Hunting season is over

Bub hasn’t hunted for 6 years, until recently.   He got a buck back in 2000,  and then in the early winter of 2002 he landed a #10 common nail in the center of his right eye.  He was building a supporting wall in the basement, was tired and miss hit the nail above his head.  Not wearing safety glasses, it went straight in and bounced back out after trashing the retina.  When he first came out of reconstruction surgery, he said that he thought that the corneal transplant was from an older black women.   He doesn’t remember saying that to us, he was still pretty drugged up, but given that the cornea was from a deceased donor……..

Bub’s vision in his right eye is pretty bad.  He has not shown any interest in hunting since the injury.  He shoots using his right eye, and shooting lefty for him feels odd he says.

However,  Vivian called and reported on his 8 pointer and Bub caught buck fever.  His hunting blind was our kitchen.  We have a good view of the pasture below and without the sheep in residence,  several deer have come up to nibble. You don’t need a hunting license to hunt on your own land, or to hunt out of your kitchen.

Buck fever is such a strange disease.  A generally normal adult man, who has good logical thinking skills looses all common sense and sensibility.   The general etiquette and behavior around the kitchen changes as the day’s light begins to fade and the kitchen becomes his hunting stand.

No talking aloud and no going outside, which will startle the deer.  Also, don’t honk the horn as you are driving into the driveway.  Also, keep the lights low and don’t distract him while he is on stand. ( actually he is standing at the sliding glass door to the deck, which is his stand. )

Bub did get two shots off on a buck and missed.  He brought his rilfe up to his father’s on Thursday to site the scope and discovered that the scope was not off, but his shot was.  Buck fever.   You see the buck, bring it up in the cross hairs, then yank at the gun as you fire off a shot, causing the gun to jerk and the bullet to sail off the intended mark.  That was a few days before Thanksgiving.

We had a second Thanksgiving on Saturday when the kids were home.   Bub did well to let us get the dinner all cooked and served.   He had a bit of a fit when I suggested that the little kids go out for a walk with Jesse and lulu after the meal.  Bump and Screech had been so good for the afternoon a bit of fresh air for them and a bit of quiet for the adults was needed.  Buck Fever means that one is very sensitive to the amount of light and time left a the end of the day when the deer might be moving again.

Hunting season, specifically rifle, is done for the year as of tonight.  Bub has plans for next year and is dreaming of apple trees and alphafa. I have plans of helping him build a blind somewhere other then in the kitchen, especially while Thanksgiving always falls in hunting season.

He will come to his senses in a few days.  Now he remains abit touchy about it and sees me as being unflexable in terms of not wanting him to have target practice off the deck this winter, shells flying all over the kitchen.  Go figure.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving 2007

The girls are coming home tomorrow and I am off to do heifer chores up at Davisi hil farm.  Our dinner with be up in Greensboro with Bub’s parents, mid-day.   Bub is taking his gun up to set the site in the scope.  He saw a 6 point buck yesterday and saw it 2 times in the crosshare, but missed it both times.  The buck was down by the lower end of the field.

Bub hasn’t hunted since his eye injury back in 2001.   I am glad that he wants to get back into it.

Oh…. time to go.

Heifer Chores

Chores at Davis Hill.

Terry who does the milking is taking his vacation over Thanksgiving, so I am being trained to do calf chores and some milking.  Milking still scares me becuase of the loud noise the milking tubes make when they auto release off the cow and then bang into the side of the milking jars, those large glass bottles in the parlor.  The noise always scares me.   Jo and Tom laugh at me when I jump at the bang.  I am more comfortable in the heifer barn doing those chores.

Heifer chores are basically back breaking manure scraping and scooping.  The heifer barn is the original cow barn that Charlie built when he first started farming.  Concrete stalls/beds that have a manure gutter at the base.  So you take a hoe and scrape the poop and soiled bedding off the bed and into the gutter.   Then you run the pump and the gutter has paddles that move the poop away from the cows and down to the pump area.

Except for the area in the barn where there are about 12 heifers.  There is a gutter, but not on the chain paddle area, so you have shovel the poop by hand into a wheel barrow, then truck it over to the other gutter area and dump it in.  I can do it in three wheel barrow loads.  Charlie does it in 2.  A wheel barrow of manure is the same weight from a cow as from a sheep.  No difference really.

The animals are in the stalls the entire time you are doing chores, so you are in close proximity to the back end of the cow.  Cows kick, so you talk to them and tell them you are there and I ask them to move their feet so I can get the poop off the bed.  I also sing to them, which they don’t seem to mind too much.  Cows are like big sheep.  Let them know what is going on and they seem to cooperate.  Except for #202 a pissy brown cow that kicks, becuase she can.  She hasn’t gotten me yet.

There is also feeding the calves and heifers, grain and hay.  There are currently 76 mouths to feed, plus a barn cat that gets some extra milk. The calves get different grain then the older cows and there are different amounts that you give.  Some get a half scoop, some get a whole and some have thier grain stolen by the cow next door, so you have put it in a special place.   Some critters get 1st cut, some get good second cut and some get not so good 2nd cut.  First cut hay is the fist hay cut in the season.  It tends to be stemmy.  2nd cut is better quality and generally a higher protein.  Better for the newer calves.

Then you have to get new bedding put out.  The farm uses shredded paper for bedding.  Recycling at the most basic level.  They have a paper shreeder/blower that you put old newspaper in and then it is chopped into 2 inch confetti, then it is blown into each of the stalls.  You have to load it with paper and then walk by each of the stalls to get the paper to blow in.

Then the new mother cows are milked and the babies are fed bottles.  You have to give them specific types of milk depending on how new the baby is.  The cow that just delivered has colostrum rich milk, the creamiest yellow milk that smells really wonderful.  (haven’t had any,so i don’t know how it tastes, but I bet it is really rich.)  So the newest baby gets colostrum then graduates to regular milk a bit at a time by mixing the two together.  You have to know who gets what and how much.  I need a list. Charlie just knows.

You have to clean out the pipe line, wash everything, tuck everyone in for the night and turn off the lights.  Generally a couple of hours, 2 times a day.

Gran is coming home

I have a wonderful cousin who gave me a painting of my great-grandmother, Bathsheba Cushing Devol Threewit Powers. Folks called her Barsha.  I knew her as Gran.   Gran was very tall and my daughter Emilie inherited her tallness.   I can remember Gran’s apartment on Beacon St. in Boston.  It had a tiny elevator, that you walked into from the front hall and it opened right into her living room, which was very dark with lots of wood and burgundy velvet.  I was so tiny then.

Gran had a stroke and was moved to a nursing home in Chestnut Hill and I remember her coming to Thanksgiving at Mamie’s (her daughter, my grandmother).  She then had a wheelchair and some of the nicest bathrobes ever. Gran would be parked in the little study, with the fireplace and we would all spend turns buzzing in and out to visit.

I remember the nursing home as well.  She had a huge selection of pretty robes and bed-coats.  A bed-coat is a cute little cape that you can wear in bed and still look all dresses up. Very 50’s I think.   She always had a black oval tin of fancy candy drops, and if I was good, then I could have one, or two.  I was not to bother the other residents, nor the nurses or the staff.

So cousin Jennifer downsized from one house to another and was so very kind to give me this portrait of Gran.  But she looked a little grubby and the gold frame was chipped in a couple of areas, so she needed a good cleaning.  This is where we lucked out.   I actually know someone who does fine art restoration.  Go figure.

Maria Roosevelt did wonderful restoration work on a portrait of Mamie a few years ago, and was able to verify the artist who painted her.  A man named Peter Cook, who did a lot of landscapes in wide brush strokes, so a portrait was a bit unique. But Mamie has hung in my living room watching over us all for a while, so when Gran came last year we had to find a good spot.  Having the two alpha women in the same room was a bit over powering and Gran came to be in my office.  She is a bit more reserved then Mamie and it worked out well.

Gran went off to Maria’s in late August or September with a jar of home made pickles.  Maria likes home made pickles and things.  It is socially very OK to bring a jar of pickles to your fine art restoration professional in Vermont.

Maria emailed just the other day:

” I’m pleased with how she came out and hope you’ll  like her as well.
The most time consuming part was getting rid of (and then repairing the damage from) a wash of green/gray that had  apparently been added to “antique” her at some time. While she did have to be cleaned and had a mildly dirty surface, that wasn’t bad. It was this green/gray wash that was rather unbecoming (and stubborn). I suspect it was likely added at the same time she was cut down and re-framed in the oval frame. Yes, she has some greenish shadow tinting that would have been appropriate, but now this actually looks appropriate rather than overwhelming.
The damaged spot in the board (as seen in the background above her head) was trimmed down, filled  and then re-touched. I elected not to removed it completely since I would have had to also remove a wider area of the board and then re-build that same area. In a technical sense, what I did do was the most effective and least invasive of the possible options. The frame has been glued, repaired and touched up as needed.
I like the way she came out and hope you do too!“

At some point my Aunt Bob, ( also given the family name of Barsha ),  Jennifer’s mother cut the original portrait and had her crammed into a smaller oval frame.   The artist name was lost, but given the time when she was volunteering at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,  we might be able to get a pretty good guess at who painted it.

The value of having this painting and that of my grandmother is to help show my daughters what strong and unique roots they come from.   A bit of their own history.  Emilie is much like gran and Elizabeth is much like Mamie.  We can find out  so much about the male line of our descendants, but tracing our mother’s mothers is a challenge.

Here is what I got so far:

Em and Liz, my girls,  then me.  My mother is Holly, her mother was Polly, her mother was Bathsheba and her mother was Ella (called Nellie) Sophia Work, and her mother was Anna Bathsheba Cushing,  and her mother was Ann Eliza Reynolds born 1811 in Logan Ohio.  Gotta love those mid west roots. That is 8 generations of women.

Not that the dudes don’t count, but frankly the female line is more interesting.

I will pick up Gran in early December and she will be coming home.

Editors note: picutures forthcoming.

I am having the most fun

This is Lulu.  She wears her hat like this so that she can be an elf.

Lulu has found all of the photo enhancement buttons on the video cam, she thinks this one was going to scare me because “it is really creepy” . 

This is what teen aged girls do in their spare time.

Lulu is done with soccer, with a bit of a disappointing season.  They lost far more then they won.  (19-3, I think)  But youth bounces back and she is gearing up to work on the mountain this winter as a snow board instructor.  She is also getting ready to take her driver’s license test right after Thanksgiving.

She is ready, I’m not.

She told me this story.

Mum, I was in driver’s ed, and the instructor was talking about a manual shift, you know, like and H with the 1 up there and the 2 down and reverse is kinda up and then over some.

Well, I told him that I have Ompa’s car and that my H is backwards with the R over there and the 1 and 2 on the other side of the H.

He said, well is sounds like you have a voltswagon.

And I said,  No I have a Jetta.

Granted that her knowledge base is about right for 16.  Selective.

I am selective as well.   Last night she wanted to know why I hadn’t AIM’ed her.  ( that means going on a video chat with her using one of the programs like Skype. )  She had set me up on it with a name and password, but I couldn’t remember it at all.  So, via the phone, she coached me though the process of signing in and resenting resetting my password.  Got it all done and then  realized that the little blue cloud icon on my tool bar, that  was there all the time, was my automatic sign in.  I had set it for a year to be signed in, so all I had to do was hit the icon.

The apple does not fall far from the tree.

We had the best time sending pictures back and forth on the web.  I sent her one from my trip to Kansas.

Mom, you are a dork.

Yes, yes I am Lulu.  You will be like me some day.

Oh.  Goody.

Editor’s note:

Lulu is not stupid, she is pretty bright and gets good grades in school.  She said that the story about the Jetta made her sound stupid and that I didn’t tell it right.   I might be banned from blogging about her for a while.   Well Lulu, the job of the parent is to be a dork, so I am sorry.  love mum