She happened in October

2014 so far

I keep starting posts & not finishing them in a timely way,  & then they go past their due date (like my Blogger's Quilt Festival post complete with pictures.  Linky closed on Friday.  WHOOPS!).   Also, I don't exactly hate but am less interested in other peoples' posts about why they haven't been posting.  So I thought instead I would just catch up, the big & the small, & maybe get back into the swing of things now that the days are getting shorter & there is just as much as there ever was to fill them.  So here it is, in no particular order:

I met my Goodreads reading quota for 2014 just last week.  Yes, It's a small thing but I am still pleased.  & I am of course aware that some of the books on the list are barely worthy of counting (but I LIKE picture books).  A few highlights- I am almost up to date on Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series.  I will say Broken Harbor was not a favorite but Faithful Place was so good that I plan to continue.  Jonathan Tropper continues to make it work, as far as I'm concerned & I discovered Leanne Shapton (Important Artifacts is my big book recommendation of the year.  Turns out no one who has asked for a book recommendation from me has not gotten this title at the top of the list; even people who asked months ago have received revised lists putting this on at the top.  It is a thing of beauty).  On the other hand Lauren Hillenbrand's Unbroken was just kind of meh for me.  I know there are people who thought it was fan-f*cking-tastic, but I am not one of them.

I have become a baby quilt making machine  There will be AT LEAST three births in one 4 month period (that ends in FEB 2015, unless it doesn't) & that is just the tail end, unless it isn't.  In days gone by I tended to make quilts in pairs or triples.  The baby quilt I prefer (Modern Quilt Studio's Once Upon a Time from their book The Modern Quilt Workshop) which lends itself to this as you can make lots & lots of connecting blocks & be 1/2-way done with one when you are done-done with the other.  Trust me, it makes sense & it does NOT make two of the same quilt.  Generally I make a set of girls quilts, a set of boys quilts &/or a set of gender neutral quilts (that's right, pink, blue & green-sue me).  I try to mix up the sets so I use up the little I-SPY images & avoid duplicate looking quilts.  But so far, for more than two years it has been ALL GIRLS.  & the next one is ALSO a girl.  I have a closet full of blue & green (& yellow & purple) baby quilts & parents who are decorating in pink-stravaganza.  Yes, at some point someone is going to have a surprise baby boy & I am going to look like a genius but until then I am swimming in pink.

Cowgirl had a baby.  Cowgirl had a baby GIRL!!!  No quilt for her, but I am pleased nonetheless. Because Hattie (Hathor, Hattie for short) arrived just a couple weeks before the cold weather we are leaving mama & baby be for longer than usual & plan to start a milking schedule by the end of this month.

My bathroom is still is not working properly. I don't want to talk about it. 

The banana trees went ballistic this year. We cut two more blooms down yesterday (cold snap last light) & they are ripening on the kitchen counter. 

I am up to (down to) a 15 minute mile, which I can maintain for.....two miles. Hey, it's no Paul Ryan speed but still I am pleased.  On Friday I started covering four miles total (run a mile, walk a minute, run a mile, like that) & I hope to keep it up even in the cold weather.  If it seems like I took an absurd amount of time to get here, you are right.  In late 2013 I had a bone density blip & it was suggested that any impact anything would not be a good idea.  For a while.  & I only started trying to run again this past August.  In the meantime, I have been BollyBlasting my way to...nowhere actually.  Still fun, though. 

Yes, I'm sure there has been more, but this is all I can remember.  Or all I care about.  More likely this is all that overlaps in a Venn diagram of things I can remember & things I care about. 

Today in cow

Dear M******:

It as been awhile since I wrote one of these!

Today was the day for our Cowgirl romantic encounter to begin.  Until this afternoon, I had not thought much past getting her in the trailer.  To that end, we moved the trailer to the side pasture weeks ago.  I never did see her get into it, but she got so she could be within charging distance of the thing.  Yesterday, of course that all came to an end. 

A went out to pump up the tires & refasten the license plate (we never put it on because I was worried the donkey would rip it off).  Slowly everyone moseyed in to see what we were up to.  Everyone except herself.  Even the world's dorkiest thoroughbred came over to bump the door, but she stood as close as she could while still keeping the fence between us. 

This morning, I did a whole rigmarole so it would just be the two of us (me & Cowgirl) & I could get the rope back around her horns for the first time since last April (inoculation time).  She wasn't wonderful, but she wasn't horrible.  I shut all the gates to keep her out of the pasture the trailer was in & then did a few chores.  I was hoping she would be curious, I didn't count on how curious.  As soon as we tried to load her, she took off.  Of course

But in the end it happened & she had the usual panic attack she has when she found herself in an enclosed space:

The drive was uneventful, we helped with some rearranging & then pulled the trailer into the pasture. I looked in to check on her & see if I could get the rope off before we released her (I couldn't).  I was pretty sure once I opened the side door to the trailer she would be out, but A had doubts (it is narrower than the width of her horns, high up & at a funny angle).  I am glad the one of us who thought she could do it was paying attention & got out of the way; she sailed by my head a few moments after I jumped off the bumper.


A few minutes to get the rope off & then she took off.  A few moments later the bull took off after her.  Funny little sidebar:  you know those testicles things rednecks like to put on their truck hitches?  Well both me & A observed that Nick's were roughly the same size.  Which, when you consider he is a smallish Dexter bull, & scale being what it is, they are advertising to the world how very small-balled they are. 

As for today, I don't think I have ever worked so hard to make an animal happier in my life.  At least, not all at once.  & I do believe she will be happy, however briefly.  Until this moment, I had not thought ahead 6 weeks to when we need to bring her back.  Shit.

What else

I realized this morning my blog has been quilt block rich with not much else, so here is the rest (the bulk) of my day:

• The bluebirds are back.  They are flitting around the faux starling house on the highest post of the round pen, just like last year.  I don't know if this means they have moved in there or of it is just a good place to catch bugs.  They are welcome either way.

• On the same note, the back yard bird feeders are seeing some action.  We set up a sunflower feeder, a thistle feeder & a wild bird mix feeder (& plan to add a cracked corn feeder) on a four-way thing A got me last year.

• We had no winter to speak of; no hard freeze so far.  This has meant a lot of work re: weeding because they never died back.  On the flip side, the roses are thriving.

• Becca (the horse) was diagnosed with Cushings late last year.  Did I ever say?  I don't remember.  Anyhow, she is on 1 mg of peroglide a day & doing much much better.  Last week, she was RUNNING. 

• Rebecca (the cow) AKA Cowgirl AKA Her Ladyship has become hand trained.  Kinda.  We have a routine in which she gets a treat from me when I walk into the pasture & when I walk out.  This keeps her from crowding me while I am trying to work.  She learned this routine in a SHOCKINGLY brief period of time.  I mean maybe four days.  I can never eat beef again.  It would be like eating dolphin.  Or dog.

• The kittens are still here, three of them anyhow.  They are just barely kittens now as they are coming up on 1 year old, but they are so much younger than the other two cats I suspect they will be The Kittens for the rest of their lives.  One of them has taken to killing snakes-more on this in another post.

• I am not yet running like I want to.  I am walking.  I am walking a lot.  I usually bring one of the dogs because since the kittens arrived, the big dogs don't get the backyard time they used.

• I  am feeling mostly better.  I still have a catch-cough, but that is likely to linger for quite some time.  The DR gave me an inhaler but it makes me feel weird, so I have never used it.  If I have never used it, how do I know how it makes me feel?  It is the portable version of what she gave me in the office to stop my coughing long enough to do an X-ray, among other reasons.   I liked not coughing, but the other side effects were yucky.  It was like being hyper-paranoid but without the paranoia.  I really don't know how else to describe it.

It doesn't sound like much, but it all takes a shocking amount of time.  It doesn't help that I am hardly a ball of fire these days.

When life gives you cowpies

I do not know what was up with Punxsutawney Phil, but six more weeks of winter starting two weeks ago would have made this the second week of winter.  That's a round-a-bout way of saying we had not had winter.  There was a hard freeze & then right back into the 80s day in, day out.

This is also the first winter I have had my greenhouse, all set up & ready to start seeds early, grow really long season tomatoes....& it is usually well over 100F in that space for at least part of the day.  Even after winter arrived, this past weekend just like Phil predicted (the groundhog was RIGHT!), the greenhouse could get too toasty unless the door was open.  All it takes is sun.

Finally this is the first winter we have had our very own cow.  Most cows are not happy in the heat but ours seems to be different.  When we burned the big pile of fallen branches etc she was very interested.  During the night, it looked to me like she was standing in the coals, but I knew that was ridiculous.  Then the next morning I found cow pies steaming over the last embers.  Multiple piles. She is a Dexter, an irish cow, so we are thinking she was making her own peat.

So what would you do?  Overheated greenhouse, empty heavy duty paper bags (there is some debate as to whether or not they constitute household recycling, lazy ass garbage pick-up bastards) & lots & lots of cowpies. 

You guessed it, we are bagging our own fertilizer & cooking it ourselves.  So far things go nicely thanks.  Also now that the cold has come, those full bags sure help retain the heat overnight.

On another note, a friend of mine used to have a t-shirt of an obviously homeless man sitting on a flattened cardboard box on a city sidewalk, with his pack next to him & a lap full of lemons.  The back said: unless life also gives you water, sugar, a pitcher to put it all in & something to mix it with, you are still f*cked.

This week in cow

Dear M******,

I know I usually send a "this week in cow" update by e-mail.  Also it is usually about the week.  All I can think about right now is This Morning in Cow.  What a bad cow!  She knocked a board out (breaking it: bad bad cow) & made her way inot the main pasture.  After that, she chased the horses, donkey, goats around..

OKay, maybe she was not chasing them.  Maybe she just wanted to go where they were going...at top speed.  Fortunately Ira, in all his goofiness was in his stall, & Becca-Pony as well, so everyone mostly just did laps around the barn.  I finally got her in the milk stand an hour late & got a WHOPPING 2 cups from her.

Once she was off the milk stand, I let her back into the big pasture (what the hell, right?) & she jumped, JUMPED the back fence (a top plank was down & I did not see, shame on me).  Once in the alley between our place & next door she trampled the old barbed wire barrier & spent a frolicking hour with at the neighbors (not the red neck who goes hunting drunk & never manages to shoot himself but the other on the other side which is a guy my brother would describe as Most Likely to Kill Buckwheat).

In the end I took down more boards, hauled her thru & put them back up.  It is pouring rain now & she is quite pissed to be out in the big pasture now that she has seen ALL the others are eating every morsel of grass from her pasture.  So, I am thinking of getting hay sometime later today. 

Not that any of this is anything you need to worry about, but I do have some actual info for you: I am almost out of jars (there was one big one left I thought I would use this morning).  Also I made 24 hour yogurt & put it in the fridge this afternoon & last of all I have some yogurt spread, also fermented extra long.  Are you still thinking of borrowing some books & bread forms?  Any interest in coming by Saturday afternoon (or later if you want to milk)?  The kitchen cabinets arrive Tuesday so I am packing the kitchen starting then. 

I know you want to test-drive the yogurt maker; I want to hang onto it until the last possible moment but then I will deliver with whatever starter I have left & I will write up the recipes (I have more than one, go me!).

mb.

PS:  this is the absolute best, most favorite granola recipe ever!  Thank you!  Apparently I do like apricots.

Curds & whey

  

What would Wallace do?

Living in a college town (OKay, in a town that is college-town-adjacent), we hear a lot (A LOT) about how impractical artistic intellectual types have no business sense.  Did I mention I live in a farming town?  Have you ever heard of an industry more rife with hard working, below par businessmen than small farming?  Seriously, the hours they put in & what they barely get for that?  I'm not saying I'm not grateful, just that I had a hard time keeping a straight face while I bought my feed before they knew I was laughing at them.

Anyway, farming is neither here nor there because today is Wallace Stevens birthday.  Wallace Steven is almost the first poet I ever heard of, mostly because his stomping ground was my stomping ground, although I was not born until decade after his death.  He won a Pulitzer for his poetry.  He was also at the helm of a major Hartford insurance group for many many years (I have actually seen I-don't-know-how-many live performances in a theater named for him in the gynormous office building that is the home of the same insurance company).  Wallace Stevens was born into a prominent conservative family & was himself a member of the Republican Party & had strong anti-labor union beliefs.  When he married his wife, a woman from a working class background, his parents refused to attend the ceremony; he never spoke to them again.

So I think we can all agree it would be hard to predict what Wallace would do, so enough about him now lets talk about my cow.  Wait, one more thing about Wallace Stevens:  his poetry really is marvelous.  None of that black-is-the-color-of-my-true-love's-heart-hair-whatever that has become a cliche.  One of my favorites is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.  I also like the Peggy Lee's version of Bye Bye Blackbird, which is not relevant except you can hear it here.

Let me present my version titled This Many Ways of Looking at Milking My Cow:

I. Misty or steamy there is
nothing like the smell
of potent lady cow

II.  Her bag pushes her legs further
apart, arched up to her back
her back is bony table

III.  Myself folded & reaching
underneath for the wrinkled
gorilla fingers swelling smooth

IV.  One two one
one two two
one two three
one two four

IV.  Sometimes I dream that someone is
twisting my hands, pulling my fingers straight
folding  them, turning them
slowly like mozzarella

V.  I saw the cord in the mirror
in my arm, when I reached to put away the towels.
These are new muscles.

& finally   VI.  You know those men - it's always men - who like to squeeze your hand until your finger tips turn blue & pretend it is just a friendly handshake?  I can make those men cry.

I think it is safe to say Wallace would be spinning in his grave.  Also, I really need to get some sleep.  Good night.

Perpetua

Anyone who has ever spent anytime here at Useless Ranch knew it was just a (short) matter of time before I churned up the Patron Saint of Cows.  There are actually lists of patron saints of cows, including Brigid who is also patroness of chickens, which seems like a lot of work for one saint; Homobonus, better know to this blogger anyway for his oversight of shoes & well, others.  But Perpetua grabbed my fancy early in the running & yes, it was the dream sequence.

Why don't I restart a bit closer to the beginning.  Perpetua was a more or less ordinary noble hausfrau, born in the second century after the BC/AD switch got flipped who converted to christianity & was then torn to pieces by wild beasts for the amusement of the ancestors of people who watch Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, etc.  That's all there is, at first.  As with all things catholic (& Catholic), god&thedevil are in the details.  You could move on to the next cow-saint on the list.  You could ditch AD entirely & start looking at cow-goddess cults of ancient egypt.  There really are so many places to go, but staying was really the only option for me because after I read the brief little paragraph on Perpetua all I could think about was "Why cow"?  In case you did not notice, the only animals in her story are wild beasts.  I'm not saying cow cannot be dangerous, but I never heard of any bread&circus event in which martyrs were torn apart by a herd of holsteins.

So, there I was wondering how the cow came into it.  & that is when I discovered The Organic Viking, a discovery otherwise much-worth making (thank you Saint Perpetua!).  I was directed to a passage (which also happened to be further down the saint-bio page I had already skipped through, (curse you scroll bar for not jumping up & hitting me in the face).  Turns out, she WAS martyred by a cow.  Go figure. A big stomping, horns intact, don't try & milk me buster, wild bull.

I could continue with my write a quippy little piece about her, but the Organic Viking has already done it.

Yogurt maker the second

Yes, yes it is true my previous post a tale of two yogurt makers actually only had one yogurt maker in it.  I ran out of time.  So without further ado, here she is My New Yogurt Maker!  I call her Gertie & she is a dream.

One of the reasons there was no second yogurt maker in the other post is I did not get around to using her until late last month.  Hey, I was busy.  & then I got a new cow (NEW COW!) & then I had more milk than I usually have & went looking for a purpose.

Now I finish the morning milking & I take those results & do the whole heat-cool-mix in cultures thing.  Then into Gertie it goes, somewhere between 10:15-10:30, out again eight hours later & into the fridge overnight.  For breakfast the next morning we have two quarts of the best yogurt you have ever, ever tasted.  This week I have been mixing it with M******'s homemade granola & the blueberries A got from a co-worker (we swapped for farm fresh eggs). 

The price of milk

We have a new cow.  I know I have hardly talked/blogged/whatever about anything else since she arrived.  I have milkmaid's wrist, milkmaid's forearm & milkmaid's grip.  What tennis is to the elbow, running is to shins, etc. you do the rest.

& mostly it is good.  You cannot imagine how good that milk smells when it hits the pail.  I want to drink it, warm on a warm day, it is so sweet-(& I only ever drink milk, cold milk when I have a stomach ache or cookies...or both).  I have gotten to the point in the process where I am not so exhausted when it is over that I can reflect on how not-exhausted I am, which is its own kind of high.  No really.  Apparently I have not yet gotten to the point where complete sentences out number the other kind, though.  Oh well.

What I do have is just enough energy to kick back & watch one of my favorite movies.  Since I am having trouble with continuity, it helps to watch a movie I have both seen before & is not quite continuous itself.  Which brings me to The Price of Milk.  I love this weird little film.  That it happens to be about a dairyman (& yet not about a dairyman) just helps.  Also, it is on Instant on Netflix, so go for it.

As a side bar, the next time I hear someone complain about how food prices are outlandish & can you believe what they want for a gallon of milk, I plan to show them my milking bruises & cuts, all for not more than a gallon a day.

Saturday it rained

Saturday it rained:

It rained, I was drenched, we lost power & the sun came out.

It rained again, the sun came out, I loaded old boards into the truck bed until they were level with the sides.

Then it rained again, the new cow arrived, the sun came out.

It rained, the cow-delivering-family left, I was drenched again, the sun came out.

It rained,  C**** arrived to work on the milking stand & the sun came out.

It rained, A & C**** kept working, C****'s phone died, the sun came out.

We made C**** do other not-cow milking-stand related things, A left to go see what the deal was with our power, it rained again.

We moved the milking stand to the pasture, C**** rode sitting on the milking stand sitting on the pile of old boards.

A & C**** unloaded it, A took the truck to the dump, me & C**** got the cow in & she got milked.

Over night it rained again.  On Sunday morning, there were waves in the sand, but the water was all gone.  On Sunday afternoon, the grass seemed to grow before our eyes.  Monday morning, I ran the sprinklers for 30 minutes, it was already that dry. 

That new cow smell

 

Happy Cow Mating Day

A long long time ago, decades even my sister was a freshman at an educational institution in the great state of Vermont. Wait, let me go back a bit further: in addition to being the homeland of the Green Mountain Boys (& if you are big on your own patriotism & you don't know who they are you should hang your head in shame), it is also the birth place of Ben & Jerry's famous ice cream.  & those B&J cows are everywhere.  Not just as Ben & Jerry's trademark, but the actual cow-cows. 

Back to my sister.  She is ticking along, being a student-that whole gig, when she learns there will be no class on March the first because it is Cow Mating Day.  She already knew they took their cows seriously & as a family we have a long standing bad habit of asking fewer questions the crazier something sounds & so Happy Cow Mating Day it was.  As for how long it took to get resolved, I either never knew or just plain forgot (my money is on never knew-see previous sentence) but it did eventually get straightened out.  While many of the original thirteen colonies/new england states do still have old-time-y town meetings, only Vermont has such a day designated as a state holiday & they call it Town Meeting Day.  Go ahead say it aloud...with a Vermont accent...while standing next to a giant cut-out of a holstein:  Cow Mating Day?  It could be.

This means the people of Vermont, if they choose, may take this day to participate in local politics.  Even in 2011 many towns still hold their annual meetings on this day & vote on budgets; in Vermont all town budgets must be approved by a direct vote of the electorate.

What else can I say except that this is hardly the strangest idea coming out of Vermont to take hold nationwide.  Those born in Vermont include Brigham Young & Joseph Smith (yes, him of the magic underwear), Rudy Vallee, Robert Frost, Wilson Bentley, etc.  As for those who worked & died in Vermont how about Shirley Jackson, Norman Rockwell & even one who while never in my lit classes was associate with Vermont wrote his most famous work there: Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book in Brattleboro.

Finally I would not want to forget those Green Mountain Boys at the top of the page.  Green Mountain for the vert mont in which they lived & boys because they were a band of high spirited testosterone-overloaded youngsters who were not about to let some occupying government collect taxes & give them nothing for it. In an interesting statistical sidebar: Vermont has also registered the most casualties in Afghanistan & Iraq as a percentage of their overall population.  Yes, other states have lost more, but Vermont barely had them to lose. 

So let me be the first, probably, to ever wish you a most joyous Cow Mating Day.  You can celebrate by eating all natural diary products & participating in the day-to-day administration of your local governing body.  I will observe the day teaching C****** how to make home-made yogurt.  No, really.