Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

Let's see...where was I last? Oh, yes, on cutting ice. Well, let's go on and talk about hubby's chores in winter. At 4 AM he has to put on his 100 layers of clothes and then head out to do his chores. There is nothing like going out to do chores in the dark in a wind chill factor of 2 degrees that makes you cringe. The first thing he does is split wood to start a fire in the barn. Cows give off heat, but when it is 5 degrees out they just don't give off enough heat. Then he goes and rounds up the herd. One nice thing when it is frozen out is that you don't have to do as much clean up work on the udders because they don't have any mud to lay in. After milking he has to bundle back up and put out hay. This is a chore of 1-3 hours, depending on who all needs hay. The milking herd gets their alfalfa plus 2-3 bales of grass hay, then the herds up the road get a bale every 2-3 days, depending on how much they eat. For one chore hubby has to wait until later...

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...

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.