuck myself to the Velcro on the sleeves of my jacket. Which was still hung on the wall. Can’t reach the hook, can’t reach the Velcro. It was kinda funny.
I’m back at ‘work’ work and I’ve been lighting the musical ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ at the college. It’s a dark musical. I’ve got some pretty looks, even though it’s not exactly a “pretty” show.
It’s not a college production; we don’t do musicals (they’re too expensive). This is a local group renting the space.
CAN YOU STAND ON YOUR HEAD OR WALK ON YOUR HANDS? GOT ANY STORIES ABOUT MAKING BODY NOISES?
Trail Baboon 