Fall Calving 101

Since calving season is creeping up on me, I keep looking for information on a refresher course for calving 101. I found three articles that I really like and intend to pass on to Dad, since he hasn’t calved cows in a non-emergency situation in forty years.

An article from beefmagazine.com called planning for calving season battle planning. The vet interviewed for the article made a lot of sense and had good tips for pre- and post-calving. He also talks a lot about minimizing physical (environmental) and disease risks in the cow herd. Read it here.

“Cowboy Obstetrics” was by far the most comprehensive article I’d read in awhile. I liked how it went from prep, to delivery, to cleaning and when each of those events should take place. I also covered what bad signs to watch for. Two things I didn’t know: “less than 2% of calving difficulties occur in mature cows” and that it’s best for the cow to lay on her left side so the rumen isn’t squashed by the calf.

The third article I liked was through Montana extension. It covered more cow management than calf, but heifers need extra special care during their first pregnancy to be functional cows later in life. I’ve seen several good heifers ruined by bad first calving experiences and poor post-partum management. Get it here.

The last resource I’m into this week for calving information is a book called Essential Guide to Calving by Heather Smith Thomas. I haven’t read this book yet, but I’m placing an order, either at Amazon.com or BN.com. Thomas is a cattlewoman with fifty years experience and I haven’t seen many books about calving by someone other than a vet. Thought I’d give it a whirl.

So, happy calving to me and to anyone out there who’s prepping for fall babies.

Cow-Calf Corner - Department of Animal Science, Oklahoma State University

Cow-Calf Corner - Department of Animal Science, Oklahoma State University

I know I need to get out more when I start using terms like vaginal wall and OB chains. But that time is coming up fast and I need to get psyched. This is a good page I found on the proper placement of OB chains when pulling a calf. (See? Every girl needs this kind of information.)

"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well" (Jack London).

This is the first blog post coming to you from my brand-new laptop. Luckily, my old, trusty Toshiba got me through the last round of term papers and exams, but she just keeps messing with me and after five years it was time to upgrade. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to switch over slowly rather than wait for the Toshiba to die a slow, painful death and leave me cursing to beat hell. It’s so much easier to deal with shit before it breaks for keeps.

I finished White Fang by Jack London today. Took awhile to get into the novel, but I really liked it once I did. I’ve been working on an action sequence between shapeshifters, canids mostly, and this book gave me the perspective I needed. After reading as much dog psychology and behavior as I have the past few months, the ideas White Fang had in the book seem a little far-fetched. But after awhile, they work and make sense. A must-read in my opinion.

I’m also reading Nikki Giovanni’s Collected Poetry. Not quite half-way through. Really like her style and voice. So far, my favorite poem is “Untitled” from the 1972 collection My House.

Janet Evanovich’s novels have also been on my reading list lately. I’m through book four in the Stephanie Plum mystery series and finished Metro Girl today. Great books as far as voice and humor. I really enjoy the grease-monkey heroine in Metro Girl. Sometimes Stephanie gets a little girly for me, but Barney doesn’t have that problem. Gotta love a girl who can hang with the big dogs in a garage.

Well, Dad fell asleep before I even started supper. At least he’s home tonight. Tired, but home. He’s had a long week. Hopefully we can get some shit done around the farm this weekend.

Well, no problems with the new laptop so far. Believe me, if I have any issues, everyone will hear about it, at least once.

"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well" (Jack London).

This is the first blog post coming to you from my brand-new laptop. Luckily, my old, trusty Toshiba got me through the last round of term papers and exams, but she just keeps messing with me and after five years it was time to upgrade. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to switch over slowly rather than wait for the Toshiba to die a slow, painful death and leave me cursing to beat hell. It’s so much easier to deal with shit before it breaks for keeps.

I finished White Fang by Jack London today. Took awhile to get into the novel, but I really liked it once I did. I’ve been working on an action sequence between shapeshifters, canids mostly, and this book gave me the perspective I needed. After reading as much dog psychology and behavior as I have the past few months, the ideas White Fang had in the book seem a little far-fetched. But after awhile, they work and make sense. A must-read in my opinion.

I’m also reading Nikki Giovanni’s Collected Poetry. Not quite half-way through. Really like her style and voice. So far, my favorite poem is “Untitled” from the 1972 collection My House.

Janet Evanovich’s novels have also been on my reading list lately. I’m through book four in the Stephanie Plum mystery series and finished Metro Girl today. Great books as far as voice and humor. I really enjoy the grease-monkey heroine in Metro Girl. Sometimes Stephanie gets a little girly for me, but Barney doesn’t have that problem. Gotta love a girl who can hang with the big dogs in a garage.

Well, Dad fell asleep before I even started supper. At least he’s home tonight. Tired, but home. He’s had a long week. Hopefully we can get some shit done around the farm this weekend.

Well, no problems with the new laptop so far. Believe me, if I have any issues, everyone will hear about it, at least once.

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of" (Jane Austen).

Zippy lookin' cute.

Been blocked on the blog all day. Been blocked on everything. I did get the laundry room and upstairs bathroom cleaned, some bread baked, my portfolio edited (60 pages), a horseback ride in with Dad, the garden tended, some writing exercises and reading done, along with a workout, and pizza for supper. Somehow I fell I haven’t gotten shit done today. I meant to blog about ag or farm life today, but haven’t found anything to pass an opinion or report on.

It rained today. I’ll need to pick peas tomorrow. I’m being overrun by zucchini and jalapeños and soon to be inundated with summer squash and cucumber. The potatoes are up to my waist and the tomatoes are so dense you can’t see daylight through the leaves. I still have two that need caging, but I only just got the cages Saturday and forgot to take them with me to the farm tonight. I was busy trying not to run over Max.

Just finished watching Becoming Jane. It was all right, but I liked the PBS version, Miss Austen Regrets, better. Of course, why wouldn’t I plug PBS? I admire Jane Austen. Maybe it’s just because she was a woman writer, earning a living by writing in an age when society frowned on women with an occupation. The Republic of Pemberly discusses Miss Austen and her works at length.

I’m stuck on a short story tonight. A story about Luke, nearly eight years in the making. At first, I always wrote books, planned for books more like. But when I read Strange Candy by LKH, I realized that sometimes a whole world can exist in a short story. So many book-length stories from years ago got condensed down to short stories, where they feel more comfortable. Luke, for instance, didn’t think he had enough to say for a book. And Chi is entirely too modest, a farm girl in a wizard’s tower after all.

Guess I wrote about farm life after all today.

"I prefer winter and fall,

when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show" (Andrew Wyeth)

This pic ain't mine. Found it at http://animals.timduru.org/dirlist/puma%20cougar/. (Can't tell I'm an English major by how I like to cite things, can ya? lol)

I’ve loved animals ever since I can remember. I guess that’s what I get for having lamb pen for a playpen. In the past few months I’ve aimed that passion at studying animal behavior as well as their totemic significance. Since horses and dogs/wolves have always been my main interests, I’ve studied them at length. But for the book I wanted more, especially in terms of wild animal behavior. For some reason cougars fell into my lap (relating to an experience with a puma while tracking a lost dog). Never having studied big cats, I found cougars especially fascinating.

Robert H. Busch’s The Cougar Almanac provided me with a great, quick overview of cougars, their appearance, behavior, and the state of their habitat. Cougars used to roam all through the US, but extensive trapping and hunting has radically reduced their ranges, causing their range often to overlap human habitations.

They are a long and lanky cat, coming in colors of tawny brown, rust, lemon, smoke, slate gray, with black being rare or nonexistent. They are two-tone, with a white throat and underside of their bodies. The tip of their tail is black. Their fur is short and course with loose hide. They have short, round ears; short, blunt snouts; and powerful jaw/bones. Their whiskers help the cats “see” in the dark, acting as an extra tactile sense to detect wind currents. They have amazing agility, can leap forty feet, and 285 degree vision, a sort of wide angle since humans have only 210 degree vision. More rods than cones in the cougar’s eyes give them excellent night vision. The senses of sight and hearing predominate over their senses of smell and taste, both of which are limited.

Cougars have this really neat extra sensory organ, called the Jacobsen’s organ. It’s a nasal organ that picks up airborne chemicals. They use it by opening the mouth, tipping their head back, wrinkling its nose and closing its eyes in what is called the flehmen gesture.

According to Ted Andrews, the cougar totem stands for coming into your own power and asserting oneself. It is recommended, if one has cougar medicine, to also study the deer, a cougar’s favorite prey. The deer stands for gentleness. Combined with the cougar, it means that power can be asserted gently. For instance, the cougar’s diet can consist of one-third porcupine meat. The cat has learned how to flip the porcupine, exposing its belly.

For more information on cougars and their totem, see http://www.starstuffs.com/animal_totems/dictionary_of_animals.htm, http://www.easterncougarnet.org/cougarfacts.html

A hungry nation is an unstable nation.

Or so my ol’ dad says.

I am the first one to admit I don’t understand agriculture. I mean, I can plant seeds and grow shit, but when it comes to the political and organization side of it all, I turn into the village idiot. Does it really take that much legislation to grow food and get it to the table?

I’ve been doing some research regarding sustainable agriculture, mainly small farming, because the trends are much like the small town stores, small is out and Wal-Mart is in. The small stores can’t compete with the big boys. But, what if, instead of taking it as “can’t run with the big dogs, don’t get off the porch?” we change it to “I don’t wanna run with them anyway. We’ll stay on the porch and like it better than any of their stupid games.”

A lesson in this came from an advertising course I took in college. The class divided into groups, selected a product to create an ad campaign for, and competed against another group with the same product. Our group promoted our product by saying it could take on this other larger product, sort of the David and Goliath mentality. That didn’t work real well. Sunglasses with a built-in MP3 just can’t replace the i-POD.

We tried.

The other group promoted the glasses as an accessory and my group went “Oh, that would work.”

When applying this to ag, I’m thinking that small farmers should only compete with the big boys if they want to. But what if we small farmers just don’t play? What if we go off and make a new game with our rules? What’s wrong with going back to basics, where the farm provides for the family, garden, dairy, meat, you know, the basics, and doesn’t try to compete with ag corporations? Yeah, someone in the household needs a town job. Yeah, it’s tight and not even close to living right. But that’s life on the farm, isn’t it?

These are just my thoughts and opinions. I don’t have an ag degree. I hobby farm because we’re not big enough (or serious enough) to make it just as farmers. Dad has a town job and I’m working on selling my writing. This is an ongoing quandary for me because ag in the 21st century is so markedly different from any other time in the history of mankind. Fewer farmers mean more corporate farms and, it seems, lower food quality, more pest/herbicides that anyone can see harms the very land we need to survive. I know I sound like an activist here, but these are important issues, not just to farmers, but to anyone who needs food to survive.

Because life is so different today in terms of technology and overpopulation, I believe that we need new, creative solutions to the age-old problem of food and fiber. Whether that means farm markets and local shopping or community gardens, I believe that only a grass roots movement can make this shift from the firm delineation between food producer and food consumer to a more integrated circle where people get back to knowing the people who grow their food.

Horse crazy

Dad and I went horseback riding in Hastings yesterday, well Yankee Springs to be precise. Hot, very humid, but perfect. We got away from the farm, spent some quality time together and with our horses, and even drank some beers (yeah, I know, big surprise). I didn’t get a lick of work done yesterday and it felt great. I may not get as much done as I want to, but Dad and I both always work at something, either at the house or at the farm. I have a saying: I don’t stop working, I pass out. Dad works the same way, only harder. Drop in the harness, that’s us. So days where we get away and do what we love and don’t work, that’s a great day, a perfect day, in spite of the deerflies. Sonny’s blood must be beer-flavored or something. :-)

Anyway, the rest of today’s entry is a book review. Gulliver’s Travels to be precise. It was an interesting read after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I love Swift’s satire. I actually get it for one thing. I’m not the sharpest pencil in the jelly jar when it comes to satire. Like I thought the New Yorker cover last week was Oprah instead of Michelle Obama. My bad. So reading Gulliver made me look back at one of Jonathon Swift’s essays that I read in college "A Modest Proposal." I love the persona Swift assumes in this essay and how he very logically walks the reader through why children should become the new dish so as to solve the population problem. Gulliver’s Travels almost hits this tone once in awhile, but has a more mid-level humor that carries all the way through the book. I didn’t quite like how the Houyhnhms, the horse people, were depicted. That’s why I write fantasy though, so I can get shapeshifters and talking animals just as I think they oughta be. But, any guy who would rather spend time with horses because humans are course is cool with me.

You can talk about anything if you go about it the right way, which is never malicious (Rodney Carrington).

Started this blog entry over cause it was so goddamn bad and self-indulgent. That’s my word of the day: self-indulgent. Story behind this one. I read Diablo Cody’s Writer’s Digest interview and she called some of her language in the screenplay Juno self-indulgent. Well, I wasn’t sure how she meant, so I rented the movie and watched it twice, once regular and once with commentary. I understand that statement a little better now. Great movie, but in terms of dialogue, I think I see what she’s complaining about. It made me look at my own work and try to figure out where the sharp, sassy, hard-core parts go soft. Do they need to, does that show humanity? Or is it self-indulgent, whiney prose? See? This is why I look to all genres and all types of writers for tips and inspiration. I never would have thought up self-indulgent on my own.

It’s been a beautiful, perfect summer day out. I’ve spent most of it at my desk, cleaning up the book and working on the chapbook. Anyone need a chapbook of poetry / flahsfic combo? Didn’t think so. So I’m getting ready to go check my garden and the state of the farm. Maybe visit with Gram and a couplea beers. I still have research and picky edity shit to do tonight. Not to mention dinner and laundry. Dad says I always have his back. Some days I wonder who’s got mine, especially with the evils of never-ending housework.

Diligence is the mother of good luck. (Benjamin Franklin)

Another quote I like, I can’t remember who said it, is that the muse cannot resist the working writer. You sit in front of the screen, or chew the end of a pencil, long enough and something has to come. Some days it just comes harder than others.

I love quotes, obviously, or I wouldn’t use them so liberally. I envy those who can spout them off like I can eat fun-size Snickers bars. We went to see Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, and Richard Ford speak on Thursday night out at MSU. Great, great time. It’s impossible to capture what those three authors do on stage together. So much experience, so much talent, and all so very literary. It’s a great gift to have such a passion and talent for crafting words. It’s comforting to think that, while I hardly aspire to be of that caliber, I am doing all the semi-right things for where I want to go with my life. One of the men said he writes because that was the only thing he was ever any good at. There are days I feel the same, since splitting open square bales or stacking them in the barn, or calving cows are hardly viable professions any more.

For those of you wondering, stacking hay is what Dad and I did this morning. 316 bales, give or take one or two. And splitting open wet bales was what we did on the 4th.

I’ve got a pile of 16 books beside my bed right now, all begging to be read, all research for Taylor and upcoming books. An odd mixture of animal behavior, shamanism, werewolves, and unicorns. All right, the unicorn book isn’t for Taylor. It’s for a short story I’ve been working on. I developed the idea years ago and only recently returned to it, knocking it down from high aspirations of becoming a novel to a novella at the most, a short story at best. I have a lot of those. There just isn’t enough there for the story to make it as a novel. But it makes a kick-ass short story. And I get a break from Taylor’s world and get to play around in one I’ve lived in, on and off, for the past twelve years. Okay, I’m into that writer’s ramble now. Better wrap this up.

No one is happy all his life long. (Euripides) or Aren't those ancient greeks depressing?

Five pages today, yey! I even got a really nice scene with Tay and her dad. Nerdy, excited girl that I am, I just had to share. This part of the book has gone so bad (over and over again) that getting anywhere makes me happier than getting the damn book done. (Well, maybe not that happy…)

Dad’s home today so we worked on the barn door some today, the one that got blown off in the storm last month. Dad repaired the door and got it off the ground. We got it leaning against the barn and jacked up on blocks, but getting the brackets together so the door can hang and slide has proven a (pardon me here) dirty rotten cock sucking mother fucker of a job. Yes, that bad. Hey, Dad was the one in the bucket of the tractor cussing it while I jacked. He’s got a right to say that with his fingers pinched between the barn door and the barn. (Taking bets on which one of the three gives first… Joke.)

So since I got my five pages with Taylor, I’m moving on to other projects. The practice screenplay, the short stories, the query letter for the book, and lots and lots of research. That never ends. And I keep needing little details for this last part of the book, by far the most metaphysical and the place I’m weakest in. I never realized how all this shit went together, but by god I’m learning now. See what five years of college gets you? An expensive lesson on how to look shit up.

Macabre and pensive? Who, me?

A good, productive day, but kind of a frustrating evening. Let’s just say neither my dad nor I excel at relationships of the romantic nature with the opposite sex. I’d really like to step in and fix everything for him but whaddya do with a schizo bitch? Go horseback riding. (I wish.)

Finally worked through my issues with then ending for Taylor, going backwards. Dude, and one of the reasons I chose to be a writer is because it’s so easy. Just like farming. (Anyone hear the tongue in cheek yet?)

I worked in my garden tonight and got two gallon size bags of lettuce and spinach. I thinned the carrots and stopped the summer squash from a hostile takeover. The peas smell really good and are blooming like crazy in all this humidity. The potatoes are slowing down on top. It seemed like for a week or so the greens grew by feet over night. I think they’re making baby potatoes. (Shh! Newlyweds!) Yeah, I need to get out more.

Gram and I ate dinner together tonight. Between the two of us, my youth and vigor and her age and wisdom, we could solve all the world’s problems. She’s cute. She called and wanted to make supper. But I went to work in the garden and brought in all the stuff for salad and seasoned her pasta sauce, cooked the pasta, burned the bread, put a salad together and she still made supper. Well, she did put the sauce together… Group effort, let’s just call it a group effort. Good food, good conversation. It’s one of the big regrets of my life that I didn’t stay and have more nights like that with my grandpa before he passed. It’s nights like this I miss him. And it’s not that often that I admit it. Well, I’m having a beer for you Grampa, wherever you are.

Ummm....

Holiday weekend and shit got away from me. Mostly, I stayed at home and grilled out with Dad and Bruce and wrote a lot. Started work on a screenplay (yeah, I know, everybody and their dog has one, it’s writing practice, okay?) and sketched out some short stories. I finished The Nick Adams Stories and Alice in Wonderland and started Gulliver’s Travels, among other assorted books for research on shamanism, magic, the astral world and all that. I figure if I don’t kill people I ought to at least have a decent magic system and my mythology facts oughta be right.

Got to ride horses on Sunday with Dad. One of our bonding things and it really makes the world make sense again.

I’ve been staring at the blank screen and reading a book on werewolves for the past fifteen minutes, listening to Alison Krauss. I really oughta just post this and get on with life.

"I'm happy for the failures that you're having right now, because it's these failures that will keep you strong forever."(Pardis Sabeti's inspiration)

My first blog from Gram’s kitchen table. We’ll how working from down here a few afternoons per week goes. Keep Gram company, make some meals, sell some fiction and poetry, what could be better? And in September I can calve my cows from here. Might as well move my desk and bed too huh? lol

I finished The Nick Adams Stories this morning. Really good book. Of course, it’s set in Michigan, what’s not to love?

I’m listening to the rock group Thousand Days right now. Their lead singer is a geneticist at Harvard! I saw her profile last night on PBS’s Nova Science Now and thought “what a role model for young women today?” Pardis Sabeti graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School too, something only three other women had done. Check her out here and here.

Not much else to report. I better get back to work. We’re marketing the book today and I’m nearing the finish line on final edits for it. Happy thoughts, just think happy thoughts.

Be happy. It's one way of being wise. (Colette)

Slow going today. Gram had a doctor’s appointment this morning and I took her to that, so I didn’t make it to my desk (or rather my bed) until nearly 2 p.m. We worked on magazine submissions today and my head is splitting. Still haven’t made pages. Will probably work on that after supper.

The countdown has begun for calving season. Last year (2007) we calved in January and, of course, several cows dropped during a cold snap where it got down to single digits and stayed there for a week. It got up to twenty degrees and we had our coats off, almost sweating in the heat wave. (I am seriously not kidding about that one either.) We lost a set of twin bull calves, one single, and a heifer died from a weird clostridia thing. So no, spring calving was not for us. We didn’t like the cold Jan-Apr, or the mud Apr-May, or the summer May-August, so we went for fall, Sept-Nov 15 (due to deer season opening). The calves should have some grow on them before snow that way. We’ll see how this thing goes.

Haven’t done a book update lately. I’m reading about seven at last count, for pleasure, research, and some devotion to a classical education. So none of them are finishing that fast. Alice in Wonderland is actually quite good. The Disney version freaked me out as a kid (I’ve never been very brave) so I was a little apprehensive about it. But the book is fun, right along the lines of Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh (always a classic; love Eeyore and Piglet). It’s a nice relief from Nick Adams, Strange Candy, and Astral Projection for Beginners. (Yeah, Taylor didn’t know she’d need that when we started out either.) So lots a new age and shamanic research for some of my characters and poems to try and inspire me to actually write some. Maybe one of these days I’ll get to read a novel again. (Can anyone say the queen of wishful thinking?)

Never argue with your characters; they know themselves better than you do. (Laurell K. Hamilton)

I just spent some time working out on the porch. The yard reeks of dog shit right now, since our eighteen year old lab/rott can’t make it far from the house to crap. I’m not ranting, I just wish the old man could take it elsewhere. But, contrary to the people who keep hassling us to put him down, Max isn’t ready to go yet. He’s still happy, if somewhat arthritic, and not in pain. He’s just happy to live minute to minute and in hope of pizza.

I’m procrastinating on the book today. We made great progress yesterday, until we got to a certain point and said “wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute! This ain’t workin’.” So I’m doing yet another rewrite (third ending so far) for the climax. The second showdown, let alone the first, just didn’t work for the characters, the plot, the pacing, or anything. I still want a big showdown, and so does Taylor, but we’re changing it (again). Besides, Bryen really got tired of being the bad guy. I’m trying so hard to plot and choreograph this escape/fight scene that I think I’m blocking myself. I keep moving around the house, my room/office, the porch, the kitchen right now, even the local bookstore for awhile today. How sad is that? I don’t usually write action, like who hit who and now who’s bleeding kind of action. So it’s a delicate thing for me to imagine and get right. So far part of the scene’s working. I keep pecking at it, then going on to something else. Not a very effective method. Maybe I need to get angry. It’s easier to beat the shit outa bad guys in paper when I’m pissed off. Should have done that last week when I had stupid boys to contend with. :-)

In the time in took me to put this post together, I finally got my four pages!!!! :-) It took me ALL DAY but I got them and this ending works SO much better! Oh this is such a relief. I better leave off here before I start gushing too much. But goddamn this makes me happy.