Category Archives: animals

2022, animals, Food, Travel, Uncategorized

Vermin Of The Sea

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Well, I must confess that I am becoming an increasingly fussy eater. I find myself being very picky at potlucks, and I never eat fast food. I wasn’t always like this, but time, experience, and my non-existent gallbladder have changed my preferences. I will no longer eat for the sake of conviviality.

I have to go to New Orleans in April for a regulatory board conference, and I am dreading all the shrimp I imagine that will be available. I despise shrimp. I heartily dislike its texture and flavor, and I equally despise the environmental impact of shrimp harvesting. I imagine there will be other things to eat there, but I am anxious. I may have to survive on beignets. My absent gallbladder may protest, but I can live with that. At least beignets are sweet.

I have tried to be an open, accepting person in my life, but there are times you just have to put your foot down and say “Enough “!

When have you uttered the ultimate “No!” How hard is it for you to put your foot down? Any suggestions for dining in New Orleans ?

2022, animals, Farming Update, Medicine, Nature, pets, work

Shoulder Surgery

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Today’s post is from Ben.

Well, sometimes things don’t go as planned.

I was in the hospital Wednesday for rotator cuff surgery on my left shoulder. Prognosis for recovery was six weeks in a sling and then a lot of therapy with full recovery taking eight months to a year. Woofda. Could be worse, I could still be milking cows. I think I got pretty lucky, after my dad retired from milking, I milked cows for 14 years and I don’t recall ever missing a milking due to injury. I remember a few times having a stomach bug, and I had to run up to the house to use the bathroom, and then come back and finish milking. And some days I probably moved pretty slow. But I don’t think I missed any milking’s other than random vacation days.

But it turns out my torn tendons were all old enough injuries that they couldn’t pull the tendons back into place. I will only need to wear the sling for two weeks, and then a lot of physical therapy to strengthen the muscles that are still there. And considering prior to Thanksgiving I didn’t know I had any issues, I would expect to be back to where I was then. And perhaps looking at shoulder replacement in 5 to 10 years. Yay! Only two weeks in a sling!

In November 1976, my dad had bunions removed from both feet at the same time. I was 12 years old. Dad hired a guy to come and do chores and milk the cows as Dad was supposed be off his feet for six weeks. That was a year it was cold and there was a lot of snow early in the winter. If I remember right, the guy only lasted a few days or a week, and then he broke the chain on the manure spreader and rather than fixing it, just parked it in the shed and went home. Well, you can’t leave a spreader full of manure sitting in freezing weather; it will freeze solid and we need to use it every day. You have to fix it and get it empty. That may mean unloading it by hand, but it needs to be emptied one way or another. Which Mom and I did. Then Mom and I laid in the snow fixing while dad shouted instructions from the living room window. The guy was fired and mom and I did the milking and chores. And it wasn’t long before dad had bread bags over the casts on his feet and he was back down in the barn. He didn’t really have a choice. I’ve asked my siblings if they remember helping or hearing about this. They don’t. Funny the things we forget or put out of our minds.

Point being: At least I’m not trying to milk cows with one arm.   

Here’s a photo of the dogs, Bailey and Humphrey, keeping an eye on a squirrel.

I was / am excited and scared, the shoulder was giving me muscle spasms or something about once a week or so, and they hurt like the dickens, so I hope that will be gone. They did clean up the site and realign some things and I got a balloon in there holding it all in place. And I keep reminding myself, in the long run, this will be nothing. I am still so fortunate.

There’s a farmer on youtube called ‘The Harmless Farmer’, Andy Detwiler.  He impresses me with the things he can do with his feet. And we’ve got a friend who’s been dealing with cancer for years. So, a sore shoulder for a few months? One arm in a sling for 2 weeks? This is nothing. Keep the perspective.

What helps keep your perspective?

Help me with fun phrases or stories for the sling:

‘______ than a one armed__________’

‘_________with one arm tied to his side.’

2021, animals, Farming Update, Uncategorized

Early February Farm

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Today’s post comes from Ben.

Made it to February. I’ve been working on my farm bookwork and getting all the receipts entered. The farm expenses are the ones that matter. The household expenses don’t factor into taxes or anything (for the most part), it’s just keeping track. Gone through the report once to find all my finger slips and I still have to input all the electronic receipts and then I’ll double check it again. (I find it harder to keep track of, and record all the auto payments and things with electronic receipts.)

Ducks and chickens are good. I think we’ve almost made it through the worst of the cold for the winter. We sure have been filling the bird feeders a lot lately.

We have several angel figurines around the house. There is one I’m particular fond of. It’s just always given me comfort.

I’m not sure what it’s made of, I thought it was wood, until she got knocked over one day and her head broke into 3 pieces and it was almost like sand. But hollow too. I glued her back together and she was fine.

Recently, she got knocked over again and while her head pretty much shattered, the rest of the body and wings are fine. I still don’t get what she’s made of.

We were going to throw it out… but I hated seeing it in the garbage, so I retrieved her. I have  justification for this: “The head is what gets us in trouble; it’s the heart we need”. “It is only with that heart that one can see rightly”* And it reminded me of Joseph and the headless snow man that got dumped on a roadside one winter.

How can you just throw them out?? The snowman, yeah, I understand. But Joseph? Heathens, I tell you. We couldn’t just dump Joseph in the garbage. Even if the lightbulb in his back was burned out, he deserves better. I even talked with a minister friend of ours asking what the proper disposal was for religious figurines. (We had a good laugh over ‘pyres of fire’ and his thought was as long as the intent was pure, it was OK.)

Still, we saved Joseph; he moves around the yard and gets sunglasses or hats for the holidays when we can, and we talk to him often. He had some really nice sunglasses that made him look super awesome. (Blue sky sunglasses photo) Until my nephew realized those were his fancy expensive sunglasses he had lost the summer before. Joseph hasn’t looked as cool since.

Any figurines giving you comfort?

*Thank you Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and ‘The Little Prince’.

2022, animals, Family, Kids, pets, Uncategorized

New Arrival

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Well, Husband and I are expecting-a new puppy! Husband decided it had been too long (7 years) since we had a terrier in our home, and it was time for another. He did the AKC “What is the best dog for me” quiz, which told him it was an Airdale. Well, we are just too old for an Airdale, and he looked at photos of various terriers and fell immediately in love with the Cesky Terrier, a recognized Czech breed bred for eradicating vermin, originally developed from crossing a Scottie with a Sealyham.

I contacted three breeders who are members of the American Cesky Terrier Fanciers Association, and found one in Oklahoma who has eight puppies who will be ready in early May. All these people are responsible breeders who show their dogs and are very particular who their puppies go to. I have to complete a very detailed application, and we will have phone conversations so they feel we are the right people for their pup. May is a good time for us, as we will have travels over and can devote time to puppy training all summer. It is also good at this point in our lives with Husband’s part-time work schedule.

Getting a puppy is pretty similar to having a new baby in the house. I will expect to be exhausted in May. I think our cat will be very disgusted. It is fortunate that the Cesky Terrier is a very short dog who can’t jump very high.

What are your experiences with new puppies, kittens, or newborn humans? What are your experiences with adoption? Any advice how to integrate a cat and a terrier puppy in the same home?

animals, Art, Family, pets

Faces, Animal and Human

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Today’s post comes from Clyde.

As a farm and woods child I was struck by how animals know to look humans in the face. Or is it just the eyes? Not always easy to tell. Maybe it is obvious for animals to look at our face, but I have never been sure it is. Maybe they are looking at the source of our voice, but the few woods animals with which I had close contact looked at my face and I was being silent. It was the cultural norm in my family to talk to the animals. Many insist that our pets pick up our moods. I think they probably read us well. Not sure they respond to our moods as people believe. I think we anthropomorphize their behavior more than we realize.

The human brain is hard-wired about faces. We memorize them extremely well. When researchers make minute changes in the key landmarks in a photo of someone their subjects know, the subjects recognize something is incorrect. This is why portraiture is so difficult. Maybe all mammals are hard-wired about faces.

As if to throw mud in our faces about this, some eastern Europeans studied the behavior of the brains of our dogs as they encounter us, watching to see how much of the brain lights up on scanners when they interact with us. Their studies show that the dog brain is no more responsive to the owner’s face than to the back of the head. This so far is a one-off study, needed other studies to duplicate, or not, their results.

But it makes me wonder. How much of our truth about our pets is in our heads and not in theirs, so to speak. The great science writer Stephen Jay Gould wrote very often about how scientists’ protocols of study and analysis of results produce the results they want to discover. Objectivity is not really ever very true.

Consider these three faces.

We certainly read all sorts of things into these three faces. The tuxedo cat is my son’s Neon and the St. Bernard is his son’s Melvin. The cat with the fancy ruffled shirt is my daughter’s Bean. (If you are wondering why the dog lacks the usual jowliness of the breed, it is because he is only a year old. The jowliness, my son tells me, starts to develop at that point. And both his parents are small for the breed and are not very jowly. He is small at 120 pounds.) What are you reading in their faces? They are just sitting there looking at their owners, maybe wondering what that thing is they hold up in front of them so often.

Amazon Prime has three series of a competition to find in Great Britain the Portrait Painter of the Year. You watch several painters painting one of three famous people. At each of four rounds they pick one painter to go onto the next round, and then they pick a winner. The three judges are very biased against anything very literal. Yet somehow the best four can capture the face very well in less literal modes. I suspect however the failed literalists get the most commission work. Sandy, oddly, is fascinated by these shows. So we watch them together in the afternoon when I am over there. No matter how you look at it, portraits are a fascinating topic in art history.

All you pet lovers, go ahead and disagree with me about your pets responding to you.

How objective do you think you can be?

Do you have a favorite great portrait or portrait painter?

How would you want your portrait to be painted?

2022, animals, Business, Family, Farming Update, Movies, Mysteries, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized

The Principle

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Today’s farm/township update comes to us from Ben.

Kelly and I saw “Come from Away” last Sunday. It was fantastic. In the lobby we heard a guy walk up to his wife and say, “My glasses fogged up and I was following the wrong lady in a red jacket.”

It was so cold! How cold was it? It was so cold I wore sleeves. It was so cold I saw a duck standing on one foot. It was so cold the handle on the water hydrant by the barn wouldn’t move. Then it warmed up for a day and the chickens came out, and the hydrant worked, and the ducks just looked at their corn.

In the winter, we get pheasants coming in to eat the corn I throw out for the ducks. Each year there’s a couple more and this year it’s 9 or 10. It’s pretty cool. The crows have learned there’s free food here too. Kelly doesn’t like the crows.

Here’s a picture of some dark colored blobs down there. Those are pheasants.

I’m on our local townboard. Been on there since 1998. We have one house on a major road that is city on both sides of this house, and there is 100’ of sidewalk in front of that house. I don’t know if it’s a ‘walking path’ or ‘bike path’ or ‘sidewalk’ but It’s the only sidewalk in the township. (because the rest of the township is rural or subdivisions that don’t have sidewalks). The city clears the walking path out in this area because there are no home frontages here, but they have been skipping that 100’ in front of this house. And the property owner has never plowed it. As it’s in the middle of this stretch of path, it’s a problem for people using the path. I learned all this last winter when I got an angry phone call from a city resident who lives out there and uses this path. I didn’t even know it was a township problem. I didn’t know the homeowner and I didn’t know if he had health issues or what reasons there might be for him not clearing the sidewalk. Took me a few days to connect with him, during which, the county snowplow just pushed all the snow back off the sidewalks and so the path was open. Turns out the guy just refuses to clear the walk on principle. Huh. He figures he didn’t ask for this sidewalk, so he’s not going to plow it. We, as the township, don’t have a sidewalk ordinance and we don’t want to make one for 100’ of sidewalk when we have 33 miles of roads to deal with, therefore we couldn’t force him to clear it. And the city says it’s not theirs, so they don’t want to clear it (even though they’re clearing a mile on both sides of it). Last winter the weather warmed up and the problem went away.

This winter I’ve been watching it as I drive by this area. I’ve seen the guy out there with his small tractor and blower doing his driveway, but he still isn’t doing the sidewalk. And I can’t decide if I admire him for sticking to his principles or if he’s being a jerk. And the city now is clearing it as they’re driving through there anyway. Which makes sense, but I could also see them leaving it… on principle.

Twenty-five years ago, just after I got on the Townboard, we repaved some roads in a subdivision. One resident never paid his share believing no one would come and tear out the road. Jokes on him; the company DID tear up 100’ of blacktop, leaving a section of gravel on this road. Didn’t take long for him to pay up and the road to get fixed. Maybe the neighbors convinced him.

We have a mystery going on at our townhall. It’s an old building, looks like a one room school. (Maybe it was the school that got blown across the road in the great tornado of 1883, or maybe it was always a townhall; depends who you ask and what maps you choose to believe).

For the last 3 years we’ve been picking up Phillips vodka bottles in the gravel parking lot. I wish LJB was still around; we need a good story for this! We have our suspicions… once a week, there will be 1, 2, or sometimes even 3 vodka bottles. Very few are empty. Some have never been opened! Most will be between ½ and 2/3’s full. We’ve got a collection in the hall now of 14 bottles, and there are a lot that have been picked up and thrown out and don’t make it to the hall collection. The hall is at the intersection of two major roads. People park there in summer and ride bikes or jog. A school bus stops there. Sheriff deputies park there to do reports. 

Why are you not finishing the vodka? And why are you leaving them there? Bonus points if you can tie in the glasses fogged up guy.  

2022, animals, Farming Update, home, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

Locks

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The Farming Update comes to us from Ben.

It’s still January in Minnesota and temps are back to normal. I got the car washed a second time just as the cold temps hit and then I went to the gas station and the fuel door is a little bit frozen and I wished I had arms long enough to push the button on the dash and jiggle the fuel door at the same time. Almost wished for the days of regular screw in gas caps.

Last Friday afternoon I discovered a pinhole leak in a water valve in the well house on the pipe going to the barn. I thought there was a little more water on the floor than there should have been and this explains why. It’s always a little damp in there. I just turned off the valve, thanked goodness there wasn’t a barn full of cattle or anything so this isn’t an emergency and called a plumber for Tuesday. $200 later I have a new valve. I regret a little bit that I didn’t just fix this myself…but I hate plumbing and this looked corroded and I really didn’t want to get involved. Work smarter, not harder.

I learned about locks this week. One of the theaters got a new door last Summer, complete with new lock and key. It was decided now was a good time to change out the locks on the other doors to match. I did one lock last week and one lock this week. “Lukus” at the lock shop was very helpful! The first lock was pretty easy. The second one took me three trips to Lukus and I learned to ask more questions. Almost had to make a fourth trip but I found the tiny little set screw I dropped out on the cement. Locks are really interesting to the un-initiated.

We bought some bagels the other day. After the first day, I preferred my bagels toasted. We cut them in half horizontally so there’s a top and bottom. I asked Kelly which side she ate first? We both generally eat the bottom first, then the top. It’s like, do you want the good news first or the bad.

The poofy head ducks are having bad hair days in this cold weather.

Cold water and crazy hair doesn’t work too well.

“LUKUS”- What interesting spelling. Got a favorite or unusual name?

2022, animals, Fantasy, Media, Movies, Nature, Science, space, Uncategorized

Too Late?

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Asteroid 1994 PC1 whizzed past us yesterday at 43,000+ miles per hour.  Apparently compared to the asteroids that swing by almost every day, 1994PC1 is fairly large to be so far outside the asteroid belt.  NASA has been watching it for years (I’m guessing from it’s name, since 1994) and since none of us got warnings about impending asteroid/earth collisions the last few days, they are quite aware that relatively speaking while it’s coming close to us, its closest pass will be five times the distance between us and the moon.  According to scientists “if you aren’t worried about the moon crashing into your house this week, you shouldn’t be worried about this either”.

I guess we might have a closer call with a much larger asteroid in 2028.  That news actually hit the stands back in 1997, just a year after a big scare when 1996 JA1, an asteroid the length of two football fields, passed by at only 300,000 miles with not much warning.  This might account for a bunch of the asteroid movies that came out in the next couple of years (Deep Impact, Armageddon, Asteroid, Judgment Day to name a few). 

I’m not a big disaster film buff (although technically if they divert the asteroid, it’s not really a disaster flick, is it?) but I did see a couple of these.  It’s an interesting concept – pushing off an object that is traveling 43K miles an hour.  And I don’t really follow this stuff closely so I don’t know if there is an object that NASA is actually worried about.  And I wonder, would they tell us if there were?  Not sure what in heck we, as citizens of the planet could actually do to prepare.  I mean, I assume we’re smarter than the dinosaurs, but there sure wasn’t anything they could have done differently.

Which do you worry about more – asteroids or a zombie apocalypse? 

2022, animals, Automotive, Business, Farming Update, Nature, Technology, Uncategorized

Bags

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This week’s Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

The weather warmed up and I got the car washed. For now.

And now It’s snowing and cold again. Oh well. It’s January in Minnesota.

The ducks and chickens did enjoy the melting snow and grass coming out of the snow; they really like having some dirt to scratch in. Everyone was enjoying the sun.

 The chickens don’t like to walk through too much snow. They’ll do a little, especially if they know there’s some dirt beyond it. Except this white chicken.

She doesn’t seem to care about the snow. Kelly calls her “sturdy and hearty”. Yeah, well, she’s something all right. She’s mean too. She will cut you! Reach under her for an egg and she’ll bite and twist and not let go!  

Daughter and I took all three dogs to the vet this week; they all needed shots. And we got ice cream. Also signed papers for the loans for corn and soybean seed. And on the way home, picked up a ton of ‘egg layer’ ration for the chickens. Thank goodness for pallet forks.

We pour a 50 pound bag of egg layer into a container mounted on the wall, then fill the chickens feeders from there. If I leave the bag on the ground, the chickens will peck a hole in it. And I don’t use enough to warrant getting it in bulk.

It makes me think of how much stuff used to come in bags. I’ll be interested in Clyde’s memories of this.

For my dad, I suppose in the 1940’s there wasn’t so much stuff in bags as they used their own corn for seed and there wasn’t commercial fertilizer or feed supplements. In my childhood, we were always going to pick up feed, seed, fertilizer, and supplements. There were always bags of something around.

I remember a truck coming late winter early spring loaded with several tons of fertilizer bags. I was too small to help or maybe in school, but one day the corner of the shed would be filled with bags of corn starter fertilizer. Seems like those were 60 or even 80 lb bags. My dad was strong! I think he worked a lot harder than I do; just the sheer physical labor of everything back then compared to what I do now. When planting time came, he would load those fertilizer bags into the truck and then dump them into the planter every few acres. Those bags were handled 3 times. Now I get it all delivered in bulk truck, put in the wagon, and unloaded via auger. Pretty easy for me.

The milk cows got protein supplements added to their feed. I used to buy that in bags. Fifty pounds each, and I’d get 500 or 1000 lbs. Sometimes 2000 lbs at once; it just depended on the checkbook I think. Eventually I put up a bulk bin and then I could order a ton or two and another truck with an auger would unload it. I still carried bushel baskets of ground corn to the cows, but it was a bulk truck that delivered the corn and unloaded it into the barn. When we picked our own ear corn, we had to grind it before feeding it to the cows. After I went to shelled corn, the co-op would crack it before delivering.  I remember dad having a “hammer mill” to grind up the corn. The mill sat down by the barn and first he’d have to shovel ear corn from the crib into the truck, then shovel the corn in the hammer mill, which pulverized it via swinging metal bars, called hammers, hence “Hammer mill”. (Let’s not forget, he may have had to pick that corn by hand, throw it in a wagon, and shovel it into the crib in the first place! Read more about hammer mills here: https://tinyurl.com/4tjv8ac4

Eventually he bought a ‘Grinder Mixer’, which was a hammer mill and tank on wheels. We took that to the crib, shoveled the corn ONCE into the grinder, added minerals if needed and it all mixed up and it had an auger that we could unload into the barn. I shoveled a lot of ear corn to grind feed. Had to do that every 10 days or so. The mixer held about 5000 lbs.  And you don’t see them too much anymore. Different ways of feeding cattle that are less labor intensive.

My seed still comes in bags, but for the bigger farmers, some of the seed is starting to come in bulk. Soybeans mostly. Sometimes wheat or other small grains depending how they do it.

Before I bought the pallet forks and had this building, When I got chicken feed or milk cow protein, it was put in an old building called the ‘blue building’ because it used to be blue. It was faded and dull white as I remember it. When we picked up the feed from the coop, it was loaded into the truck from their pallets by hand, then unloaded at home, bag by bag into the blue building.  Then I’d haul them to barn as needed, usually 4 or 5 at a time every week. There was a just a lot more daily chores. And it wasn’t “work”, it was just part of the day. I was talking with daughter about that. I never said I was “going to work”, it was just “going outside” and that might mean milking cows, grinding feed, hauling bags, or who knows what.

Have I mentioned how hard my dad worked? So much has changed, so much has gotten physically easier in farming.

What do you think of milk in bags?

More or less bags in your life these days?

2022, animals, Fantasy, Movies, Mysteries, Nature, Science, Uncategorized

Prehistoric Critters

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I don’t remember why I asked for a DVD of The Cave of Forgotten Dreams from the library.  I had to get it through InterLibrary Loan so it took awhile.  I have a vague memory of seeing something recently about cave art so that is probably it, but I’m not sure I’ll ever remember for sure.

It was captivating to see the cave art (from the Chauvet Cave in southern France) – the public is not allowed in the caves so it felt a little like getting away with something although the scientists and camera crew did have permission.

The film got weird in a few places, a little disconnected and then at the end it got REALLY weird.  In a “postscript”, the film introduces a nuclear power near the caves and then continues to show the crocodiles who have been added to the warm waters of the plant.  Not only that, but some albino crocodiles became the final focus with the film clearly suggesting that they are mutants from radiated water.  This, of course, captured my interest in a big way.  First off, they weren’t crocodiles, they were alligators – classic u-shaped alligator snouts.  But more importantly, why in heaven’s sake would a nuclear power plant build a crocodile farm?

Of course all my questions were answered when I actually looked up at the screen just in time to see “Written, Directed and Narrated by Werner Herzog”.  I don’t know a lot about Herzog but I have seen enough comments over the years to know that he doesn’t use the same definition of “truth” that I do.  This made it incredibly easy to fact-check the crocodile farm story.  The power plant did NOT build the croc farm; it was built by two crocodile enthusiasts.  They are close to the cave and they do use the water from the nuclear power plant but the water is consistently tested and has never shown any radioactivity.  And the albinos?  Imported from a croc farm in the Southern U.S.; they were albino before they even reached the French waters.  Not radioactive mutants.  None of this really explains the purpose of the postscript of the film, but it was interesting research.

The most noteworthy fact I found is that the French croc farm is not the only place on the planet where crocodiles are benefitting from nuclear waters.  Apparently 25% of the crocodiles in the U.S. thrive among the cooling canals at Turkey Point Nuclear Plant south of Miami.  They are protected, having been encouraged there since the discovery of the first nest back in the 70s.  Fascinating.

Have you ever held a baby alligator or crocodile in your hands?  Snake?  Tarantula?  Anything?