I used to mow the east pasture for my dad in the summer once in a while. Had I worked dawn to dusk it might have taken a full day, I don't know; I remember completing the job in two afternoons.

Dad's little John Deere tractor (sadly, it's no longer with us -- may it rest in peace) provided the horsepower, and the mower rolled along behind, cutting a swath just a bit narrower than the tractor through the thick pasture grasses. There are many things I cannot do, but even I could manage to mow the field with the tractor, slowly lowering the chopper, engaging the PTO to start the blades slashing, putting it into gear and starting around the perimeter of the pasture.

Round and round, clockwise, hugging the edge of the tall virgin grasses, the marked line of demarcation shorn by my previous pass.

Round and round, no radio, no air conditioning, only my thoughts as I watched for large rocks or boards in my path; occasionally I had to throw the tractor out of gear to jump down and move something that didn't belong in the pasture and certainly couldn't be mowed over.

Round and round, not fast enough to create a breeze. Funny, I had terrible grass allergies as a child which kept me from mowing the lawn and feeding hay, but the grasses never bothered me on the tractor -- oh, except for the one time I forgot to wear sunglasses. It seems that sunglasses keep the grass pollen out of my eyes and completely block my allergies. I didn't forget twice.

Round and round, uninterrupted . . . unless . . . sometimes the rhythm was broken when I hit a mound of dirt or a hidden piece of wood. When that happened, the mower did what it was supposed to do: it sacrificed its weakest link, called the shear bolt. A shear bolt is a fail-safe weak point which keeps a motor from slogging too hard against an impediment, such as a tangle of tough brambles -- anything which creates a lot of torque for the engine. So when I hit a rough patch with the mower, BAM, I'd shear the shear bolt right off, and I'd have to stop mowing, leave the field, and take the tractor all the way back to the dairy yard for my dad to replace the bolt. Yes, I was a weenie and I didn't replace my own shear bolts, or at least not often. I think I had done it but maybe I was really terrible at it (probably). I remember going through two bolts in one afternoon once.

Mowing was a zen experience, other than the occasional shear bolt. But once in a while I would hit something else. If you are squeamish, you must stop reading now. You won't miss anything you can't live without.

On one long straightaway pass I looked to the right of the tractor, where I had mowed on the previous pass. There was a scene of great carnage, and I had to look away before I truly understood what had happened. On the next pass I was certain: I had mowed over a nest of jack rabbits. The poor little guys never knew what hit 'em. The rest of the afternoon was spent going round and round, bawling my eyes out.

Round and round, *sniff*, round and round.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

If I had been wearing swim fins and a snorkel, I would have been dressed only slightly worse than I was yesterday morning, at 9:00 a.m., while feeding hay.

I had to be at church at 9:30, kidlets in tow, but I had to feed hay first. Got the girls up, showered, dressed, fed, hair done, teeth brushed -- the whole shebang. I matched them lockstep, but added some makeup and hairspray into my personal transformation. So we were all dolled up and ready to go; I remembered to feed the outside cats on the way out, and I had enough presence of mind to grab my old tweed work coat to throw on while I fed hay (it's lovely).

But I felt pretty stupid when I found myself standing on the haystack in a black wool shirt and black tights, throwing flakes of hay into the stiff north wind. Each flake I launched into the air sent a shower of hay and dust cascading back onto my black clothing, and onto my black shoes, which had HEELS. At least they weren't pointy-toed stilettos -- naww, they were just my old black Fart Shoes -- but still, they were grossly inappropriate farm shoes, and they had a mighty thick coating of chaff clinging to them by 9:15.

But by far the worst choice I had made that morning was to apply lip gloss before I left the house. Have you ever fed hay in a gale while wearing lip gloss? No, I didn't think you had; I'm the only one here dumb enough to have tried that one. For the uninitiated, lip gloss has the consistency of glue, and when a 25-mile-an-hour sustained wind whips your freshly-brushed hair across your face, as it will the second you get out of the car, the hair glues itself to the lip gloss and stays there. This tends to occlude one's vision, which can make walking on a haystack somewhat treacherous, relying (as I do) on one's sense of sight to get around.

So, there I was, standing on a haystack in heels and tights and wool galore, wielding a gigantic hay knife, my hair firmly glued down tight over my whole face, feeding hay into a powerful wind.

Not so much.

Warmer.
(Photo stolen from these guys)

Oh, did I mention my nose was running?

I had my own special little prayer once I reached the church.

(photo stolen from these guys)

I pay too much for my internet connection. "Why would you do THAT, you dipstick?!" you ask. (Why all the hostility, I ask you back?)

BECAUSE, I say, ready to launch into a long and boring justification speech, BECAUSE I can't get broadband out here in the sticks (unless I have something like a million dollars for satellite internet, which I don't).

BECAUSE I've had that same e-mail address since 1996 and it's older than my children, and just as familiar. It's like a limb.

BECAUSE I don't like change. This is why I've kept my maiden name all these years -- PURE LAZINESS! (It's been convenient for keeping my immediate family anonymous when I say something stoopid on my blogs, however, which is frequent.)

But -- and I'm sure you saw the BUT coming -- all this is probably going to change. It looks like -- dum da-da-dum! -- we can finally get broadband out on the Pushing Water Ranch! My friend Gubby, as usual, did all of the research for me, and he's trying to drag me, kicking and screaming, into the Technological Age. Here I go.

So, if Clearwire's services will reach all the way out to the Pushing Water Ranch, and early indications are that they will, I should join the ranks of the somewhat speedy very soon. I will be able to use the phone -- GASP! -- while conducting important business on-line*.

I'm still not happy about giving up my limb, however. And I still don't like change, dadgummit.

*playing on the internet

This was my view from my kitchen window last summer.

Well, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by too much. Summer is the time when the "ants" work -- laying in feed for the winter. I am a "grasshopper." While I understand what the ants are doing, I'm still secretly annoyed by it.

This summer, mercifully, I did not have a haystack in front of my kitchen window. There is still a lot of hay around the ranch, but someone gave it a little more thought, and it's been stacked in less obtrusive places. Also missing from last summer: the hay truck, loaded with hay, and abandoned in front of our living room window. It sat there

all

summer

long.

I came home from work one autumn evening and the truck and its load were suddenly, magically gone, thank goodness, but they could very easily have become a permanent part of our landscape. At least the load of hay was worth enough for someone to come deal with the ancient, decrepit, pretty much worthless truck.

As the days get cooler, the grass becomes less interesting to the cows, and you have to feed more hay. The funny thing is, the only time we have bright green grass around northern California is the winter and early spring; regardless, cows draw a lot of their winter nutrition from hay. So the ants bring more hay, and stack it.

Just not in front of our house this time.

Here are a few pictures of things that endure on the ranch.

This barn is still very much in use today, both as a hay storage barn and feeding facility, and as a good place to sort and separate cattle. The barn was built in the mid-70s. We used to have one of the best, if not the closest, views of Mt. Lassen in the north valley, and Dad had to go and build a barn in front of it. This became our view out the kitchen window. If you look through the barn, toward the northeast, those mountains are the northern Sierras. Mt. Lassen is behind one of those pole supports. Mom was irritated.

Another old barn suffering from lack of use. It was right in the heart of the action back in the days when the dairy was a 24-hour operation. Now it's home to wasps and spiders, probably pigeons and maybe a few cats, and not much else.

This large, empty and decaying room is the tank room. Imagine a huge stainless steel tank, about eight feet tall, filling every square inch of this room. That was the milk tank. Milk was pumped into it three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, without fail. The milk truck, a semi truck-and-trailer tanker, came and picked up the milk once every day, also without fail. Late in the afternoon it was fairly impressive to climb the ladder, open the hatch, and look down into a swirling vat of icy cold white milk, stretching back to the wall, farther back than even the light from the open hatch would reach. If I gave a casual tour of the dairy to a friend or visitor, I always ended with a trip to the tank room.

For a while it was my job to clean the tank. If I stop typing here I'll leave you picturing me in a haz-mat suit, scrubbing away inside the tank with a broom. Nope -- everything was automated. It was a clean, easy, boring, push-button job, but it was critical. Anything dealing with health and public safety is very regulated, and there's little room for sloppiness. Push that button. baby.

There used to be a phone here. Not a good place for a casual telephone call. It's right outside the milk parlor, and the phone (which was removed; you can see the holes and the outline where it was bolted to the wall) was mostly for calls to the electrician, to come fix the barn, or the milker, to get his late butt to work, or Surge, to come fix the milking equipment. With very loud motors running for seven-hour stretches, and people coming in and out of the barn at all hours, this was not a great place to have a phone chat.

When you're in a hurry you can write numbers with your finger, apparently. I don't even want to know what was used for "ink." See the vet's number? Gerry is still our vet -- but now it's just for our stupid cats.

Most places have a john for their facilities. We had a FRANK. It was named after one of the guys who worked there. I'm not sure he appreciated it. I'm quite sure no one cared.

I wouldn't have used that potty for any amount of money.

(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/)

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.

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.

Feeding beef cows is not rocket science. They graze all day on green pasture, and, depending on the time of year, you supplement their diet with hay. Alfalfa hay is the best, and a favorite of the cows.

Feeding hay is a pretty big job in the winter, when they need so much more food energy than only grass can provide. In the late spring they need almost no hay at all, and in fact prefer the tender green grass to hay. But in late summer as the grass toughens, the cows again start looking for hay.

When my parents go somewhere overnight, or for weeks at a time, we take care of their animals, the most important of these being the Limousins, their beautiful red beef cows. Dad's instructions are usually vague, with lots of wiggle room: "Feed them enough. If they don't clean it up by the next feeding, cut them way back." Then sometimes, like last weekend, Dad gets oddly specific: "Give the cows on the north side 27 flakes, and the south cows none. Unless, of course, the south cows are standing there, in which case, give them four flakes." Um, okay.

So last Saturday morning I was up on the stack tossing alfalfa hay flakes down into the concrete and iron manger below me. Done it a million times, nothing new, can almost do it in my sleep -- until. Until I looked down and saw that I had inadvertently dropped a piece of baling twine down into the manger. Darn. When this happens, it's important to retrieve it, because some cow could possibly eat the twine. Cows are not known for their brains or discriminating taste.

Back when I was a little kid, hay bales were secured with three wires, made of metal. Dropping one of THOSE into the manger was a crisis. I know it sounds crazy, but cows really did ingest the wires, and then you had a real problem. A cow with a wire in her belly was a cow in trouble. The wire, or any scrap metal that dumb cows might eat, lodges in the honeycombed walls of the reticulum, one of the cow's four stomach chambers. Inflammation results, and the cow fails to gain weight, or, if she's a milking cow, her milk production drops.

The wire solution was surprisingly elegant and simple: all heifers were given cow magnets before they entered the milking herd. No, not those colorful refrigerator decorations, but 4-inch stainless steel magnetic cylinders which the cows were forced to ingest as if they were big vitamin tablets.

The magnets were preventive medicine against stray wires in the cows' stomachs, because all metal simply adhered itself to the magnets and stayed put nicely.

But, since hay bales are now wrapped with twine instead of wire, there should be no danger, right?

Wrong.

That Saturday morning as I watched a stray twine slither into the manger below me, I was horrified (and annoyed, let's face it) to see a cow already eating the darned thing. Stupid cow. Time to go down and save her from herself.

The minefield that is the haystack includes such dangers as
-- sharp alfalfa stems
-- black widows
-- unnoticed gaps between bales into which your entire leg disappears
-- cut bales that collapse under your weight
-- wobbly bales that teeter under your feet
-- feral kittens (dangerous because you'll soon be feeding them and calling them Fluffy)
It is rare, but it is also possible for poorly-stacked bales to collapse under your weight; it happened to my middle brother once. He was standing on the corner of a stack when it gave way beneath him. Luckily for him he was inside a pole barn, and near an iron support post for the barn. He grabbed the post and hung on as the stack crumbled out from under him, and survived with sore muscles instead of a broken neck.

But my least favorite hay hazard is caused by feeding hay into the wind. You find yourself suddenly in a cloud of swirling alfalfa dust and flakes, blinking and sneezing and shaking out your t-shirt. Wearing a bra full of hay particles is about as miserable as it gets, but there are no advisories for such things, and no one writes cowboy songs about that.

Every place has its problems, its annoyances. In urban areas there's often noise to deal with, or traffic, or maybe a neighbor's tree encroaching into your yard.

In the country we have flies. Where there are herd animals there will be flies.

The house we moved into in 1971 had white aluminum siding on it. From a distance the siding looked okay, I guess, but within a few feet the first thing people noticed was the black polka dots on the white paint. "What are those?" they'd ask.

"Fly specks."

"Oh. What are fly specks?"

"That'd be fly poop."

"Oh. Can't you wash them off?"

"Would you like to try?"

Fly specks covered our house, our patio furniture, our cars, and probably our pets, if we had looked hard enough. Removing fly specks is next to impossible, so after a while you just give up. Removing the flies was impossible, though Mom tried. She bought bags of wasp larvae (more bugs), which we kids "planted" in fresh cow manure all over the dairy. When they hatched, the theory went, the tiny black wasps would destroy the fly larvae, somehow, and without pesticides. Who knew that 1970s bumpkins could be ecofriendly? The only problem was that if it worked, nobody could tell.

When Chas and I were first dating he introduced me to his old roommate Evan, who asked where I was from. "Oh, Orland -- I know a dairy family in Orland," he said. "I went to a fly-be-que there once." Yes, well, eating outside after Easter is not advisable if you live on a dairy. But, as with hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes or network news, after a while you do get used to the clouds of flies. Some of us, like the father of my best friend Cheryl, become almost proud of our fly-endurance -- "I've eaten in worse flies," he claimed. I've filed that quote away among my favorites.

So many more bugs and pests to share with you! But they'll have to wait for another day, because I have flies to swat.