Check out my new piece at Ethicurean.com. Pets vs. Livestock: Cracking Open the Myths about Backyard Chickens. “Last spring I decided that this was the year I was going to finally get some chickens. On a snowy Saturday in March I brought home six tiny cheepers that I bought at my local ranch store in Livingston, Montana. Two of them died right off, which didn’t entirely surprise me: those fluffballs didn’t look like they’d really committed to life on the planet. … “ Keep reading by clicking here.
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So the NY Times had a good little piece this weekend by Michelle Slatalla about digging out her grandmothers’ old recipes — they’d each lived through the depression, and were good cooks, and managed to keep everyone alive on beef barley soup for decades. She even punts a little bit at the end as she discovers that short ribs have gotten expensive, so she experiments with shin, because her grandmother was nothing if not thrifty. I had to laugh a little — not at the article per se — but at the mere thought of learning anything about cooking from…
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It’s supposed to go down into the single digits tonight, so this afternoon, despite the fact that it was only 25 degrees out, and snowy, I got the storm windows out of the shed, and put them up. Every year I forget what a colossal pain in the ass they are. I replaced all the old windows in my house except for those in the living room. They’re really old double-hung windows, so old that the glass is wavy, and I just fell in love with them. So I kept the clunky old wooden storm windows that go with them,…
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So I was driving down to the cabin last night when I realized that all those grey things in the field next to the East River Road weren’t deer, they were Sandhill Cranes! There were scores of them — I’m notoriously bad at that sort of estimation, but there were well over a hundred birds in a harvested wheat field, grazing. I’d heard that they do this, but I’d never seen it, so of course I came to a screeching halt to watch for a few minutes. Apparently they gang up before migrating, they’ll fly around, calling to the other…
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Well that was lovely — Monday was my official “last day” at Cisco (the severance was odd — 2 months as an employee but not working, then a big parting gift payment that is coming in the mail). Anyhow, so there it was, my official last day and I got pinged on Facebook in the morning — two of my favorite Cisco people were visiting Yellowstone, and wanted to know if I’d have dinner with them. So I drove down to Gardiner and had dinner with Joy, who was my manager for about six weeks my first year, and Patty…
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Tennis was my bête noire as a child. I took lessons, dressed in my proper white tennis skirt and tretorns, from the time I was about four until I was fourteen. And in all those years I could never hit the damn ball. It was a trial. My mother desperately wanted me to be one of those girls, tennis playing girls, nice suburban girls who get along with others and wear their hair in shiny ponytails and go out to play tennis on Saturday mornings. And I couldn’t hit the ball. I bent my knees. I kept my eye on…
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Walking around town this morning with Raymond, I noticed we’re in full sunflower season — every alley and garden and roadside is suddenly illuminated with sunny yellow flowers. The cosmos also did really well this summer — lots and lots of big banks of pink and white cosmos around town. I love this time of year — it’s so brief, and in fact, we’re supposed to get frost on Monday night — time to go buy more plastic sheeting. But for a short window every summer we get this period of flowering — the last gasp even as the first…
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I’ve written before about Owen’s robo-leg, but it’s worked so well that I had to send it back to the good folks at K-9 Orthotics in Nova Scotia last week for a tune up. It was really sad — the vet and I had to put him in a brace, like the ones he spent much of last summer in, except that because we didn’t have the fiberglass “cast” as a base, we wound up using a generic hard plastic brace for support. Since he really doesn’t have a functioning achilles tendon in that leg, it needs support, in large…
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Here it is — our whole pig, butchered, cut, wrapped, with the hams and bacons smoked. Chuck drove over to pick it up and he said it was a very festive atmosphere over there — a big refrigerated truck filled with orders. We paid $290 for this pig, which means we’re looking at $1.75 a pound for a local 4-H fair pig. We were late to go look at the animals with the kids, so what we saw was pigs and lambs being loaded onto trucks. It’s a rural ranching community here — that’s what happens after the fair, you…
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It’s been interesting, this “self-employment” thing. I must admit, I’ve taken a very big break — amazing how many things one can get behind on after working a real day job for ten years. I realize that most people work “real day jobs” for their entire career, so I’m not trying to be disengenuous, but before the Big Corporate Job That Vanished, I was a grad student and a ski bum and a raft guide and worked a lot of odd jobs and retail. I’ve worked since I was fourteen, and for most of that time I had more than…