Brand Whores.

Farmers are.Tractors are John Deere. That includes lawn tractors. Drills are Milwaukee. Chain saws and brushcutters and their accessories are Stihl. Wrenches are Craftsman. Tires are Goodyear. Mowers are Hesson. Mayonnaise is Hellmans. Manure spreaders are New Idea. Cars are Honda. So are three-wheelers. This is a small sampling off the top of my head of the inviolable brands of my father. Farmer-beliefs in certain brands can be well-founded and based on years of experience fighting inferior products and faulty engineering. And they can be just as mythical as thinking the Heineken tastes measurable degrees better than all other beers. I can't tell the difference yet, so I'll probably walk away from here with the same exact list of exalted brands stuck in my head.
His one failure to stick the farmer creed of choosing a brand to defend is the most obvious category of farmer argument: trucks. He simply doesn't care. They all eat too much gas and fall apart. Right now it's an old 4x4 Dodge, but not in the same way that all the neighbor's friends all drive Dodges. If Honda had built trucks in America 10 years ago, it would be no question. But no American manufacturers have yet figured out how to make long-term reliability standard.

Recently I've been putting effort forth to see if I concur with the decision to buy Stihl to cut things up. Chainsaw chains are a pain in the ass to sharpen well. So I'll put that one off till later. My dad warned me that cutting brush for more than an hour would hurt. A lot.
He was right, but only because when his shoulder straps broke in four different places, he tied two breaks together with wire and kept using the damn thing. When you trample though brush for an hour with a dead albatross hanging from your neck, you get old prematurely.
So I postponed the brushcutting too. Till today. Bought a new shoulder strap. And it works like it's supposed to.
Conclusion: Stihl is worth the extra monies when you have acres of nasty things that need to be shortened (multiflora rose, too tall children, vegetables, small trees). I have those acres.
What is 'Brush'? I suppose in the 1800s it referred to all the small growth ferns and bushes and weeds that would grow up along the hard to mow fencelines and edge of woods. Now it's just one plant, multiflora rose. If you didn't cringe when you read that, you haven't met one. It's exactly what it's Latin suggests, a member of the rose family with multiple flowers. But it's flowers are ugly. And they last for about a week. And the stemmy thorny practically tree-like stem is left for the rest of the year to stab anyone foolish enough to walk near it. It's not native to America. Some schmuck from Asia brought it over as a rose. Some knuckleheaded gov't agent told the farmers that it would make a great natural fence. So they planted it. And birds ate and pooped the seeds all over the Midwest.

I seem to have drifted off topic.
In conclusion [<---funny], farmers are brand whores. Which can at times make my life easier. Thanks advertising!

Wait, no, that's not right, I mean thanks better products!

Bury 'em where they fall.

This is the cemetary, burial ground, plot, graveyard, whatever, which sits on top of the hill in the field just behind my Aunt's house. The churned up mud surrounding it is a result of a too warm January and 60 fat, preggo cows. We mix our cows and our dead.
My directly-descended-from family didn't clear the land and start farming it. Between Indians and us was at least one family. There are five adults buried in our little graveyard. One in each corner and one in the center. The large stones at the corners of the wall have children under them. Inside, there are only two headstones left standing:
This one belongs to a Durbin. A Samuel Durbin, aged 30, killed in 1821. Yes, killed, not died. These markers are for the settlers killed by Indians.
There are still Durbins around the area. One lives six houses south of mine. When Brad was home he talked to a woman who has done geneological research back further than we, and she found that we are vaugely related to those buried here. She cared because she is also vaugely related to us.

Run Rampant.

Mid-Ohio has a coyote infestation. When I was growing up there were almost none left around, they had been heavily hunted by local concerned farmers. I saw only one as a kid. I stumbled over it and we both shit ourselves.
But this time around, we've got coyote crawling out the ass. There is a pack that lives in the woods behind my uncle's place, where the calves will be born in couple months. There is a pack that lives in the woods behind my house. Jesse says he went out to light the boiler the other night and ran into a pack of coyote 20+ strong. That is far too many in one place. Locals have been finding deer carcasses stripped to the bone overnight. When the moon is full their howling creeps Darwin out. And rightly so.
Hungry coyote in packs that large can easily take down a newborn calf. Which is why we allowed a coyote hunting club come track over our fields last weekend. It was neat to watch. About twenty-five armed men in a giant contracting circle of blaze orange, making silly coyote noises and firing their guns. I haven't heard yet how many they got. But it wasn't enough.

Rusty was mad that I didn't let him know it was happening. And he just sold his AR last week. So he was going up to Medina on Sunday to a gun show. Disposable income and all that. He invited me along. And as I need to buy a gun, what for coyote and groundhog, I went with. We meet 5 other locals at a restaurant at 8am. Had some coffee. Made fun of people who don't like Bush. And set out. On the trip up we traded gun stories. We pulled into the parking lot of a county fairgrounds, packed to the brim with Murrican-made Trucks. It was quite large, maybe two acres of folding tables covered with ancient revolvers, 50-cal machine guns, ammo, shotguns, clothes, uzis, rifles, holsters, knives, clips, handguns, and a single booth dedicated to the local libertarian party. There were probably 10 women in the entire place, the rest of the space was filled with testosterone-fueled, hard-on hiding gun nuts. I went to start my gun education, to have the difference between brands and styles explained to me. But Rusty was too excited to fill me in. And I was too busy staring at them the same way they usually stare at me.

It was interesting. Takes all kinds.
Rusty bought a 9. We went home and blew through $30+ of ammo.
Just what the world needs, another gun-toting farmer.

Destruction of property.

Yesterday was the day I needed to "dart in and out of the field."
Didn't quite go that way. The ground didn't set up quite like I had hoped. So I got my first major stuck under my belt. All day yesterday was devoted to trying to get my loaded hay trailer (trailer: 2 wheels, easy to back - wagon: 4 wheels, front wheels turn, a bitch to back) out of the mud sink I had sunk it in. (editor's note: it's not really mud. it's the fly-by-night bastard child of silage leakage, cow excrement, mud and January rainstorms) Kent brought up little johnny when big johnny wouldn't turn over. It took us about an hour and a half to break the three point hitch on little johnny. We needed more horsies. So I did some other chores waiting for my uncle to come home to show me how to drive his big tractor. (It's German and I didn't understand the icons that were supposed to be universal. When he explained it real quick this morning the letter K stood for Blitzkrieg, or drive like hell. No wonder I didn't get it.)
By 5:30 pm we managed to unstick my tractor, which had been sitting uselessly on the front of the trailer. Kent decided to drive the Deutz without instructions. By 7 pm we had broken two log chains and the trailer in two places. But it was still stuck. Our only success was removing the bales from the trailer. It was time for ribs. MMM ribs.This morning my uncle and I started out early. (As you can see by this picture, I got stuck approx. 1 foot into the pasture.) When his tractor (big), pulling my tractor (4wheeldr), pulling on the trailer with an exceedingly large chain wouldn't budge it we broke out the construction-grade backhoe. Picked up the back of the trailer with the front loader on the backhoe. Found that the floor of the trailer had broken off the back and created a sort of mouth which had picked up about 600 pounds of mud and sunk the end 2 feet into the ground. So we spent an hour shoveling mud out of the hay wagon. But 15 minutes after that, it was free:Of course, picking up a hay trailer with a massive machine bends hay trailers. Now I must completely take this welded together, packed with flamable hay, monster apart to put it back together.
And then later today my good tractor decided to not run anymore.
And then the weak calf decides to fall down and refuse to get up.

And then I ate some steak.

The Sunset Tree.

This will be my most blog-like entry yet!
These are my dead and dying willow trees. Aren't they just fabulous? A willow tree is real neat to see in the summer when it's alive but they need far more water than most trees to live. So you can't have them near any human residence because they attack. Which is why they are dying all lonely like back in the fields.
Yesterady it was 55 and rain. Today it's 20 and blowing snow. Snow that somehow stuck to warm warm earth. Tomorrow it's again going to be 50+. I can't feed my cows when it's been too warm out for too long, as the entrance to the field turns into a sunken mupit. Even my 4-wheel drive JD gets stuck. So tomorrow morning I must dart in and out while the mud's half froze and hope I can get enough hay too them that it will last the next January week of rain and April-like temperatures.
I buried Dingo two days ago. My mom and I drove to Columbus to pick my brother up from the airport. As we passed the house my mom commented that Dingo was running in funny circles out in the field. Kent and I stayed in Columbus that night to celebrate Rusty's BD. My mom was left to feed the calves in my absence. When she came to the house to feed them she saw Dingo still running in the same crazy circles. We assume it was a stroke. And half-Dingo is no good to anyone. This time, putting her down was effective. She was the best farm dog anyone could ask for.
Darwin was thirsty after chasing me on the 3-wheeler this morning and I was tired of watching him eat snow to quentch his thirst. We have the silly notion that outdoor animals on a farm with multiple creeks and at least 2 springs don't need to be fed water. They can find it on their own. But Darwin has an aversion to walking back in the pastures. So I had him follow me down to the creek, and for the first time, he wanted to keep going. We wandered back to the woods. It looked awesome. Like Narnia under the Winter Queen. I didn't bring my camera so you'll just have to imagine it.
Metafilter is a meta-blog. I used to read it all the time. Now I only wander over there occasionally. Today I saw a link on the page to a AskMefi question: What skill should I learn next? The answers are interesting. Reminded me why I used to read it.
I was a politcial-internet junky in the months before I left Mpls. Most of it was stuff that fed my views. The best overall blanced web-coverage is run by the National Journal. Here it be.
And here's some public art that is delicious.
I need to learn how to train Darwin, wuss that he is. I was recommended this book. Has anyone had experience training a dog?
The Greens are right. The world is ending. We're killing everything. I care, truly I do, but I find it so hard to find a real way to participate in saving everything. There are scant beginnings, with the Prius, biofuels *shudder*, wind and sun powered dinky stuff. People are seriously contemplating starting more (lots more) nuclear power stations. But shit, China. In a few more years we Americans will be only half responsible. Can we humans really kill Gaia?
The Detroit Cobras play little brothers on Saturday. I won't miss them this time.
My mom's new very annoying cat pumpkin is yowling in my ear.

Death of an Immortal.

The dog which could not be killed has gone to the big backyard in the sky.
We'll miss you Dingo.

Definitions by Rusty.

Rusty disagrees with these definitions, and claims that this is the actual definiton of a dingleberry.

That poop don't flush.

Fertilizer provides crops with the extra nutrients they need that they can’t get, year after year, from the soil. On bigger, corporater farms that means money for chemical sludge created by another corporations laboratory. On our wimpy little organic farm that means shit.

The calves all eat in the same small barnyard. They poop everywhere and at all times. On other cows, on their own tails, right where they lie down, in their water, everywhere.
The calves eat pasture in the summer and are kept out of the barn. The poop that ends up in the barnyard is mine to spread around. I got out my small tractor and scraped up a big pile of poo. Then I got my big tractor and hooked it to the manure spreader.
I filled the manure spreader with shit, using the bucket loader on the little tractor.Then I drove my load of shit to my future corn-field and painted it brown.

A moderately full of shit barnyard, as it was, took about 6+ hours and 8-10 loads of manure.
FlingFlangFlung. How was your day?

Anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphism. Is the making of things not human human.

So yesterday I was taking hay from the hay barn to feed the cows. Under the hay barn thrives a healthy colony of groundhogs, swornest enemy of the Ohio farmer. (I dunno, I guess they eat the crops and dig pesky holes, the dastards.) Quite unsurprisingly, the bale I lifted did reveal the lair of a young woodchuck. He was trying to sleep. He noticed it suddenly got a lot colder and a bit brighter, but he was fully intent on staying asleep.
I leapt from the tractor to find my meekest of dogs. Darwin needs to learn to kill rodents. Here was the perfect opportunity, a young, practically sedated groundhog just praying to be mauled. I found Darwin on the porch of the house.
*A note about Darwin. He likes only three places in the world: my front porch, the backseat of my car, and my aunt's garage. He will run at a dead sprint to these places. He will follow anyone about 100 feet away from any of these places and will then freeze up, sit down, and refuse to go any further unless you promise to rub his tummy.
I thought that if I was excited enough for him he would come with me and learn to love killing the things I don't like. But no. Darwin wouldn't leave his precious porch. Nor will he chase a frisbee. Or a ball. He's very undoglike and much more resembles a doormat. Anyway he didn't get to kill his first beastie. I had to take a pipe and do the honors myself.
And for that I was mad at Darwin. Which he rightly completely didn't understand. But that didn't stop him from being all sorts of extra meek today. Which led me down a path I had pondered before:

Do dogs have emotions? Do they have emotions that could be reasonably compared with human emotions? Do we understand human emotions? Do people of other languages have a different understanding of what the possible emotions are? Are there possibly only a very small number of human emotions, (like maybe, say, three?) and we take too much time parsing emotional minutiae when they're just shades of these three emotions?

Back to the first question and the title of the post. It seems like this could be important for moral vegetarians. Do animals have emotions that we can understand? Are horse whisperers gobblygook? Should we have not killed all the Natives of the lands so they could show us?

suddenly i'm empty

Aught Six

I've changed since I've been home. Some like it, some hate it. But there are very few people I aim to please. Three years may make me into someone you don't know.

We traded the chapange of new years with distilled wormwood. But no one caught the faerie.