Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

Not much, but enough to make our morning walk enchanting.  I don't really know as Bella cared one way or the other about taking a walk in the snow, but she enjoyed herself as usual.  I enjoyed myself, too.  Snow makes familiar sights along the walk enchanting.   I wonder if it makes it more difficult for Bella to smell where the squirrels have been.   Every weed, every vine and tree are turned into a work of art, etched over with white. I see the above vine looped over on itself most every day we go down there, but seeing it covered in white makes it really stand out.  I think it's an old grape vine.  It would have to be old.  Gary had the cows down there in summers for close on to 20 years or more, and they wouldn't have allowed a new grapevine to grow.  In fact, since there haven't been cows down there for a couple of years now, there's  more and more vegetation taking over again.  Probably even poison ivy/poison oak, though ...

Gary has been setting up a better corral for us to manage this beef "herd" as it were.  We have 17 heifers/cows and about 12...maybe only 11...calves, so we don't have a large operation.  But in order to manage them we have to be able to separate them, vaccinate them...etc.  So here a couple months ago Gary invested in a fancier corral than he ever used for the dairy.  It has all sorts of swinging gates, both big and little, latches...etc.  In this picture above, which was almost 2 weeks ago now, we had moved 2 of the cement feed bunks from the dry cow field up to the new corral, which is in the field just west of the house here.   This involved a random misadventure on my part as I was driving the truck/trailer.  He had gone before me with the tractor leaving me with the rather vague instruction to follow to wait about 5 minutes and then go to what I understood to be  "where we have hay."  Which could potentially have been any number of...

 The past 2 or 3 days we have had a "polar vortex" travel over us, with wintery temps and precipitation.  The temps just hovered a smidge above the freezing point, so what snow we got didn't stick. Several times I have heard or read somewhere that the native Inuit have multiple names for different types of snow.  I guess we do as well, to a certain extent, though for the most part our culture isn't as permeated with snow as theirs would be, I guess.  We have snow, sleet, slush...anything else?  I am sure I missed some. Yesterday when it started "snowing" here it was small, super dry pellets, like pictured above.  Gary called it a "hominy snow."  I have heard him use that term for it before, but had never bothered to look it up.  I'd always thought it was just local colloquialism, but it led me down a couple of rabbit trails looking up terms and definitions.   It actually originates from German; Graupel.  I copied and pasted the below fro...

 The days after Christmas always seem to be a bit of a let down.  After almost 2 months of buildup, it's suddenly finished; leftovers are in various packets in the fridge, Christmas cards need to be trashed or stored for repurposing and some of the toys probably are already broken.   The tree is in the front room hollering to be taken down; though I have enjoyed seeing it set up and lit up this year. Ellen and I went to town yesterday because I wanted to see what sort of after-Christmas sales I could take advantage of.  As it turned out; not any really.  We got to Walmart at about 10 AM, and all the nice ribbons were gone.  If I had needed it; there was plenty of wrapping paper left, but I have quite a bit of that at home already.  We rarely use wrapping paper; mostly we just bung things into gift bags, top it with tissue and voila.  I save most of the tissue, all that hasn't been torn.  And we all save our gift bags and boxes and give them b...

 It is a bit after 7:00 AM.  We are getting ready to rev things up for Christmas.  Gary is off helping Gail do chores.  She gets a free ham from her work, so she fixes the main course at her house.  When he comes back we will do gifts.  After I finish this blog post I will head to the kitchen to do a few kitchen-y things.  Devil the eggs for one.  We also have to make the frosting for the Yule Log/Buche.  All of it is low carb, of course.  And aside from rolling it up, a buche is the easiest dessert to make.   Ellen is in her room doing her "get up" routine.  It is currently 45 degrees outside, and dripping a bit of rain.  It was 53 when we got up, but this weather front is passing over us and the arctic vortex, or whatever term they are calling it now, is following behind it, so the temps are already dropping.  Today is Monday.  The next 3 days after today they are calling for snow.  Ugh.  I wish ...

 Smudge in the window.   Christmas Eve when I was a kid always meant opening presents.  We always opened them that evening.  So did my sister's family.  (Just bear with that idea for a bit.  Haha...I don't want to go off on a rabbit trail here.)  Her mom and family always did a big get together on Christmas Eve evening.   Anyway.  Here is where I run up against it when it comes to Christmas memories.  I do not have any overwhelming memory of specific gifts really.  I seem to remember something about getting this toy called the Sunshine Family.  It was big back in the 70s.  I really wanted them.   I remember there was a family of 3 with a traveling van or something like that.  I was thrilled. I must have been 7 or 8 maybe.  I don't remember. I think I remember birthday presents more than Christmas.  Birthdays always marked milestones.  When we kids turned 10 my dad always got us a new...

...and take a walk. About 3 days ago Bella and I headed down over the ridge to the creek bottoms to wander around a bit.   We hiked across the hay field over to check on Fluffy; who is still hanging out on the fence post.  I find it incredible that the jaw is still just hanging on the wire.  It has been there closing in on 9 years now.   The moss, lichen and rodents are really taking their toll on her.  That dead limb washed up there beside the post is a great perch for squirrels or rats to reach the jaw to gnaw on it. It's hard to tell in this photo, but the white edge is where the bone has been gnawed down. Here is a shot that shows a comparison of how much has been gnawed away: The closest part isn't as easily accessible, so it hasn't been gnawed down. After we left Fluffy we wandered back up along the creek bed in the trees.  I love this group of sycamores.  They must have grown up from a stump many years ago. The two on the right are actually...

 Isn't he cute?  This is the real thing from back in the 60s.  I regret greatly that when my mother stored her Christmas decorations back in the day she used cardboard.  I am not sure how many of these she had originally, but rats in the attic of our storage building destroyed all but the two elves that I now have. At the moment for some reason my Google picture account from my phone isn't jiving with the laptop to show the other elf.  He is solid red. I should write a story about the elderly elf and his survival in the attic.  Haha...  If I were to make it true to life it would, unfortunately, be a horror story.  Imagine watching all your friends being made into rat's nests.  Ugh! At the very least I am glad Ellen has been able to enjoy them and has this small Christmas connection to her maternal grandmother.   To continue on with Christmas memories though...  Fetching and decorating the Christmas tree is my prevailing memory ...

 The picture is just for attention; it's of the sunrise just outside of our back door.  But the cedar trees remind me of the evergreens we had back in California.  We had so many trees on our property, but there were only maybe a handful of deciduous  trees; mostly alder.  The bulk of the trees there are Douglas Fir and that what we used as our Christmas tree.  Though, as I have written about on here several years ago, we didn't use trees from our own property.  My dad would take us up into the mountains there to get our Christmas tree.  We had to get a permit from the Forest Service to cut a tree, of course, but we never saw any forest service official or anything out there monitoring it.  We would often find perfectly good trees that had been cut and then abandoned for a supposedly better tree.  We would take those home, too, sometimes.  We'd "plant" them outside in front of the house.   I remember we would decorate the ...

On Facebook I follow a guy from church, Dan B.  He and his family have a business near town, a gift shop mostly, but they prefer to focus on antique pieces and old timey ways of doing things.  He restores and then sells cast iron cookware, old clocks...etc.  They carry locally made soaps, jams, jellies, honey, candles, and candle wax buttons, hand thrown pottery...all the fun, old-fashioned, or unique gifts you could ever want for Christmas.  In spring they sell seeds, bedding flowers and vegetable plants, flower baskets, potting soil, straw...you get the drift here. Every business day morning he tries to post an update on Facebook as to what they have in stock and what he has been doing.  He has over 6000 followers I believe, which surprised him a bit, I think.  This December he has been putting in a blurb about his Christmas memories of back in the day when he was a little shaver. It has been interesting following his memories and has put me in mind of re...

  A couple of days ago, Gary and I moved the beef herd back into the above field.  It's good for Gary to have them close, so  he doesn't have to be on the road taking hay to them, and he can just walk across the back here to give them feed.  This cuts down on easy long walks for Bella and I though, because it the only flat place on the top of this ridge where I can walk without going up and down difficult hills.  So now I occasionally take Bella out to the dormant big fenced in garden to run some, when I am not up for a longer walk down to the creek bottoms.  I walk around and around in there and let her sniff in the rodent holes and runs in the weeds along the fence.  When the cows and calves are out there though, she assumes the above stance at the fence, ever alert to their presence, and is interested in nothing else. The calves are not used to her, so they will stand fascinated, just watching her.  All bovines are possessed of a large curiosit...

 Yesterday at our church we had our Christmas program.  This year the program director and her assistant, the youth director, get mad props for organizing a production of three acts where adults on down to a couple of little bitty shavers took part, none of them had lines to memorize, and it was very moving. It was all either narrated or sung whilst the actors mimed it all out.  The first act was in one of the Sunday School rooms and involved adults acting out the part of Mary, Joseph and an angel.  Second act was in the next Sunday School room and involved an angel, shepherds and wise men.  The audience was funneled, 15 people at a time, from room to room, then back to the main auditorium where they did Christmas trivia until everyone had seen the first 2 acts.  Except me, because I was the hall usher, directing the flow of traffic from one room to the other.  I am familiar with the gist of the story, so I was content with the final act.   I...

 It is to the SW of us, out on the edge of the pasture before the field slides down into the ravine to a spring.  I am not sure why this tree is leaning like this, when the one just behind it is quite straight.  Perhaps the far trees have more rocks under them for stability, or the leaning tree is actually closer to the ravine.  But I find it fascinating how this tree has attempted to right itself, to counteract the lean by growing more limbs on its upper side.    Nature is amazing.

 Here is a pic of my peeps.  Haha..  This is our ladies GLOW group from church.  GLOW officially stands for Godly Ladies of Worship, but various of our husbands have referred to it in other terms, one being God Loves Old Women.  In fact all ages are welcome.  Unfortunately our youngest member, at age 16, was at work at the Catfish Cafe.   As a general rule we meet monthly at the church where we have a devotion, do a craft or a project, then have lunch. This time one of the ladies hosted the group. Our Christmas meeting in December traditionally involves our secret pal reveal and a cookie exchange.  I forgot to get a picture of the cookies.  We did pretty well at bringing a variety of cookies, though there were 3 different kinds of sugar cookies, just decorated differently.   Also for this meeting we got an assembly line going to make cards and then make small gift bags for each of the residents of the nursing homes the youth gr...

 Last night as I was lying there half asleep I thought of something profound to write in here.  But, as per usual, now that I am sitting here I have not one profound thought in my brain.  In case you hadn't noticed, I have been trying to keep this blog more active but I have trouble coming up with things to blog about.  I think my trying to be profound makes for a boring blog anyway.  But my sense of humor has been at a low ebb lately.  I don't know why.   One funny thing recently has been watching my sister-in-law's cat play in the evenings.  She is a hoot. This is Princess. Well, it is Ellen holding Princess. Princess is teeny tiny as compared to Smudge.   But Princess has an addiction problem.  She LOVES catnip.  Gail says they have never had a cat who is as crazy about catnip as Princess is.   Gail has a patch of catnip.  I know nothing about growing it, but it seems to come back every year.  Maybe ...

 I had thought it was too late in the season to see any frost flowers, but this morning on our walk Bella and I found some.   If you have just randomly run across this blog and really want to know what they are, you can Google it.  But simply put some plants, and only some, retain moisture in the stems or roots and when it dips to freezing the moisture in the plant also freezes and squeezes out in whorls and curls.  They are lovely to see.   This morning I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't get many neat pics.  Maybe tomorrow.

 Two nights ago we had the above sunset which, as you can see, was one of those where you throw down everything you are doing and run for the camera, or your cell phone, or whatever device you might have to capture it.   These dramatic sky scenes, at least the ones I catch, always seem to happen in fall or winter when there are no leaves on the trees and all looks rather stark and dystopian.  It must be either the weather, the atmosphere or a combination of both.  Or the fact that when there are leaves on the trees I can't manage to capture the same light.  It has been a busy weekend.  For Ellen anyway.  On Friday night in our local town they had a cookie crawl, sponsored by a local business.  You bought a card for $5 at that business, then around the town square were 30 booths set up by other businesses or organizations.  At each booth there were cookies, you could pick one cookie (if you wanted to) and have your card stamped.  Aft...

  Gary got a new corral this past week; a bit more intricate than anything we had for the dairy herd.  It has a swinging panel and random gates and chutes and whatnot to it, for vaccinating and separating calves.  Far be it from me to understand exactly what it does.  I helped him set up the tricksy part of it, but it was so cold I didn't give it as thorough of an inspection as I ought to have done, perhaps. We have had these beef heifers for 2 years now, and all of them have calved except one.  Well, no, there was another one that didn't even breed.  She must have been a free-martin or some other issue is going on with her.  Hopefully this last heifer will calve eventually and have a nice little baby for us.  Otherwise all the rest of them did well. Only one heifer had a still birth, I believe.  Another abandoned her calf.  Just walked away from it.  We got her and the calf in the corral together and she summarily refused to have a...

  A couple of mornings ago it was in the upper 20s when Bella and I took our morning amble around the back field to the West.  It was a frosty fall wonderland.  When it is this cold it's hard to get up the gumption to rig up in all my sweatshirts and coats and head out, but once outside I do enjoy it.  The crispy temps keep you on the move, no lolly-gagging, so I get my steps in pretty quick-like.  Otherwise, as you'd know if you've read my ramblings on here long enough, I tend to pause to check out curious oddities and ponder on them.   Like terrapin shells.  Here it is from a different angle, showing the chip and crack in it.  Upon studying it I don't think it was caused by a predator after all on account of the crack extends further back along the carapace.  You can sort of see it...  See how I get distracted.  I took this picture yesterday, not on the frosty morning day. 

 For the most part Bella is an outside dog.  She has a snug wooden dog house, lots of hay she scratches out the door so she doesn't have to lay on it, and lots of things to bark at as they pass by; wild animals or stray cats for the most part. But when it is too terribly cold, or when I just don't have time for a long walk I bring her in the house to vary her day, and mine too, of course.   Rarely does she ever lay on the floor like this, unless I've kept her in overnight, then she curls up on a bed of old towels in the bathroom. Her normal routine when she comes into the house is to make a bee-line for the cat's dishes, then inspect the kitchen floors to see what crumbs she might glean, if any.  After that she takes up her vigil at one or the other of the windows. She will just stand and stare outside for awhile at each window in turn.  I can tell when she actually sees something because she will wag her tail.   On one particular  morning la...

 A year ago today, in 2022, I got this in the mail.  It actually came to what was my mother's address up the road from us where I cared for her until her passing in December 2021.  This was a jury duty questionnaire thingy, to fill out so the courts can have it on file to call you for jury duty in the coming year.  It actually made me laugh; she had been deceased for almost a year and, had she been living, she would have been 93 years old and in the last stages of dementia.  Had she been alive and in her right mind she would have had a great laugh over the idea of her serving on a jury at that age and in that condition.  I posted this picture on my Facebook timeline asking for people's opinions about why in the world the court system would send out a jury duty letter to a 93 year old who'd been dead almost a year.  Of course I got varying responses.  I believe in most states and counties there are cut off ages and you can fill out paperwork at the...

 Yesterday morning Bella, the dog I didn't want but enjoy watching run around out in the fields and woods, and I went for a walk.  I have been trying to up my daily steps and taking her for a walk is a great way to do so.  As well as the fact that Gary has the beef herd up the road, so we can walk with her off the leash out in the west pastures and woods.   After 25 years, or more, I even forget now what year Gary said he started the dairy, anyway...  After over 2 decades of dairy farming it is inevitable that bits of pieces of dairy evidence are all over the place. An ear tag from a long departed cow.  The year isn't on there, so who knows.  It might, in fact, have come off the ear of one of our beef cows Gary had out there just last week.  Since he doesn't have to milk these animals he moves them around from field to field to get all the graze they can before he has to start feeding hay.  But the tag is still a bit of farming detritus ...

 Nature has grown little plates for Christmas dinner.   Soon the squirrels will portion out acorns, walnuts and hickories on each plate, and little piles of dried berries.  There will be such a rustling of leaves as everyone take a spot, then teensy teacups of dew will be lifted after the blessing.  They will chitter and chatter as everyone chows down.  Sometimes I wonder if I am quite right in the head for having such thoughts as I tromp about in the woods.  But then again, I am sure that my walks would be boring if I didn't let my mind take such flights of fancy. 

 I spied it by the path as I walked by; The shell of a box turtle, Quite empty, but for a leaf Frost-frozen to the plastron. The carapace was chipped. A hungry predator had gnawed it But, foiled by ancient design, Had left it for an easier meal. And so the turtle had wandered on. And time had polished the sharp edges Of the shell that I picked up and wedged  In the burl of the tree.

 ...or maybe the day before, I don't remember.  In any case, I have had a couple mornings where I had things to do, so I have skipped more days than I thought.   On one of our walks earlier this week, or maybe even last week, Bella and I ran across this deer bed.  It's just a depression in the leaves of where a deer slept overnight.  He slept there alone.  I am only presuming it was a buck because usually the does stay together.  But maybe not.  I am no deer behavior expert by any means.