Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

This is supposed to be a blog about the dairy mostly but lately it seems I have been posting about the baby. But you have to excuse me there because she takes up more of my time now than the dairy. In any case it came to my attention this afternoon, after my 3rd wheelbarrow load of wood, that I have neglected to document how we heat the house during the winter. This is our Hardy wood burning furnace. This isn't the best of pictures and was taken back in '04, but it will have to do until I can locate my camera. Until I moved here I had never heard of a wood burning furnace. I don't understand (and therefore am unable to explain fully) how it all works but these are the basics: It runs off of electricity-to power the blower-and has a huge tank of water in it. The wood fire inside the furnace heats the water and that water is piped though copper coils and somehow the heat is blown off of that into the house. So, of couse, it only works with forced air heating systems. ...

Much has been said; mostly by my mom, that Ellen never takes a bad picture and that she is such a smiley girl. Here is proof that it's not always so. Ha! This was up at her Great Grandpa's place last Sunday. I came home and took the picture I featured below when we got back home. Her aunt wanted to take pictures of her in her Christmas riggings, so I left her dressed up when went there. Ellen was not impressed. She let us know in no uncertain terms that she wasn't in to a photo shoot at the time. Maybe it was because there weren't any presents for her under the tree.

Here in blogger land it seems to be customary among some circles to have a Throwback Thursday, where you blog about the past...however long ago it may have been. I shall attempt this off and on as I go. Here is a picture from long ago, where I grew up in Northern California. Many folks think, when I tell them I am from N CA, that I come from San Fransisco or thereabouts, but no, my hometown is much further north than that even. San Fran is a a drive south of several hours. Anyway, this picture (and I am not sure of the quality here) is of the house I grew up in. It is pretty much surrounded by Douglas Fir trees with the occasional alder thrown in for variety. The willow tree is hiding the front window. The front part of the house was built by a bachelor logger who first owned the property back in the '40s I believe. The back half of it was added on later by my dad and uncle, who finished it off for their mother to live in. She bought the property originally. The house is covered i...

Since I likely won't have time to do much posting in the next few days here is your Merry Christmas card from me to you; courtesy of Ellen and her sunny smile. May you have the greatest Christmas yet. Remember the reason for the season, clear your heart from all resentments and regrets, count your blessings, eat a little, laugh a lot and remember to rejoice always. Please note: a Christmas photo from the dairy isn't complete without a hint of dairy-ness. Check out my husband's work boots by the back door in the upper left hand corner of the picture. Is that not hilarious! Merry Christmas!

Yesterday morning I went up the road to do the feeding and Rosie wasn't there with the herd. She gave me quite a scare because I didn't think her udder was big enough for her to be close to calving, but finally, after I'd driven all around the pasture, in the half-dark mind you, dodging limbs and stumps and all, I found them; Rosie and her calf. I was so relieved to see her standing up and with a live calf standing next to her I almost cried. Yes, it's a little heifer calf, and RED like her mother. A little bit darker red, but red just the same. Rosie doesn't have much of an udder, as you can see in the picture, so unfortunately she might become a cull later on down the line, but for now I am just happy she didn't croak in calving and that she had a red heifer that I am not going to worry about that. I couldn't get the camera to cooperate with me, so that is why Rosie has this demented gleam in her eye-the flash kept going off, but all in all the pic ca...

Yesterday morning husband says: " We need to get a Christmas tree for Ellen. Today would be a good day. I'll get the 4-wheeler and the saw out and you can go get it. Men aren't any good at picking out Christmas trees" So he took Ellen up to his mom's and I, being the dutiful wifey, went out and got the tree. He saw me coming buzzing back up the road and laughed and laughed. What a wonderful romantic my husband is. Look at my hair! It certainly looks like I went for a long ride on the 4-wheeler, doesn't it. Ha! It, my hair, always frizzes out in humid weather, and it has been kind of humid here.

For want of anything trenchant to write today; not that I EVER have anything trenchant to write, here is one of the latest Ellen photos. What joy a child has in being totally oblivious to appearances...just enjoy your food, make the most of it and what doesn't make it into your mouth...wear it with pride! (Actually, it isn't a cookie she was eating, it was one of those teether biscuits.)

The past few days have been busy. On Thursday we had to move our heifer herd from Windyville back here to the farm...well, just up the road from the farm here, so husband can take them hay with the tractor. We have a winter pasture we put them in; they still had plenty of grass in the summer pasture in Windyville, but weatherfolks are predicting possible 6 inches of snow this weekend; it's not fun driving a bale of hay 5 or 7 miles or so every couple of days-especially on icy steep roads. So we spent a couple of hours driving back and forth transporting 18 beasts to their new winter home. Two of them were bred so we put them back in with the bull and his heifers. The rest went into the winter pasture. It is funny to watch them react when you put new critters in with an established herd. They get all huffed up and posture and headbutt to establish who will be boss cow-or heifer. They duck their heads, headbutt and go round and round kicking up mud and grass until someone gives ...

Sourdough Bread 7 cups bread flour or all purpose flour-divided (*see my note below on making dough) 2 cups warm water (105 degrees F-110 degrees F) 1 cup sourdough starter 1 ½ packages active dry yeast 2 teaspoons salt 2 teaspoons sugar 2 tablespoons cornmeal (if you don’t have cornmeal, just regular flour will do OK in a pinch) Making the Dough In a large bowl, using an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook and set on medium speed, combine 2 cups flour, water, sourdough starter, yeast, salt and sugar; beat for 2 minutes. (I just use a wire whisk to start out with, then as the dough gets thicker, graduate to a wooden spoon, or whatever else “feels” right at the time. I tried using an electric mixer and dough hook and couldn’t keep the dough from crawling up the hook into the mixer. Maybe I need more practice) With the mixer on low, add 2 cups more flour, a little at a time, until combined. Increase speed to high; beat until smooth and sticky, about 3 minutes longer. With the mixer o...

In tribute to what those in Oklahoma and other areas of the Mid-West are going through, here is a poem from one of the masters of poetry, along with a couple of photos I took from our ice storm back in January. I feel badly for those who are going through it now, I remember quite vividly how horrible it was to be without power. We were without power for 9 days and it was awful. We had to milk using a generator, and we went down to husband's mom's place to sleep. It stayed cold-well below freezing-for so long and the ice didn't melt and the limbs kept falling and we had to slip and slid around on the ice doing chores. A veritable nightmare. The first pic is a shot of husband's granddad's place and the damage to their shade oak tree. It has recovered a bit by now, but it's still sad. The second pic is some dogwood buds on ice. Robert Frost had it right; ice is great for destruction... Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’...

Whenever we have a storm of some kind we get a calf. We are now kind of in the middle of a freezing rain episode. We got some Saturday night, a bit yesterday, some last night and this moring and we are supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. What is saving us from a great deal of headache is that it warms up above freezing during the day, so much of it melts off and the roads, so far, are clear. This is a VERY good thing because we NEED to milk truck to be able to make it and pick up the milk. If he doesn't we are supposed to dump the milk because he's not supposed to get milk that has been in the tank for more than 2 days. Husband says sometimes they allow it if the weather has been really cold like this, but we have a fairly small tank that only holds a bit over 2 days worth. Anyway; back to the calf. This morning husband takes hay up the road to the dry cows and finds bull calf. He is back snug and dry under a cedar tree but as soon as husband comes over to inspec...

Haven't spent much time on the computer lately. Guess I got burnt out after the NaBloPoMo run. But it was fun. Yesterday we had a little calf rodeo here. Had to wean 3 of them and put 2 more in the bigger pen. While we were catching on of the weaners another one took a flying leap over the dilapidated fence and landed in the muck back by the barn where the cows stand and..um..."produce" after they have been milked. Dunno why they don't go back out to the field, but no, they just stand and make a deep swamp of unmentionable things. So anyway, the calf lands smack dab into this green swamp, on her side. Husband and I just stand there watching her flail around and get covered in muck. *sigh* For a minute there we were thinking she was going to be stuck in it, but no, she got up and went trotting triumphantly off with the cows. They, however, wouldn't have anything to do with her. Then somehow, while we were taking another calf to the weaner pen, this first...

For some reason this always fascinates me so I will go ahead and post about it. On the ridge back behind us hubby actually owns the original homestead that his great grandfather (I think) built here back in the late 1800s. This is a picture of it. The middle building is the house, the building on the right was used as a chicken shed and the building on the left was...I dunno, I forget. There is a barn, but it's off to the left of the pic a bit. The large tree on the left was a pecan tree, but it was demolished in the Jan 07 ice storm, a heartbreak to me. The pecans were really good, if you could get any from the varmints. The fallen tree is also a pecan and is actually still alive, it bears pecans every year. The property has not always been in the family. Back in the early 1900s it was sold to two sisters who actually lived on it and farmed it up until 1968. A few years after that time one of the daughter's of one of the sisters sold it back to my husband because she...

The two days that hubby was gone went smoothly. Neighbor did a really good job, and had fun I think. The cows seemed to like him. This isn't always the case. Sometimes they don't like new people and won't let down their milk for them. Cows are funny that way; funny-weird, not funny-haha. So of course on Tues we have a cow who has a calf. Another heifer. That makes 61 heifers for us, in a total herd, including two bulls, of 101. I think hubby said he was milking 38 cows now. So anyway. We got a new calf on Tues AM. Today we went down and got cow and calf. And, lo and behold, there is another cow in labor. So we brought her up too. Dunno if she's calved or not. Hubby will check on her later. That's it for today.

In an effort to find something to blog about today here is a picture of my most unusual house plant. I like having house plants here, it gives me something green to look at inside the house. However, with regards to inside plants, my thumb is not as green as I would like it to be. My husband's aunt gave me a couple of plants when I first came here; an aloe and this plant. I have, to my great joy and disbelief, managed to keep the aloe alive. It has grown quite a bit over the past 3 years since I have been here. I need to repot it but am not sure how to go about it. It has propagated quite a bit so there is a little flock of teeny aloes in the pot as well. Husband's aunt propagates these other plants. They go by several names: Starfish plant, Starfish Cactus, Hairy Giant Starfish Flower, Carrion Flower. Also: Stapelia Noblis. I just call it the dead mouse plant. It is a succulent, not a cactus, and is pretty easy to care for, much like an aloe, though it needs much more wate...

With temperatures dipping well down below freezing every night, it gets really cold in the barn. Not even all the hot cow exhaust helps. Here is my husband's solution. He used to heat the barn with an old cast iron stove that took two of us much trouble to move in and out of the barn. It had lots of moving parts to take off and put back on and it was super heavy. We had to be really careful moving it because I guess cast iron is so brittle. So last year husband made this. He used to drive the bus for the local school system and at the bus barn they would have old bus wheels he'd buy really cheap. He took three of those, welded them together and then concocted round ends, a door, handle, draft...etc from scrap steel he has around. You can't see it really well in the picture but the little draft is a round piece of steel welded onto a nut on a large bolt. The whole shebang works really well. It is much, much easier to move in and out. He does it by himself using a dolly. ...

Yes, that's right; 14,600+ consecutive times my husband has milked his herd. That's over 20 years of non-stop dairy-ing. Twice a day every day. No vacations. No overnighters to the big city. No breakfast in bed. No sleeping in past 4 AM. No evening at the movies. No getting further from home than you can drive back between milkings. FOR OVER 20 YEARS!!! Tomorrow it all ends. Well, for a couple of days anyway. Ha. For the next couple of days he is going to go out of town. He will leave really early and be back really late each evening, so we are having our saint of a neighbor come over and do the milking. I will still do my calf feeding and graining up the road and do the washup as well, but the neighbor will do the milking. This should be interesting.

In going through my photo files to find something to post I ran across this picture. This is the building where I used to work. It went by a couple of names; the Justice Center, or as we called it: MCDC. Multnomah County Detention Center. The very top 5 rows of windows belong to Portland Police, their entrance was at the back of the building. The rest of the building was the jail, with the entrance you can see here in this pic. This was the main jail in Portland; one of 5 jail facilities at the time I was there. Yes, the jail population in Ptlnd OR averaged about 1,200 per day, give or take a few, it depended on funding for jail beds. That is more than the population of half this county I live in. When hubby told me this county had not long ago built a nice new jail that would house more than 30 inmates I rolled around on the floor laughing almost. What's really freaky is that they have a whole floor for just the sex offenders. What does this have to do with the dairy? Ummm..not mu...

In an effort to find something to post about; here is just a random picture of the holding corral in back of the milk barn. The calf just happened to be in there when I took the pic; she was just separated from the cow. Initially when I came hereto the dairy I thought nothing special of it. I mean, a corral is a corral is a corral; right? Well, from all the comments that visitors make about it I guess it is a rather nice corral. Even the veterinarian made a comment about how nice it is. My husband is pretty handy with steel. Collecting steel is his hobby, or one of them anyway. So over the years he has been working on this corral; setting the round steel pipes in as posts and welding the square pipes as rungs, or cross bars, or whatever you call them. There are three separate holding areas in this corral; you can swing the gates around to create one, two or all three at will. It makes it easier to separate out a specific cow when you need to move her somewhere else. Just last mo...

Hey. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. Here is a turkey that was just passing through last spring. Well, we had a flock of them that wandered around the place here. I haven't seen many around here for a few months now. Mostly they like it down in the bottoms I guess. As pertains to the dairy we love having the wild turkeys come and visit. They like to scratch the cow pies apart to eat the undigested corn and that way the cow pies do a better job of fertilizing. Otherwise they just dry up and kill the grass. Sorry, when you live on a dairy every subject of conversation can turn into something about one kind of cow product or another. We have a guy who comes out and hunts turkey during hunting season. When he gets one he will usually bring us some. It can be tough, but I season it with tenderizer and then coat it and fry it; instead of chicken fingers I make turkey fingers. It turns out pretty well. I am not much into wild game, but it's OK sometimes I guess.

( Here is a picture of S.E. -who is no longer with us. This was right before she calved and as you can tell she was a victim of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of breeding to get bigger udders on cows. But more on that later perhaps. I took this pic to get a shot of her markings; an upside down baseball mitt catching a ball. It's not real clear in this pic, but you can kind of see it.) OK-so once again I fell down on the NaBloPoMo job by not posting yesterday-it's amazing how life gets in the way of my hobbies...ha ha. Since I haven't prepared what I want to post I will just go from a comment C left and talk about naming cows. I think I have mentioned in a previous post that I try to avoid naming or getting attached to them at all costs because you never know when one is going to croak or go bad on you. The first calf I lost I cried over and she was only about 3 weeks old. And in fact in the past 3 years since I have been here and maybe longer than that we have h...

As requested; here is the recipe for the sourdough starter. It's pretty easy. This is verbatim from the book, however, I usually just use all purpose flour and tap water and it seems to work as well. Sourdough Starter 1) In a large bowl combine 1 ½ cups bread flour, ½ cup rye flour, ½ package active dry yeast and 2 cups bottled spring water. Cover the bowl with a cloth and let sit at room temperature for 3 days. The mixture will bubble, smell slightly sour, darken slightly and collect a watery liquid on top. 2) On the fourth day, stir in ½ cup flour and ½ cup water; repeat on the 5th day. Use starter in bread dough or refrigerate in a sealed container. 3) For longer storage, once a week remove 1 cup starter; replace with ½ cup flour and ½ cup water.

What's the only thing that can match the smell and taste of something chocolate straight from the oven? Sourdough bread! This is my newest talent. I found a recipe for a sourdough starter and tried it and was hooked! Notice that one loaf is missing a slice or two. I cannot resist; I take it straight from the oven and get the knife and the butter and enjoy. I love it when it's hot and crusty. It makes great toast later on too. After making my own I really don't care for storebought sourdough much anymore. What is it about homemade food that spoils you for storebought?! In the dairy business: we got another little heifer calf yesterday, but nothing remarkable happened in bringing her and the cow in. I am glad it's a heifer calf. This past week we weaned two calves, which takes me down to 5 on the bottle. This will make 6. But I have another one to wean on the 23rd and then another on Dec 4th. So I need more heifers to keep me in the calfkeeping business. Well...

Another day, another post. At times I can think of a dozen things to post, at other times I can't think of a thing. Today is one of the latter. I try to post things pertaining to the dairy, rather loosely at times I admit, but it is hard because things tend to be pretty dull around here for the most part. Here is a pic of sunset on the dairy a couple of days ago. The wind mill is non-functional except for creating ambiance. It does a good job at that. This scene was much more impressive in person. Not to mention by the time I raced into the house and got the camera it had faded a bit. Well, hopefully by tomorrow I will have something more interesting to post. Thanks for stopping by.

Way back in the fall of '04 when I moved here I went through a rather tough time having left job, family, friends and everything else familiar behind in Portland. I had for 12 years lived where I couldn't have any pets, so here in the country one thing I wanted again was a pet; specifically a cat since we live way too close to the 55 MPH highway for a dog. I also had the idea that I would create a kind of compost pile out behind the house. This was until I realized that nothing would stay there and compost due to 'possum, skunk, 'coon visitors. But then one dark evening when I was coming back from the barn there was this little ghost that flitted away from the compost pile. I would see it off and on and eventually it became used to me and would just hide behind a tree and mew until I left. We finally discovered it was a fluffy yellow cat that would sleep up in the hay during the day. One sunny morning in late winter or early spring I saw it up there and went and...

Here is a picture of about half of our 2007/2008 winter hay supply. It is hard to believe that the girls go through so much hay. In a picture you can't really get the overwhelming sense of how MUCH hay is here, and how tall it is. But over on the left edge you can see a piece of our goose-neck stock trailer and truck. Anyway, this particular hay shed is a pussy cat's dream retreat. Any stray cat in the neighborhood shows up here eventually; much to Matilda's ire. She is intolerant of any other feline trespassers. But I will have to tell Matilda's story in a different post. This hay stack also attracts all kinds of varmints; you can see at the bottom the little triangular holes between bales. These make great dens for skunks and 'possums. (BTW-I was tagged by Michelle at NaBloPoMo , but since I don't really have that many friends who I'd feel comfortable tagging there, I will just give you a link to her site, which is really cool; she does cards and crafting...

(OK. I joined NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month)-meaning I am supposed to post every day for November, but I haven't been doing a very good job of it. I joined late so I guess it doesn't matter for this year anyway.) Yesterday my husband had one of those Mondays. On Sun evening at milking time he noticed that our expectant heifer was acting funny, so he rounded her up and got her in a pen by the corral. At 2:30 AM he dons his boots and heads out to check up on her. Sure enough, she's got a calf, but somehow it has slipped UNDER the corral and Mama Cow is having a fit to get to it. So he has to drag the calf around, in the dirt and whatnot, and rearrange portable cattle panels so cow and calf can be reunited and not mix with the rest of the herd. In the process one of the panels falls down on the back of his leg. He comes back to bed and tells me nothing of what's gone on. At breakfast a couple hours later he tells me we have a healthy heifer calf, but, he says, ...

Yesterday was pretty typical. After I got my husband his cornflakes at 4 AM, I took another nap on the sofa until 5:30 AM. Then I got up, got the baby up, gave her a bottle, bundled her up and went out to do chores. I fed the calves...etc. Then I came in, got ready and went grocery shopping. Grocery shopping...I hate it. I would rather go to the dentist. Since I still have no cavities at age 39, I really WOULD rather go to the dentist than go grocery shopping. My husband doesn't quite understand why I hate grocery shopping, but he has never gone in his whole life so how could he? After I came home, put everything away, ate lunch and was resting, in came husband with a request; go see if you can get that cow into the corral so we can get her and her calf. So somewhere along the line I find myself up in the dry cow pasture ACROSS the fence on the neighbor's property hanging on to the leg of a bull calf that is trying to kick the liver out of me, with my husband on the walkie talk...

There are times when the whole Mid-West thing gets to me. Maybe it's just the time of year when I feel melancholy and wistful anyway. But having grown up on the coast sometimes I feel landlocked here, suffocated by all the miles and miles of land surrounding me. Then I would give my eyeteeth for a day on the North West Coast, where it's wild and rugged, where the gulls scream and sail over the waves and you can look down on them from the cliffs and see the whales in the water spouting as they migrate. At times like these this poem comes to mind: Sea Fever by John Masefield I must go down to the seas again to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking, And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied; And all I ask is a wind...

The other day as I was sweeping for about the 3rd time that day I realized that I can almost always tell what season it is by what I am sweeping up off the floor. This is fall. I am now sweeping up dead flies. These are the flies that sit out on the back door and porch waiting for us to go in or out so that they can come in and drive us nuts. Husband and I walk around with swatter in hand killing them by the dozens. After husband has been through doing his fly massacre duty I also have to mop after I sweep; he has his special trick of swatting once then swatting again to make sure the fly is dead. When he does his second swat he does this swat-and-drag technique that leaves a cute little red trail on the floor. Ick. In winter I generally am sweeping hay off the floor; the hay that comes out of husband's pants cuffs. He cuffs his pants before he puts on his boots. After he is through putting out hay he comes in, takes off his boots on the back porch but uncuffs his pants in the kitc...

Here is a situation I never expected to have on a dairy farm: trouble with coons. Now don't get me wrong, we live in the country and I expected them to be around. Coons are everywhere. In fact, they were very much present in downtown Portland even. I mean right in the center of town. Portland is very "green" I guess you would say, with lots of parks downtown. The coons were quite at home there and spent their nights in the dumpsters and in trash cans; they are pretty adaptable . But here on the dairy they make their living in quite a different manner. Ummm ...how do I present this? Well, let's see. First off, just a piece of cow information. Cows don't digest the dried corn that they eat; it comes out the other end. And you can see where I am going from here. Coons love predigested corn...gross but true. So they goober through the cow pies and eat the corn. This past spring and summer the coons were SO BAD...so many of them my husband was nearly tripping over them...

Last weekend we had a couple of escapes. Those are always fun to deal with. Early last Saturday morning I went up the road to do my feeding. To feed the heifers and bull I go part way up my husband's granddad's driveway (which is about 1/4 mile long) and go into the corral through a gap we cut in the fence. So I head up there and what do I see but a cow standing in the middle of the driveway. She was one of the newer heifers to come fresh about a month ago. I walked up to her and petted her. She was just puzzled as to where the rest of the herd had gone. Husband sends them up that way at night. Somehow this one just managed to get through a gate that had come down in some way. It was kind of strange that she was the only one to get out. But you never know when it might happen. They have a tendency to rub their chins or heads on the gate latches and open them by accident. Anyway, I had to go tell hubby; we came back down later and kind of herded her back in a different gate. On ...

Well, I have had quite a few things I wanted to post this week, but not much time. Here is a start to it. On Monday I took a walk down to the river. I met a couple of box turtles out for a last stroll before winter themselves. Here is one of them. The other was shy. I hadn't been down there since before the ice storm last January and was overjoyed to find my favorite sycamore tree was spared. The picture doesn't do it any justice; it's huge.

Zucchini Pie This happened just about 2 weeks ago. I decided that I would use up some of the zucchini that I so painstakingly peeled, deseeded and sliced back in early summer. Mostly I use it for this zucchini pie recipe that we like; once it's all done it tastes almost exactly like apple pie. (I very much miss having apple trees.) So happily humming to myself I make the crust, thaw the zucchini, measure the spices, stir, stir, stir it all up and assemble; confident in my ability to cook this simple dessert. At the appropriate time I take it out of the oven; sniff, sniff, ahhhh the aroma. Time for dessert after supper; I slice it and put a generous serving on my husband's plate. A piece lands on my hand, I taste it. EEEEEWWWWW!!!! BLEEEEECH!!!! "Dear," I say. "I think I did something wrong." "What?" he asks. "Did you forget the sugar?" "Ummm, yes, I did." Well, ever the optimist, especially when it comes to dessert, my ...

This unfortunately won't be as amusing as my gelatin caper story. It has taken me so long to post this because I wasn't able to make it into a funny story, mostly it is just odds and ends. More blunders: My mother says I have always been the type of person who wouldn't try to do anything unless I was sure I was doing it correctly. I guess that is true. I haven't really made too terribly many blunders in cooking, but then again I am only a bit less than 3 years along in my marriage and cooking career. So, I am sure there are more blunders on the way. Here are the ones that stick out in memory. Pepper About 2 years ago I was making scalloped taters and read the recipe wrong. Please note: a whole tablespoon of pepper will totally ruin your scalloped potato casserole. Vinegar My mother in law has this apple salad recipe that she makes. It involves chopped apples, raisins and mini marshmallows. The dressing is Miracle Whip style salad dressing with sugar and a tad o...

Here's a cute picture; a nice break from all the stories. Ellen and the calves were fascinated with each other while I did my little walk along the fence line.

This will be an interlude from dairy cooking while I cook up another story about my kitchen adventures. I actually wrote this well over a year and a half ago and friends found it entertaining...husband did not find it so entertaining for some reason, so if you know him and see him, just keep mum about it. Thanks! Ha! It all started about 2 1/2 years ago when we realized that this modular home was not designed with any type of storage in mind. Down on the back of the ridge, built on a slope, my DH had a small 8'X10' building that he had constructed about 20 years ago, back before he had the sawmill or dairy. He'd hand sawn all the boards from oak and built it as kind of an office/hangout back in the woods. He had a small old sofa and dresser in there. Well, he figured he would move it up here for us to use as storage, though he was nervous about the whole process and kept putting it off. But he finally bit the bullet and moved it; quite a process involving the bulldozer, the...

This was going to be just one post, but I got bogged down with trying to tell everything all on one page, so I am going to make several posts out of my cooking stories. Here is the beginning: When you are 36 and have been a never-married bachelorette for so long, you don’t really prepare the meals, they just kind of happen; soups, sandwiches, fruit, cereal and milk…etc. I rarely ever ate out, but at the same time I didn’t ever see the point of preparing full meals for myself either. Sometimes I would fix a casserole and freeze most of it to be taken for lunches at work, but for the most part I didn’t bother much in the cooking department. Also, for much of the 12 years I was in Portland, OR I didn’t live where I had access to my own kitchen, I either had to share with a bunch of others, or I only had a microwave and a stove top burner. So when I got married back in the fall of ’04 I was pretty green in cooking to please myself, let alone someone else. I had visited my future in-la...

For the past 26 years; even before my husband started the dairy, he has driven the school bus for the local school district. Yesterday he officially retired. This will mean many things for us, but uppermost on my mind is that we get to sleep in an extra 50 minutes in the mornings. You see, in order to get the little kiddies to school on time he had to do the milking pretty early. For the past 26 years he has been eating his cornflakes at around 3:15 AM every morning on school days! When I came on the scene about 3 years ago the concept of a 2:55 AM arising was daunting. But I eventually adjusted; however groggy I was during the day. I take the occasional nap, but I never know when he might pop in and have me do something; oh, like drive the tractor to tow him on his motorcycle to get it going, or chase a wayward calf or whatever. There are no end of surprise chores on a dairy. On the weekends, during school vacations and over the summer he still prefers to get done early with th...

(First off...thank you to everyone who has visited and commented. I appreciate it so much. Someone asked for more about the baby and DH. I will start with the beginning of baby and go from there...ha. You will get some of DH in the story. Usually I write these first in Word and go back and edit, but I am just going to put this in off the top of my head and maybe edit later. Here goes...) The whole thing began with DH asking me a question: "Had any deep thoughts lately?" I told him we had best be thinking about whether we wanted to have a baby or not because the biological clock was ticking pretty loudly. This threw him for a loop. See, he was 47 at the time and I was 37. We had only been married for just over a year and THAT was a huge leap for both of us since we neither had been married before. At age 44 his sister was the youngest in his family and so he had no exposure to babies and their ilk. He wasn't sure what to say. But suffice it to say and to make a long story ...

As the years go on I keep learning new things here; not all of it has to do with bovines. Here are a few more things. I will keep you posted as other things come up. 1) Cows can walk up stairs. 2) With the right motivation cows can walk backwards down stairs as well. 3) A pack rat is a very large beastie; close to the size of a squirrel. 4) An agitated pack rat running straight at you takes on the dimensions of a VW Bug. 5) A 24 hour old calf can outrun a 40 something year old male and leave him in the dust. 6) A 24 hour old calf can contain a lot more poo than you would think. 7) A 24 hour old calf is already an expert at sharing its poo; and is very generous at spreading it around. 8) Training a calf to take a bottle is a task to be dreaded. 9) A bull is an obnoxious, ornery, ungrateful, unpredictable, dangerous (...etc) wretch. 10) No matter how you shout, wave your arms, rev your 4-wheeler and otherwise make a fool of yourself in public, a bull in the middle of the highway will not...

When you live on a dairy for very long the first thing you learn NOT to do is to name the critters. You never know when one is going to croak, or when you will have to get rid of them; either BEFORE they croak on you, or because they have some kind of problem. However, there are times when a name or a nickname just happens. This one calf came along back when I first started my calfkeeping gig here. My husband went by her house one morning and said, "That calf in the last house is sure fat and fluffy looking." And that is how Fluffy got her name. Fluffy just had her first calf this Monday. My husband was out there at 9 PM, stripped to the waist because he had to pull the calf. Fluffy was in no mood to cooperate, so it was quite the ordeal. He got her in the trailer, but she decided she didn't want to be messed with so she went after him and he had to climb the side of the trailer to get away from her. Anyway, he finally got a live heifer calf out of he. But she w...

For those of you who are self-employed I am sure you can relate to the whole insurance headache. My husband has a second part time job which insures us, but when our baby was born 7 months ago we decided to get her coverage from a different source. Then, since it worked so well, we decided to get it for me as well. Here is the abbreviated story on how THAT has gone: The fun began in June of this year. When he talked to the agent on phone to get a quote he, my Dear Husband, made me 2 inches taller than I am and got a quote for the Premium plan which was $236 p/mo. When I filled out the form I put my real height. Well, the agent calls back a couple days later and says when he turned the application in they had to adjust it because I am four pounds too fat for my height (well, he didn't say that, but that's what it comes down to; 4 lousy pounds) to qualify for the low rate Premium plan, and to keep it would be $262 p/ mo. DH didn't want that rate so he called in and said we wa...

Here is another interesting calf we had last year, I believe. This one was a bull, so we sold him, but he was funny. I think somewhere along the line he was missing a chromosome or two. My husband said the springs were just missing from his ears, but I think there was something more wrong. He always had his tongue hanging out, though calves will do that off and on, but he was pretty consistent with it. Also his tail was kinked up. You can see that it is kind of short, but when I felt it some of the bones seemed fused. Anyway, other than his appearance, he acted perfectly normal and the folks that buy our bull calves didn't seem concerned. I am working on more halfway funny stuff to post but there's so much that I don't know where to start. Just keep tuning in. Thanks for visiting. Calfkeeper

This happened last month. I thought it was an interesting case. Wed Aug 15th 2007 8:30 AM: Went out and brought new heifer calf and cow in from field. Not too sure how old calf was; umbilical cord sort of dried up, but calf still seemed damp. Left her with cow all morning ‘til maybe early afternoon, then separated them. Beautiful, normal calf. 6 PM Fed calf bottle. She slugged back the whole thing. Thurs Aug 16th5:15 AM (approx) Calf comatose. Or as near as I could tell. She was on her side, non-responsive, drooling, head on ground, eyes closed or just barely opened. I tried to feed her bottle but she only swallowed convulsively once or twice, then milk just drained from her mouth. 5:30 AM. Husband went out and looked at her. Drug her out of pen and out of the way to be taken to boneyard later after chores were all done. She was barely breathing and as I said, totally non-responsive.This was a real grief as the cow she came from is a great milker and to get a heifer from her was a joy....

Here's a break from my stories.... This is a photo of a calf born back in March of '05. The mom is a b/w Holstein and so was the bull. But both of her grandfathers were registered red Holsteins. With some lack of originality I named her Red Rosie. She is in with the bull to breed now. We are anxious that all goes well with her. It will be interesting to see if she has a red or b/w calf.

This takes longer to write and to read than it did to happen, but read on and laugh if you must! It started off as a regular, normal morning. I went out and did the AM chores as usual and was doing the wash-up after milking; where I run wash and rinse waters through the hoses and milkers. My husband, who drives a bus for the grade school, had left to start the bus and warm it up (he keeps it parked up by his mom’s place) and to check on his mother. I was in the middle of finishing the bleach rinse cycle when I took the plug out of the vat so the water wouldn’t go back up the intake hose and the milking hoses would clear out. As I leaned over to do so I casually laid my hand on the porcelain sink that we use to wash our hands; it is right next to the clean up vats. To my everlasting astonishment the sink just fell off the wall. Now, this is a large older porcelain sink and rather heavy. However, it didn’t go kablooie, it just kind of bowed slowly away from the wall, like it was...

Prior to my marrying a dairy farmer and moving to the dairy I was ignorant of the majority of happenings on one. I grew up in rural California where my father had a cow, but she was sold when I was about 5, so beyond the very basics I knew nothing about the day to day conditions or events of running of a dairy farm.. In downtown Portland, where I lived for 12 years before moving to Missouri, one doesn’t see many dairies beyond one called the Belmont Dairy which is actually a large grocery store with spendy lofts for rent on the upper story. There are many dairies in rural Oregon, but I was not fortunate to have visited any of them and picked up any practical knowledge. So once I became an adult what I learned about dairies I learned from the cow commercials I saw on TV when I visited my mom back in California; Holsteins are immaculate, live in lush, knee deep grassy fields, where the bulls yak companionably and the cows chit chat like a group of gals gossiping over a steaming latte...