Thoughts from the Middle of Nowhere

I can't believe it's the last day of February all ready. I realized it yesterday as I was looking at the main bunch of cows. They are really getting heavy and are going to start calving any day now. They're bred to start on the 10th of March but early ones could start any day now.

I think they are just waiting for cold weather, which by the forecast isn't going to happen, before they decide to start having them. Waiting for cold weather? Hell I'm waiting for any kind of weather other than this day after day of nice weather. It isn't Montana with all this nice weather. Something has gotta give eventually.

The weather has been so nice that I've heard some people are out farming. I had to move some dirt Saturday and below 2 inches the frost was still in the ground so hard I couldn't get the blade to bite. It's nice enough I want to get out and do some farming or anything but it will be a while yet before the frost is out to do anything. It's driving me nuts!

Well I don't have to wait to see if the graft of the bum took. Momma just loves her new baby and follows it around like a puppy dog. I will leave them separate for a little longer so the baby knows for sure that the cow following him around is momma.

It's alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, or the cold at night. A thousand ways the desert can kill. Harry Essex

Hope you feel safe now that the Government says Canadian beef is okie dokie. I don't, but I am just a stupid cowboy who doesn't know anything about the cattle industry. I'm so dumb I shouldn't be allowed to speak.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety. Edmund Burke

Had our first casualty this morning calving heifers. I had to pull a calf about 1:00 a.m. and it was dead when it come out. I have no idea why the calf was dead. Looked like a full term fetus. I noticed the front legs were a little odd while I pulled it but nothing big wrong, just a little odd.

Now comes the question, do I graft the twin I bummed on to her? Did she lose this calf because of an inherent genetic problem she has or was it just a fluke? Will I get a live calf in another year from her? Does she even want a calf? I know she doesn't act like she really wants a calf. I dreamed about the situation the few hours of sleep I managed to get. I didn't come up with an answer in my sleep and I'm not sure now but we will see in the fullness of time how it turns out. I'll make the decision when I see here shortly.

We ask for no statistics of the killed,
For nothing political impinges on
This single casualty, or all those gone

Karl Shapiro

We in this area have been in a persistent drought for many years now and the outlook for breaking it is grim. Now California has been having the opposite problem lately with storm after storm flooding them out.

I run across a story about the plight of the dairy cow in the recent rains in California and it could just make me cry. I don't know how many of you have seen the California cheese commercials that feature dairy cows grazing in lush green pastures and saying how happy they are but I've always had a problem with these commercials since dairy cows are run in a feedlot setting in todays high output environment and not out on grass like the commercials dictate. This story tells you what its like in such a feedlot environment when the rains come endlessly like in California like they have recently.

Cows produce less milk when they have to expend so much energy slogging through water. Also, cows resist lying down in standing water and will stand for days in the soggy muck until they collapse - and sometimes die - from exhaustion.

I am not saying I know how to fix the situation but it just makes me cringe seeing the cows standing in such muck and mud struggling in it. I just want to save them somehow.

There is a whole picture galley of items dealing with the recent storms in California and the first 6 are of dairy cows fighting the mud. Not a pretty sight if you ask me and not very good advertising for the California dairy industry.

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old

Leigh Hunt

It seems like your friends and mine, the big meat packers, want to expose us to even more potentially BSE infected cattle from Canada than the USDA does. I keep telling you the meat packers don't give a rats ass about safety of the consumer and the quality of product it sells and this just shows it.

So now there is competing law suits. One in Billings, MT wanting to keep the border shut to all cattle and one in Washington D.C. that wants the border thrown wide open to all cattle regardless of age or condition with no controls allowed at all. Interesting choice of venues for these lawsuits if you ask me.

You might be wondering why the meat packers want the Canadian cattle so bad. Well, let me let you in on a dirty little secret about the meat packing industry.... Continue reading "Danger" »

Made smaller at request of many readers. Click on picture for full size enjoyment.

I noticed recently that I am getting very few comments on this blog anymore. I was persuing my site statistics trying to figure it out and have discovered that I am getting 90% fewer hits after my Valentines Day post. Boy, some people have real tender feelings about Valentines Day and definitly don't get who I am. Write a post making fun of a holiday, try to inject some humor in it, then send a Valentine message to my wife at the end of the post (which was the whole purpose of the post) and all most everybody quits reading you. I didn't realize Valentines Day was such a sensitive subject.

Well, It answers my question as to what happened to people commenting, so if you are one of the 2-3 people that are still reading this thanks for sticking with me.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I read the story about the sailor performing surgery with great interest. Most stories about Submarines catch my eye since I proudly served in the Silent Service and enjoy keeping up on it. This story hit a little closer to home though.

While the guy that did the surgery deserves his accolades I want you to think about the guy laying on the table. Some guy that isn't a doctor standing over him getting ready to cut into him. Believe me that is scary.

One time when my Sub was out doing "oceanographic research" I got a strange infection in my leg. The corpsman on board thought it was pretty serious and wanted to evacuate me to a shore station for real doctors to deal with. The higher ups in D.C. decided that our "oceanographic research" was to important to do this and informed the corpsman he was to take care of it.

So there I lay on a galley table with this guy that isn't a doctor going to cut into my leg to clear this infection out. I will tell you it is scary. No anesthetic and this lowly corpsman carving into you.

It all turned out well but it hurt like a son of a bitch. I got to take a couple days off duty while at sea. Really a strange thing since you never get time off at sea.

The story in the paper reminded me of all of this and how it feels to be a guniea pig to a corpsman. Not Fun.

Do your duty, and let the gods do the rest. Pierre Corneille

Savetoby. I found this via J-Walk Blog and find the whole thing absolutely disgusting. Extorting money from people to save an animal he willingly adopted. What a complete lack of morals and virtues this asshole has. It is one thing to care for an animal that is destined to be food but to care for an animal and then threaten to eat it if people don't pay him money is such a complete lack of morals that I can't imagine what rock he crawled out from under.

Anybody that pays him is just as bad. You never cave into such terrorists tactics or more assholes will come down the road trying to do the same thing. He has all ready raised over $15,000. How disgusting.

What should I threaten to kill and eat Fred or Irv in hopes you will pay me not to? I would never do such a thing but some other low life will just to make a quick buck from softies that pay him.

NEVER PAY OFF TERRORIST. IT'S A TACTIC THAT WILL BACKFIRE ON YOU AND CAUSE MORE TERRORISM.

They prey on their own with extortion and protection rackets, in a culture where people don't go to the police. Ronald Goldstock

Well I finally had to bite the bullet today. I had been avoiding like the plague bumming one of the twin calves since it is a pain and the calf never does as well, but as you can see by the picture the one calf is not doing real well any way so it was time to do the dirty deed. There was a bull calf and a heifer calf so I pulled the heifer calf since the bull will be worth more and the heifer will be a freemartin. So I will have to see if Fred (I call all bums Fred until somebody comes up with a better name) will take a bottle now. I will have to wait till she is good and hungry but I think she will. I will hold mom at home for a while to ensure the calf goes to a bottle.

Now I realize the Legislature is working hard on such bills as designating a state insect but maybe they should concentrate on more important issues.

Terminate the gerrymander

Now this really looks like a plan that Montana needs to look at. Get the power of redistricting out of politicians hands and into some non-partisan body. I realize this would be hard to do but it would be well worth it. The politicians will never give up their advantage and do this is the only problem. Maybe a initiative drive would be the answer, something to think about.

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. Harold Rosenberg

This one is from the too weird to be true file.

Thieves Steal Built-In Swimming Pool

A Norwegian family returned to their mountain cabin for the first time since November and found their swimming pool installed 20 years ago was gone.

"It must have been a terrible job to disassemble such a big pool. There is a steel lining all the way around, plus there is a plastic liner and then there was a skimming system, a filter system and a lot of big hoses, and pipes," said Brit Nicolaysen, who owns the cabin with her husband.

"They must have had a whole lot of time," she said.

Brit said no one, not even the police, believed them at first.

Police said they had never heard anything like it. They suspected the pool was taken for someone's private use, since there's not a market for 20-year stolen, in-ground pools.

I kind of doubt there is a market for used 20 year old built in pools. It makes you wonder who did it and why. Aliens or was it a prank?

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final.

In Memory of:
Hunter S. Thompson

Gotta protect them lawyers from untrained competition. It takes a government mandate to protect them from unskilled, untrained competitors? I'm sure they really don't have anything to worry about from them. Anyone who would want to use a non-lawyer for legal advice deserves what they get.

A good deal of tyranny goes by the name of protection. Crystal Eastman

Just like the infamous Valentines Day, today is another made up holiday that I have no use for. This one was not made by the greeting card companies though, it was made up by the Government to give their employees a paid day off. I don't see that they need it but on the up side they aren't working so they aren't bothering me so I guess it might be worth it.

What I always love is when you give a Government employee a bad time about their made up holidays which gives them days off they say, "I work hard and DESERVE the day off." Yes they actually say deserve like I emphasized it while looking down their nose at you like you are some inferior being. This leads to a question. For those of us who work on these days off are they impling that;

a. we don't work hard or,
b. we don't "DESERVE" the day off since we are too far beneath them to understand such a comment?

I wish somebody could explain it to me once I am back in from working today. I would really like to know why I don't deserve a day off.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. George Bernard Shaw

About every Legislative session here in Montana we hear the call for an earlier Presidential Primary to garner attention from Presidential candidates instead of being a fly-over state. I'm just curious , why would we want to do this? They don't listen to us anyway.

Take for example our current Commander in Chief President Bush, please take him somewhere. After winning an election, that mostly rural states like Montana won for him, what does he do? Slashes many budget items that affect mostly rural states like ours. This really shows how much the candidates really care about rural concerns, they don't.

My other question is who is going to foot the costs of having an earlier Presidential Primary? We are still going to have a regular primary for the rest of the offices in June like always so instead of paying for one primary election in a season we will have to pay for two. Where does this money come from? From the Presidential candidates or our own taxpayer pockets? Sounds like money down a rathole for no apparent reason.

Then I see they are proposing we can vote by mail for this proposed Presidential Primary. I hate to tell them we all ready can. It's called an Absentee Ballot. DUHHH! What did they just conveniently forget about such a critter or are they just trying to make this boondoggle sound better? Nothing can make this proposal sound better in my book, it's just an expensive waste of time that needs thrown out in the trash.

Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness. Sophocles