New Life Old Farmers

All was going well and we were 4 days away from having little chickens hatch, when the light on the incubator burned out!  Leaving our eggs out or rather in the cold, much too cold to survive.  My Loving Spouse was sad, as 5 of the 8 eggs would have been chicks.

Back to the drawing board for the home-made incubator as upgrades are installed.

Step One was adding a second light to the incubator-ice chest.  Should one go out, the other should create enough heat to keep the clutch healthy.  Step two was moving the lights to the bottom of the ice chest, as warm air rises. Step three, My Loving Spouse pilfers the BBQ supplies to build a platform for the eggs to rest upon.  He adds a thin board with holes in it for support and foam to cushion the eggs.Once again the eggs are marked so when we humans turn them daily (in odd doses), we will know when they are adequately turned.

Those are the technical changes, but to increase the odds of every chick hatching, we have upped the ante by doing everything in our power to get our clutch to hatch.  

This time, there are 13 eggs in the clutch.  So, that should do it, because that is how My Loving Spouse’s father always did it.

For my contribution, I am clucking to them every time I turn them, yep, out loud.  I’m pretty sure this could be making all the difference.

If all goes as planned, there are 15 more days until hatching…check back for an egg update!

We’ve been getting the bassinet ready, but we’re hardly the first to do so.

In 1948 my Grandfather gives the bassinet a coat of paint for his first grandchild.

2014 My Loving Spouse gives the bassinet a coat of paint for our first grandchild.  The tool he uses might have changed, but the bassinet is the same.

As is the joy that surrounds each use…

…it has held two generations so far…

Rusty, Jerry, Nancy, David, John, Ellen, Richard…

Justin, Morgan, Corey, Riley, Laura…Number One Son a few days old…

…who will be a father this summer and for his little one…

…the bassinet is ready.

It is calving season and believe it or not, but Number Two Son had not seen a calf born, so I have been doing my level best to help him capture the complete country experience.  So far this meant a lot of driving by the farmer’s field, sitting there watching cows poop.  As Number Two still has a broken wrist, he’s activities have been severely limited, to the point that he’s actually been a willing captive to his mother’s you-need-to-see-a-calf-born obsession.

Saturday nights it seems are the night we are ‘on call’ as it were to be Our Friend the Farmer’s Calving Assistants, lucky for us!  We’d invited Our Friend the Farmer for dinner, and knowing my interest in his calving, he walked in the door with an update on one of his heifers.  “She’s been ‘monkeying’ around all afternoon”.  ‘Monkeying’ around is his official farmer language to mean, she’s calving and it is not going quickly.  As soon as dinner was over, he headed off to check on the heifer.  We threw the dishes in the dishwasher and headed off behind him, bringing Number Two with us, in case we got to see a calf born OR in case Our Friend the Farmer needed us.  (I’m often not sure, if he ‘needs‘ us as much as perhaps he is ‘humoring‘ us, but either way…I’m IN!)

The heifer’s water had broken a long time ago and nothing was happening with this calf.  No feet sticking out…nothing… As a heifer has never calved before, assisting in the birth, Our Friend explained can sometimes upset the process and they may not mother the calf properly.  Still..nothing was happening, so it was time to give her a hand.  We Our Friend the Farmer got her in the head catch.  I held the heifer’s tail out of the way while he reached in (yes, into the heifer…this is why he doesn’t wear rings) to feel for the calf.

“It’s alive”, he said as he grabbed a hold of a hoof.  It was a slow process to get the hoof out straight and far enough to wrap the chain around it, but after a bit of work he had the calving OB assisting chains around both front hoofs.  Things were progressing when that darn heifer sat down on her back legs, head still in the catch.  I checked she wasn’t choking and My Loving Spouse took over the tail holding as Our Friend the Farmer went back to the calf pulling…and before we knew it…out he came…a little bull calf. 

The mother stayed right where she was…sitting on her haunches.

The little bull was pulled around to his mother and some of the fluids wiped on the cow’s nose to help her identify with her little one.  The heifer was still just sitting on her haunches as if to say…”What in the world just happened or (Bad British word)!!”

I kept waiting for the heifer’s mother instinct to slam into gear and for her to  go “Mooooo, WOW, baby look at this calf!  Let me lick that little one all up!”  Except, she didn’t…she was taking her time, even after she was able to get up, she was still acting a tad stunned as if Mother Nature had possibly played a mean trick on her.  Actually in her defense, I do remember being a tad stunned myself after natural childbirth, where I was all in favor of having some drugs, but the darn baby (Thank you Number Two) came so fast I didn’t get any….and so maybe she is a normal Mama after all.  She did finally wander over and take another sniff of the wet bundle of black hide and finally began giving him a lick.

As for Number Two Son, he has had an experience he is sure to remember forever.  Although, I am pretty sure it has not altered his career path to ‘Calving Photographer Up Close’.

Sometimes Valentine’s Day stinks.  My father’s birthday was Valentine’s Day.  The first few Valentine Days after he died, everyone (the whole wide world) was celebrating love and I could only be reminded of my loss.   In the years my first marriage deteriorated, I was alone, hurting and carried a burden of failure…grieving over so very much, but mostly not being able to give my children the home I desired them to have.  Valentine’s Day really stunk then and I hated it.  I even said so out loud to a wise older gal at choir as I hugged her.  She said, “No you don’t”…well, I was pretty sure I did!  She slipped a small home-made card into my hand that said, “I love you”….reminding me in my mess…that I was lovable.

One of the problems with Valentine’s Day is finding the right ‘fit’…in both good times and bad.  Our media makes it look ‘one way’, grand, romantic and expensive, if you are going to do it ‘right’.  I am grateful this year for being in a space that is the right ‘fit’ for me…

…and I found the perfect Valentine card for My Loving Spouse

…even if I did have to modify it just a tad.

I want to make sure I give full credit to the creative folks who designed this card…and because I like how the cow’s tail end gets into the picture.So…Happy Valentine’s day to you, may there be laughter in your love and hope in your sorrow.

The attic transformation has not been forgotten.  We’ve just been slightly distracted by calves, cows and kids.  My Loving Spouse and I framed out a lot of the walls the other day.  It was very rewarding as the room began to take shape quickly…
…plus, I got to use power tools!

I was using a power nail gun to be exact, and yes, it was a lot of fun!  It makes a big noise and with a puff of air shoots the nail into the wood.  Now, you may be wondering why My Loving Spouse would let me loose with such a tool, well there are some very good reasons…

I love power tools…

he loves me and….

I am tall…

 Ta Da!…Nailed those angle bits up in no time and the room is looking good.

Designing this space has been a lot of fun.  So far the only real problem I foresee, is this view from the window.  This is the designated shower spot and with a view so pretty, I’m afraid that the showers will certainly be longer, not shorter….a darn good problem I’d have to say.

This weekend was an award winner.  Plenty of snow, plenty of ‘real life’ moments to remember and plenty of farm snow pictures, just because.

Unfortunately, this weekend My Loving Spouse and I are tied for the “What were you thinking” award.

One of the cats we like, Pooh pretended all day to be stuck in the rafter of the garage.  I can say ‘pretend’, because we’ve seen that cat up there plenty of times, and down again as well, however she stayed up there all day crying.  Finally, My Loving Spouse took pity on her and went to help her down.  This was a quick decision, (‘quick’ meaning there was little planning and little common sense involved.)  He couldn’t actually reach the cat, so in his wisdom he stood balanced on top of two propane bottles.  This worked pretty well, until he actually got a hold of the cat who then latched onto his face, upsetting the delicate balance of the whole propane bottles as step stool system, down he fell onto the garage floor with Pooh on top of him.

My “What were you thinking award” is a tad worse, because I’ve managed to do it once before!  Moments after snapping a few pictures of the farm in the snow, I shoved my phone in my back pocket and jumped on Blue to help clear the driveway, still a bit of learning curve for me, especially with the new tractor, totally forgetting what happens when my phone is in my back pocket on a tractor!!! Yep, lost my phone in the newly plowed snow, somehow finding it just moments before My Loving Spouse ran it over with the tractor.  One would hope I will remember in the future as my luck with this phone certainly cannot hold.

Number Two Son earned the First Icy Path Related Injury Award.  While at work, carrying in a tray of scones he slipped on the ice and fell on his wrist.  I knew it was perhaps not ‘just’ a small thing when he called me at church to tell me he fell, “but don’t worry it is not broken”.  He is not a ‘quiet’ guy, in fact he has often been dubbed ‘The Energizer Bunny of Noise’, so as the afternoon wore on and he got quieter and quieter and held his wrist more and more, the writing was on the wall…bonding time in the ER.  A small fracture of his wrist, a large ‘soft’ cast, plenty of discomfort and grateful for the distraction of the Olympics to occupy some of his time.

I also earned the Cattleman’s Assistant Award which is an upgrade and boy, was I excited!  It was dark and snowing as we returned from the ER.  Our Friend the Farmer called me, he was trying to get over to ‘The Cattlemen’s Dinner’, which only happens once a year.  He had a cow that was calving, would I keep an eye on her?  Would I!  This big old cow had been moved into the ‘nursery’ set up for his calving and My Loving Spouse and I could see fairly well what was going on…the calf was half out and looked to be stuck.  Luckily, we could see the calf shake his head, so we knew it was still alive.  Just as we were sort of panicking, the cow pushed her calf out and as often happens it landed on his head.  (Hello, world!)  Now Mama just needed to lick it off and he needed to get up on his feet and we’d be all good.  Except it was dark and snowing hard, and it went slowly.  A newborn calf is often up in 5-10 minutes, not this one.  I needed to find a place to keep an eye on it and not disturb the Mama, so I stood near a crack in the boards of the nursery wall where I could make sure everything was progressing.  Ever grateful for my new farm jacket that kept the snow off of me, as it took that calf 30 minutes to finally get on his feet, worrying me the whole time!

The biggest award and the one that really means something in the ‘real’ world goes to Our Friend the Farmer and we couldn’t be happier for him.  At the Cattlemen’s dinner, he was awarded Cattlemen of the Year.  This is truly a big honor.  He is an incredibly hard worker.  He’s built his farm and ranch on his own with his kids, often learning things like we all tend to do…the hard way.  He has expressed how grateful he has been to have learned so much from those Cattlemen of the Year that have come before him and to now be named as such, he was deeply honored….and we are thrilled for our friend.

We are turning eggs, but only an odd number of times a day.  Yep, that is what I said, turning eggs…rotating them daily, but oddly only, not evenly, usually 3 times a day…not 4.

My Loving Spouse built an incubator…from ‘junk’.  Well, not junk exactly, the ice chest was a perfectly good little ice chest before he put a hole in it to hold the light bulb for his incubator.  The light bulb wiring he stole from some old lamp that we didn’t want any more (I think or rather I hope).  The thermostat came from an old water heater thermostat he just happened to have lying around and the eggs…well, we know where the eggs came from.

Now we ask each other important questions daily, “Did you turn the eggs this morning?”  Because they must be turned (oddly), as that is one of the jobs the mother hen does when it sits on her clutch of eggs, she turns them.  Since we are a tad newer to egg turning these eggs are marked on each side so we know when exactly to stop turning them.

If the incubator works, we will have 8 hatching chicks next Saturday, there were 9 eggs, but one met an early drop dimise.  There is the possibility that the eggs are not all fertile and we could hatch less than 8.  The incubator could be working fine, but we had a 4 hour power outage the other night, and so we do not really know if that did them in, so we are still turning them (oddly).  Chances are if none hatch, we’ll load her up and start again…turning eggs…oddly.

I had a title for this post all written out in my head.  It was going to be ‘A Calf in the Kitchen’.  Our Friend the Farmer called me in the morning with a ‘Calf situation’.  He had a weak calf, 4 days old that was still struggling and not doing well in the cold.  (Did I mention it is bitter cold here with the emphasis on bitter!)  Our Friend the Farmer has about 20 newborn calves, 70 cows that are bred and a lot on his plate right now with the cold (bitter cold).

“Are you up for a calf?”

“Yes, of course!”

“He’s weak.  Do you want to come look at him?”

“I don’t need to come look at him, I’ll be late for work, besides he needs me.”  (Insert Farmer chuckle here)

“Okay, we’ll get him set up at your place at lunch…he’ll need to warm up..”

So I raced home at lunch to pull out my equipment, calf replacement formula and milk bottle, from my days with Chance.Then we needed to create a warm place for the calf, where he could also stand up and move around but without pooping all over the floor.  My Girl and I drug in from the work shop a large wooden box, which certainly has been built for this purpose and used more than a few times.  We set it up in the kitchen and My Girl was ready to ‘calf sit’ once I went back to work for the afternoon.She might still have a lot more city and a lot less country in her, as she had visions of watching TV with the calf curled up beside her on the couch….still she was my ready and willing aide.  Except, the little one did not make it and we were sad…and she reminded me of Our Friend the Farmer’s famous words…”Well, they just don’t all make it”.

This extreme bitter cold will be with us for a day or two more and you cow lovers may be wondering how our other cows are doing?  Agnes although, not completely tame, is very smart!  She has chosen to make the old pig sty/stall her home, where there are 4 walls and a bed of straw.  She is even ‘house broken’, coming out of the stall to poop.….and should there be another bottle calf that needs me… I am ready!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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There are few words I want to ever utter out loud and ‘I am on a diet’ is high on my list.  It is not that I haven’t spent years trying to lose weight or being conscious of weight….but I seldom wanted to say the words ‘out loud’, because they in themselves seemed recipe for disaster as ‘goals’ were seldom met, and if you say it, then I imagined all the critical people of the world are expecting it.  It being the miraculous new me (complete with ‘ta da’ and plenty of sarcasm).

Thank you to the mastermind who put this snippet together..

So truly where did ‘it’ start.  My dear mother worried about my skinny brother John’s weight, and gave him milk with all the fat.  She also worried that I was ahhhh…’not skinny’….and gave me ‘non-fat milk’.  I know she meant well, John was a skinny kid and now he is a skinny man…. and yet…when I truly look back I am surprised to see that I was just a kid and my size was pretty ‘normal’ and not really fat at all.

(Circa 1964…that’s me…in the braids…)

Fast forward 50 years…last summer, I finally became content with my weight.  I do not know how it happened…but I did.  No more diets, no more inner turmoil and it was nice for about 5 months…then there was the night I went to bed, my knees hurt from building….etc…I couldn’t sleep and I thought, I want to get healthy.  I want to be here to really enjoy our grandchildren…and decided that I would lose weight…for a different reason than ever before.

…and so we did it.  My Loving Spouse and I are on a diet.  The Dukan diet to be exact.  We’ve watched my cousin loose 46 pounds and adjust her life, we read a bit, and we got started, thankfully we are doing it together!  I am adding a ‘page’ to the blog for the diet, because reading about others journeys always helps my own.  I will try to keep it updated, with our progress, recipes and blunders, as there are bound to be those, should you care to follow, but I do not want to turn this blog into a ‘diet blog’…so there you go, I’m sure to be talking about cows again soon.

One key is that we are to walk 30 minutes a day, well that makes sense.  Yesterday I planned to walk home from work, a 3 mile jaunt.  No problem…until it started to snow.  My friend told me to walk around the Mall (Fred Meyer’s), so I tried that and there were three problems with it.

1.  I felt like a fool

2.  I was walking by a lot of nice looking food

3.  Walking quickly and trying to look at the items on the aisles made me dizzy

So???? Is it working?  Are we making progress?

Well, we’ve found the sweet spot in the bathroom floor, that spot where the scale registers the lowest weight and we are not moving it!  Just a tad over 3 weeks and My Loving Spouse has lost 20.8 pounds and I have lost 10.2….so here it is in black and white…and it feels good.