Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

(Photo stolen from these guys)

Life kicks you when you're down sometimes, dunnit? In the past couple of weeks we've had both cars in the shop for repairs or maintenance on four separate occasions, three different mechanics. All's well (for now).

And then the pressure gauge thingy on the pressure tank of the dairy's very large water system (which feeds our house) took a dive this weekend, and the resulting high pressure made our water heater start squirting all over the place. Two plumbers and many, many sopping towels later, and we need a new water heater (which will be installed some time Monday, or maybe Tuesday . . . fingers crossed).

IN THE MEANTIME . . . I took the girls over to my parents' house last night to shower all three of us. At home the water will get warm -- just. Not warm enough for little kids, and just for a little while; not long enough for three showers, certainly.

I did manage to get a shower this morning -- glory hallelujah! Some people need caffeine in the morning; I need shampoo. A word of caution, however:

Never shave your legs with cold water. When you've got chicken skin, you can't tell when to stop shaving.

Wish me luck this weekend. I may spend half of it in a laundromat.

(also posted at http://foolery.typepad.com/foolery/)

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am having quite a week. Busy at work, busy at home. And trying to watch every second of the new Ken Burns miniseries "The War" on PBS (if you haven't watched it yet, catch up -- it's on tonight and next week).

So I was unprepared for the plumbing problems. This weekend one plumber came to fix a relatively simple but quite important burst pipe. The rooster tail of water shooting over the driveway was very impressive. Dad casually mentioned that he was surprised that the increased water pressure hadn't burst any pipes in my house.

WHAT?!

That can happen? And for those of you who know anything about plumbing, you'll be able to tell instantly by my word choices that I know NOTHING about plumbing.

Nothing, that is, except that Dad is right, and in the last 24 hours we've had two more broken pipe or connector thingy's in our laundry room. I'm just grateful that Chas was the one who had to deal with fixing the first one, and calling the plumber for the second one.

The verdict? We need a new water heater. Does this mean we won't be spending money on food for a month? Because that's all I really want to know.

So, to entertain both of you today, I will link to something I wrote in 2005, then lazily reposted (on my other blog, Foolery) on such a day as today, when I couldn't really come up with anything worthwhile. It's a warning to those who would mess with the plumbing in a very old house -- especially a very old farm house.

(Photo stolen from this guy)

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 03:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most people have probably heard warnings about getting between a mother bear and her cub. You can probably extrapolate this concept of protective motherhood to encompass an awful lot of mothers in the animal kingdom. There are some mothers from our own species who fly in the face of this hypothesis, but those are stories for another day. I want to talk about cows and calves.

BUT FIRST! A little bull . . .

(Photo stolen from these guys)

1987 marked the end of the Holstein-Friesian cow's supreme reign on our property. It's a long and tiresome story that I won't bother you with tonight, but the very strict terms of the buyout agreement my parents signed in 1986 made it absolutely verboten to have any cow on the property who was even THINKING about looking black and white. So, after a short interlude of a very strict cow-free ranch, Dad started raising Limousins.

I didn't spell that wrong, and these are not automobiles. Limousin is a French breed of beef cattle. They are usually the color of an Irish setter or golden retriever (although they can also be black), and they are known for their mild manner, as beef cows go. Here are some lovely Limousins, with horns, in their country of origin:

(Photo stolen from these guys)

When the dairy was operational, the only bovine on the ranch that wasn't black and white was the catch bull. Always a Hereford bull, the catch bull's job was enviable by almost any standard: he lived with an ever-changing group of females, most of whom were very young (think teenage cows). Any cows in with the catch bull who weren't teenage cows, were probably on their way out and desperate to get pregnant. All this bull had to do was, well, what came naturally. Small talk was optional, no one had to buy anyone any dinner, and the moral code of the pasture was clearly on the side of his good time.

This is Bully-Bully, as named by Sparky.

The catch bull's job was to "catch" unbred heifers: to impregnate them when artificial insemination (A.I.) had failed, which would jump-start their fertility cycle and get their milk flowing. The catch bull was never a Holstein, for two reasons. One, any calf sired by the catch bull would be a half-breed, and would be instantly recognizable as such by its white face, usually. The calf, which was just not as important as the kicking off of its mother's milk production, would be sold immediately after it was born. Second reason the bull was never a Holstein: because Holstein bulls are known for their mean tempers, third behind Cape Buffalo and Naomi Campbell, if reports are to be believed.

You ever see a Holstein bull in a bull riding show? Me neither. Know why? 'Cause they're TOO MEAN! Come to think of it, we've never seen Naomi Campbell in a bull riding show, either . . .

So my siblings and I grew up around docile female Holstein cows and the occasional exhausted Hereford bull. We were cautious around a cow with a calf, but I don't remember any Holstein cows giving anyone a scare.

Fast-forward to the beef cow years (including the present). There are behavior differences between the sweet docile milk cows of my childhood and these Limousins. The Holsteins were all hand-raised, and had become used to being herded every day, three times a day. The Limousins are not. The Holsteins never kept their calves for more than 24 hours, and so no strong maternal bonds really formed. The Limousins have their calves with them until well past the calves' voting age, and very strong maternal bonds are forged. You can imagine, then, that getting between a Limousin cow and her calf becomes a tricky thing.

I first learned just how tricky negotiating the beef cow-calf bond can be when I was home from college, helping Dad try to isolate one cow from the herd one day. She and her calf were ushered into a small corral inside a large barn -- what had been the maternity barn when the dairy was operational. The barn had become, by this time, mostly a hay barn, as well as a place to store tractors, trucks, even a boat. For some reason the old dairy pickup had been stranded within this small corral, never to run again. Both of its doors has been scavenged, rendering it an open air vehicle. The corral was large enough to hold three pickups abreast, if need be, but this day it had only the one pickup, one suspicious beef cow, and her clueless calf. It was our job to separate the cow from her calf and the pickup, and isolate her in a chute where the vet could examine her.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that Ms. Cow had other plans.

We were completely unprepared for the cow's self-confidence, and her absolute surety that she was NOT going into that chute. This was new -- aren't cows docile creatures? Didn't she get that memo? Um, no. And she backed up her position with physical threats. She chased one guy (I think it was the vet) around that pickup so fast that he was glad there were no doors on it as he dove through the cab to get away from her. Well, Mama Cow hadn't heard that cows don't drive, and she followed the vet right into the cab. Chevrolet pickup cabs are known to be spacious, but not quite spacious enough for a rampaging cow. The vet was lucky, and the upside of this whole unplanned set-to was that Dad was able to roll the calf under the fence while Mama was busy bullfighting. Cow: zero, Man: one, but just barely.

There was one other time when I experienced how stupid it is to get between a beef cow and her calf. I was walking through the east pasture, going to the middle of the pasture to reset the irrigation. Behind me was the hay barn and manger where Dad's one lone Brahma cow stood munching, her back to me. She was not ornery at all, but I was wary of her because she looked so fierce. This is a Brahma cow from India:

(Photo stolen from these guys)

While our cow was not a purebred, still she had the hump atop her shoulder, the sagging jowls around her throat, and the long down-turned ears. And didn't she have horns? I can't quite remember, but I steered clear of her.

I had to cross the ditch and was about five feet short of it, when up jumped a new baby calf out of the ditch with a yelp. It was a Brahma crossbreed -- her calf, which she'd hidden in the ditch while she went to eat -- and I was between the calf and its mother. Brahma Mama bellowed suddenly from the barn behind me. I turned around to see her charging across the pasture in my direction, bellowing like a maniac, jowls flapping in the wind, so I bolted for the irrigation block mid-field. When I got to it I looked back, but thankfully the cow had stopped chasing me; she hovered close to her calf and caught her breath. I waited a while before climbing down from the 5-foot high concrete irrigation block, and sneaked home quietly.

No wonder cows are sacred in India! I wouldn't mess with Brahmas either. Or any, mother, really, if I happened to be between her and her offspring.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Life in the country is usually blessedly free of crime, but every once in a while something happens -- some real world ugliness invades our space, and we realize that mostly, we've been lucky.

When I was growing up our house was the command center of my parents' dairy. People came and went all the time. We locked our doors at night, but mostly because we'd feel terribly stupid if anyone found out that we didn't. The house was never locked during the day, and car keys -- well, Dad's car keys -- were routinely left in the ignition at all times. Nothing happened for years.

A dairy is a 24-hour operation, and vacations were not in the cards until I was 12 years old. At that time we began to take family trips, and employees would feed the cats, dogs, birds, rabbits, lambs, guinea pigs, ducks, chickens, and any other pets we may have collected, while we were gone. We'd usually arrive home in the middle of the night, fall into bed, and over breakfast the next day we'd hear from those employees about how things went in our absence.

One such bleary morning breakfast, the lady who fed calves at the dairy and who had cared for our pets and our house that vacation, appeared in the kitchen to give her report. Dolores looked shaken as she told us we'd had a break-in, of sorts. I'm wracking my feeble brains trying to remember whether or not we knew as soon as we walked in the house that night, but I can't be sure. In any case, I'm sure my parents knew that night, but there wasn't anything to be done about it.

Nothing was missing.

The offenders were not thieves, but partiers. They had learned that our house would be empty for a week, and they had used the house for a party. Not a big party, at least -- they had some decency, or maybe a lack of forethought. But they had a swimming party which spilled into our locked house. Dolores had cleaned up the worst of the mess -- many, many, many beer cans and bottles and cigarette butts and God only knows what else -- but some things took a while to show themselves. Some part of the swimming pool's cleaning system had been broken, surely an accident by drunken fools just trying to get the pool sweep out of their way. Something minor in the house had been broken, but again, it was not an intentional act of vandalism, but a clumsy mistake. Still, I can remember feeling creepy about being alone in my room at night, trying to fall asleep, for several weeks.

The story came out rather quickly. One of the milkers might have mentioned to one of the hay haulers that the boss would be gone next weekend. BINGO -- it was immediately obvious who had been in the house: a big friendly great dane-like guy named Carl, who had hauled hay to our ranch and to many others over the years. This guy had logged more time drunk and hung over than sober in his short life. This growing hypothesis was backed up by another milker, Rich, who reported being surprised to see a guy stagger into the milk parlor in the middle of the night, inviting Rich to "come on over to Dave's house" after his milking shift was done. He described Carl to a T.

Nothing was provable, but Dad did get the word out that he knew who had done it. Predictably, nothing like that ever happened again.

But the "win one for the Gipper" moment happened about ten years later, when Dad and my uncle and I were having breakfast in town one Sunday morning. Into the diner walked Carl, ten years older and ten years more hard mileage on his liver. He was still wasted from the night before, and in his big drunken friendly guy stupor he unwisely plunked down at our booth, uninvited, next to my fresh-scrubbed Mercedes-driving uncle, who was as uncomfortable as a man could be at that moment. Carl droned on to my dad for a minute about nothing, and then Dad let him have it.

"You haven't been back at our place in several years, Carl -- the last time you were there you used our house for a party." Dad fired the across the bow -- not in anger, but in even, morally-superior Father Tones. Carl blinked and swayed in his seat, not sure he heard that right. Dad fired another salvo: "You brought some women to our pool and had a party. The milker saw you, said you invited him over, too." This speech was delivered in the I'm So Disappointed In You, You Let Us Down tones that only a father can deliver, and from a laid-back, immensely likable man like my father, it had to have been devastating to hear (it always was for me).

After an uncomfortable, expectant silence, Carl stammered, "Yeah, I've been meanin' to come talk to you about that." That was a close to an admission as we were likely to hear, and besides, my uncle had COMPLETELY lost his appetite by this time. Case closed.

Carl died a few years later. I'm not sure he had turned 40 yet, but I'm sure his liver was at least 90.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I experienced a head-on collision with Nature yesterday, right there on my driveway.

Walking to the house from the garage, I noticed (but my daughters, thankfully, did not) that the neighbor's dog was off his chain and he was eating our outside cats' food. The dog bolted when he saw me, and I was able to get the girls into the house before they knew the dog was there. Smedley is terrified of dogs, and Sparky copies her big sister and screams right along with her.

So I thought I was smart. I instructed the girls to go into the living room and look out the front window at the yard. I walked through the yard toward the dog, who was sitting beyond the fence out of sight of the girls, who were --

-- suddenly standing right next to me. Kids and dog noticed each other at the same moment. Dog ran toward kids, kids fled to house in terror, screaming the whole way. Mom (that'd be me) tried tapping her heels together three times, chanting, "There's no place like Cancun, there's no place like Cancun . . . "

. . . but Mom (still me) still needed to secure the dog. The girls were by this time screaming inside the house, and I could hear them fumbling with the door lock. What, did they think this dog had opposable thumbs and a burning desire to come in?!

I managed to get the dog to come toward me, but I was concerned by his demeanor. I should tell you that this is a large dog; he's probably half black lab and half Rottweiler, and it was the Rottweiler half I worried about. He's just reached adulthood and has not been neutered (please spay and neuter your pets -- and other people's pets too, if you don't mind) and he's like a big sloppy teenaged boy when he roams the neighborhood. Not a bad dog, but one that bears watching.

I crouched down quietly and let the dog come up to me, which he did not do gently. After I regained my balance, doggy whuffled me up and down, getting doggy drool all over my black sweater. Great. He let me pet him, but he wasn't thrilled about it. No, this dog didn't know he had any labrador in him at all, and I wanted him out of my yard.

So I stood up very slowly and started walking toward his house. That's when my daughters decided to open the door and come out onto the porch to see what was happening. Doggy heard the latch click and leaped past me, nearly knocking me down, and closed the difference between kids and dog muzzle very quickly. SLAM! Screaming girls were once again screaming safely behind the door, and it was time to take this dog HOME; no more nonsense.

I was just a few steps down the driveway when he joined me, and unexpectedly body-slammed me. I was annoyed, because this huge creature had managed to get paw prints on my collar. Mostly, I was getting really uneasy, because he seemed to take no joy in this whole game; he just stood up and silently pummeled me, over and over.

"Ricky?" I called tentatively, hoping someone at the neighbor's house would hear me and call off the dog.

And that's the moment the dog chose to induct me into The Club.

It's a club I've heard of, mostly on cruddy television sit-coms, but not a club I'd ever join. I'm talking about the People Who've Had Their Legs Humped By Dogs Club. Sorry to be crude, but there it is. That dog had a PLAN, and it included my right leg.

"RICKY!!!"

His little sister came running. She wasn't at all hesitant to grab the dog's collar, not like Yours Truly, the new club member, who imagined pulling back a bloody stump should I grab that dog's collar.

"He gets a little excited," she said. Well, at eleven years old, she didn't know the half of it. "You should have seen him about 30 seconds ago," I wanted to say, but I held my tongue. Ahhhh, now I understand his demeanor. He wasn't playing, he wasn't fighting, he was . . . going blind, so to speak.

Back to the house to shed my drool-, dirt- and Heaven Knows What Else-encrusted clothes while I calmly talked to the kidlets (for the umpteenth time). "What's the worst thing you can do when you're frightened by a dog?"

"Ru-u-u-u-un," they moaned in unison.

"What did you do?

"Ra-a-a-a-a-an," they admitted.

"And what's the second worst thing you can do when you're afraid of a dog?"

"Scre-e-e-e-e-eam," they chanted in defeated tones.

"And --"

"We know, Mama! We screamed, okay? We screamed!" said Smedley.

"Yeah, well, how'd that work out for ya?" I shot back. I tromped off to the laundry to ditch the clothes, fresh from my triumph of imparting a lesson.

I was soooooooo glad the girls had missed my initiation into The Club, though. Don't you dare tell them.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 05:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I just closed the outside door to the office, and it's after 1:00 p.m. Usually our air conditioner has been on for hours by this time of day, doors and windows shut tight against the heat, but not today. Today the valley is somewhat cool, insulated from the punishing late summer sun by a thick white blanket. Not clouds -- smoke.

A large fire in Plumas County, which started on Labor Day, has pushed enough smoke into the air and down over the whole valley to block out the sun. Usually the first light of dawn through my northern window wakes me, but this morning the sun was thin. I was thankful for the dove hunters who woke me up at first light -- BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! -- otherwise, with the sun all but blocked out, I might still be asleep.

Driving into Chico was surreal. Most cars on Highway 32 had their headlights on, and the sun was a neon orange-y pink ball, casting a sinister one-eyed glare over the commuters. I listened to NPR on the drive in, as I always do, but, as often happens with breaking news, the local news report contradicted what I'd heard elsewhere about the fire. The Moonlight Fire, as it has been named, has charred anywhere from 3000 to 15,000 acres, depending upon which news you believe. The fierce north winds which kicked up last night fed the fire, turning it into a monster.

The air was orange. My shadow was brown against the concrete, with a sickly orange halo. The acrid smell of smoke, borne 50 miles or more by the relentless wind, wafted into my office.

This isn't L.A. -- is this L.A.?

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I need to explain something about life in the country: we have pretty much everything we need. We could use more money, more grass seed, more rain, and more reliable cell phone reception . . . but otherwise, we're doing fine.

We don't need any more cats, thanks.

I can imagine the scenario. You have a female indoor cat who gets out one night, lured by the serenading male cats out on your lawn (who were, of course, lured there by her feline feminine cycle in the first place).

A few weeks later -- and it is WAY too late tonight to Google the gestation period of the common house cat, sorry -- you've got KITTENS. What to do?

You could sit outside of Safeway with a box of wriggling, adorable kittens; sit there all week until every Safeway patron in town has snubbed you, twice.

You could take them to the Humane Society, but that would just be an admission of owning an unspayed cat, and who needs that kind of grief on a Tuesday? Not me -- not you, either, apparently.

So, you do the logical thing, and drive way out to the country to dump them beside the road in the dark . . . next to a dairy or farm. "Hey," you reason, "Dairies have mice and rats, so they need cats!"

There are a couple of problems with this thinking. First, we HAVE cats. If the cats we have weren't feral we'd be thinking about driving all 4000 of them over to YOUR place to dump them. We hear you've got a female in heat . . .

Second, cats are not born knowing how to hunt. They are trained by their mothers to hunt, just like lions are. If their mother should die before they learn to hunt, the wild kittens aren't likely to survive, unless they find a doorstep where they can lurk to do their hunting. In the human world we call this begging.

Third problem, and this is the cruelest one: the feral cat population is kept in check in four ways. One, the survival of the fittest, otherwise known as starvation. It isn't pretty. Two, gang warfare, in which the biggest and toughest survivors throw their weight around. It isn't pretty. Three, overpopulation, which always leads to disease. Feline distemper scourges the property periodically, systematically thinning the cat population and leaving a few ragged survivors, more desperate than ever. It isn't pretty.

Finally, four. This is the human -- and humane -- solution to what's left of the cat problem that Nature couldn't quite wipe out: crowd control. This is best accomplished with a .22 rifle and a beer chaser. I have never done it -- I'm way too soft, and that's no compliment -- but I tip my hat to those who take up the grim task every now and then when the cat population is out of control.

At this date we have three adopted cats who are allowed in the house. Outside we feed four cats and two kittens, all but one wild. There were more, but disease has made a recent sweep. Mom feeds at least five over at her house. Not feeding them is not an option. We tried that, and the bolder ones ended up trying to get into our house, fighting with our cats, and generally making us all miserable.

So while I know that YOU would never dump an animal out in the country (dogs are dumped almost as often, with even sadder results, usually), there are people out there who will. I hope they know that they do no one -- especially the cats -- any favors. Please spay and neuter your pets.

This is Campos, who was living in the orange tree in our yard when we moved in. He had been abandoned and was thin, frightened and miserable. Now he's obnoxiously large and secure.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)