The Milking Curve part 1

I would love to have pictures of what I'm writing about, but my hands are quite busy as I milk, so I hope your imagination is handy.

Early every morning, I get up, and a few minutes later Jason gets up. We put on dirty clothes and I make sure my hands are clean. I get a tub of warm water with a squirt of soap in it and the milk bucket. Jason grabs two carrots and as of today, the essential oil stuff to discourage flies. We put on shoes and wander down the driveway. We hope and wish that Violet will have Clover in the barn.

When we get to the field, we quickly scan for the cows, and if we don't see them, we make a mad dash through the gate, while trying to appear very calm and collected, and we lock Violet and Clover in the barn. That would be a good time for a happy dance.

What usually happens is we see Violet contentedly grazing with Clover acting up her calf-ness to the fullest. It's really adorable as she scampers and hightails her way around the pasture or rubs her head determinedly against anything (I guess new horns itch). We watch her for a minute, though not exactly in admiration. We are quietly and calmly making a plan for getting this rambunctious thing into the barn so her mother will stand placidly to be milked. I'll tell you something, Violet sure knows how to be un-placid.

This is the point in the morning when I'm glad there's no video camera. Jason pulls a carrot from his pocket and Violet pretty much follows him like a trained dog, or cow. Clover walks sweetly beside her mother right until her third or fourth rib is into the barn and then she makes a mad dash to scamper around the field again. Violet doesn't seem to mind for about ten seconds and then she turns around and walks halfway out of the barn. She gives a solicitous moo toward her offspring and Clover seems again like she's headed for the barn, but just as she reaches it, she cuts right and turns and careers around the pasture again.

Maybe we should laugh at this point, but at barely 6:00 am, it is not actually all that funny to be standing beside an anxious bovine mother.

Violet scampers after her child at some point. We scamper and wave sticks to try turn the wild thing back toward the barn. We stand still and see if she'll listen to her mother. We urge her mother back toward the barn hoping Clover will follow. And eventually, she does. We know there has to be a better way, but we don't know it yet.

The sun is up early in summer

You might think that having a cow to milk would make one an early riser, but it's not so. Really, it's the sun that does it. Right around 4:00 each morning, I wake up and look around and wonder if I've overslept and aggravated the cow, Violet that is. I wonder how much longer I have to sleep. I look at the really beautiful morning light filtering through my blue curtain and in through the leaves in the living room. I doze, I wake, I doze. Finally, I go back to sleep and the dog, Nico, wakes me to climb into bed with us, and I check the time, and it's about 4:48.

I started setting an alarm, which is a bit of a trick, because I removed the alarm clock from our room recently. (I'll tell you later!) I decided to use the Ipod for one of its best features, which is the alarm setting. I thought if I set the alarm, I could quit being anxious about missing chore time and sleep better for the last hour of my night. But no. Now, I wake up and wait for the Ipod to go boing! I wait so long in fact that I have to get up, and while I'm up I check the time on the stove clock. It's about 4:23.

It might sound like I should just go ahead and get up with the sun, surrender to an obvious biorhythm, but then I want to go to sleep again right after breakfast. Today, I managed to make it through lunch, and then laid my head on the table, just like in school, and went right to sleep. It was a lovely nap.

Chickens

Last Monday, as we sat at breakfast planning for how to welcome the cow, Violet, and how Jason was going to drive the livestock trailer the first time, the telephone rang. I should point out that being up here in the far, far north, the sun greets us well before 5:00, and we tend to be awake by 5:30 on a summer morning when we're sleeping in. So, for the phone to ring during breakfast is a remarkable event. It was not even 7:00.

It was the post office letting us know that we had 27 chicks sitting in a box just waiting for us to pick up. I leapt from the table and the children leapt after, and we made our mad dash to the post office.  (Quick aside- I think the postal service is amazing.)

I knew the chicks were supposed to arrive last week, and I had written down that they were supposed to arrive Monday, but when I looked back at my notes, that just did not make sense to me. Things don't ship on Sunday, so they would have to ship on Saturday and just sit somewhere until Monday in order to pick them up Monday. Needless to say, we were not exactly ready.

The people at the post office are not nearly as excited about chicks as we are. There were not happy smiles wishing us luck, just a quick, "Here are your chicks. Good-bye!" So we hustled home with them peeping away in Ezra's lap. I only had to tell him 80 times during the 5 minute drive to keep the box closed.

At home, we quickly assembled our brooder, dipped their beaks in water, and set them inside. By day two, we had spread them into two boxes just for an excuse to handle them all. They muck up their water quickly, and one of the roosters already charges and pecks at us when we're changing the water or food. That's funny now because we weighs less than two sticks of butter, but I've already started calling him Soup.

They grow really quickly and eat like they're growing quickly. This is a picture from last week. That one is not dead; it's just what chicks do. They walk around pecking and drinking and eating, then suddenly they fall over asleep. It can be rather alarming.

Here are pictures from this morning. Note how many more feathers they have, and the one bird up in front is Soup.

What I See

This is borage, it rhymes with forage. The leaves are all prickly, even spiny along the underside of the main vein. I think some people eat the flowers and it has a medicinal use. I just think it's beautiful.

This is the push mower that was handed down to us from a friend who also got it from another person. It is an AWESOME mower that suddenly smokes a lot, hence the stark line in the grass. Maybe it doesn't like the oil I put in it, maybe I put too much. I must solve that problem.



These are sunflowers by the woodshed with morning glories around the base. I hope the morning glories climb the sunflowers. Wouldn't that be lovely?

This is one of the roses that we got for the kids. I look forward to seeing how the roses look.

This is a little cluster of pinks that I left in the middle of the yard. Have you read "Felicia and the Pot of Pinks"?

TOMATOES!!!!!!

One of the six trees that was felled. I am limbing them slowly and steadily.

A flagging tape from the surveyor. It's pegged to the ground.

These are the lupines I've tried to mow around. I think it worked. These are actually an invasive species. I wonder if Ms. Rumphius knew that.

This is our cow Violet who suddenly doesn't want us to touch her.

That's her calf laying in the field out in front. That's Violet eating the afterbirth.

These are the pine trees and apples before the pines were felled. And this is the same corner of the house minus the pine trees.

Bread

I have baked bread off and on since I was in Mrs. Warner's Texas history class in seventh grade. That first time, my mother did most of the stirring and measuring, and I mostly learned that bread was hard to handle. The recipe we made that time was for yeast rolls like my great- grandmother used to make, then my grandmother, and now my aunt. If you're lucky and you happen by her house around one occasion or another, you might get to have one of those rolls straight from the oven, dripping butter.

When Jason and I moved to Fort Worth, I looked at Molly Katzen's drawings and description and thought for sure I could make bread. I have perhaps too much faith in what one can learn from books. I tried and I tried to make bread like she said, but the twenty to thirty minutes of kneading it on the counter as she recommended never turned out anything worth sharing with friends. And there was also the unintended lesson about how to explode Pyrex bakeware. Then, around that time, one friend got a bread machine that made better bread than I could and another began making sourdough that put my bricks to shame, so I put away Molly and the Tassajara cookbook someone had given me.

Sometime after I started staying home, I again tried my hand at bread. I had a bit more luck, but I still don't think I quite had it figured out. One day, when I was in a hurry, I did not knead it long and I left it in the bowl to knead it. First of all, you can have MUCH wetter dough if you are not trying to knead it on the counter. Additionally, whole wheat soaks up water in the first rise, so it is MUCH better for it to be pretty wet during the first rise. Finally, twenty minutes of kneading is WAY too much kneading; you can not knead at all and still have yummy bread.

The most recent innovation for me has been a switch to making sourdough, which I feared for so many years. I discovered sourdough is more reliable than yeast packets and easy enough to tend if you're making bread for five people.

So these days, I make bread one to three times a week. I mix my starter with extra flour and water in the evening. I leave it sitting on the counter overnight. There is no magic temperature, although I do cover it to keep cats and debris out of it.

Then, I separate some of the starter and stick it back in the cool box. I add the rest of my ingredients to what's left. To make two loaves of bread, I use four cups of the overnight glop, 7 cups of flour, 1 tablespoon of salt, some maple syrup, 4 tablespoons of butter, and roughly two cups of water.

I let it rise until after lunch, then divide it and put it in buttered loaf pans. If it's warm, the bread is ready for the oven by 3:00; if it's cold, I stick it in the oven closer to 5:00. I slash the tops of the loaves and put them in the oven before I turn it on to 350. They bake about 40 minutes, and then we have bread!

If you're as awesome as I am, you grind your own flour at least once in awhile so that your whole wheat doesn't have that off taste, and so you can make your own layered sand looking flour container.

And last but not least, I have yet to taste 100% whole wheat bread that was worth a bit of butter. Don't be too pure or "right"; use some white flour.

No Hurry

A good friend and I were talking about the impact of hurrying on our families. Maybe you know this situation: I'm standing at the sink, washing the dishes before I get dinner going. Sylvie has made her usual huge mess in her room and I want her to clean it up before dinner. She cries, because she's five and doesn't want to clean it herself. She just wants some company. I order and threaten and demand and cajole and maybe she ends up cleaning the room and maybe she doesn't.

If I wasn't in such a hurry to get those dishes done, I could probably help her clean her room and get the dishes done in less time than the whole drama described above. This is a drama I've found ways to avoid in many other parenting crisis points, like getting everyone to the car or getting dressed or going on a walk. Still, it comes up again and again. It seems to be something I have to work through.

What has happened is I've learned when I'm the one who needs to hurry and that most of the time, hurrying is unnecessary and even harmful. I don't start asking the children to get ready to leave until I'm ready; otherwise, in my haste to get all my pieces together, I begin herding and harrying the children when all they actually need to do is put on shoes. It also makes it easier for me to delegate; if my things are assembled and I'm waiting by the door for the children to get their shoes, I can hand them things to carry or give them specific chores that will help us get to the car.

I've learned that when I slow down, I almost always have more time than I thought I did. Sylvie and Ezra are much more cooperative when I'm not panicking about time. And let's face it, cooperation is often the fastest way to get anywhere as a family.

All work and No Play

I just read a quote, "All Work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow."

I think I would rather be a poor wife than a rich widow.