Saginaw valley

I had to drive through the beautiful Saginaw valley here in Michigan last week as I drove my husband to the VA hospital in Saginaw for his regular check up. I love seeing all the German –Dutch farms along the way, brick or white clapboard farm homes, big red barns with green roofs, often with hex signs or the farmers name on them, and always neat and tidy. Along this route you seldom see the type of farms with collapsing barns and hundreds of pieces of rusting machinery in the yard.

Sugar beets are being harvested now and we passed a piling station with huge flat topped mountains of beets. It’s strange to think that sweet white sugar comes from those huge brown ugly lumps. Sugar smells awful when it’s being refined too, sort of a burning sugar smell crossed with cooking cabbage smell. We have a refinery near us in Caro and this time of year the smell hangs over the town.

The farms in the Saginaw valley produce a variety of things from sugar beets to corn. Corn harvest is just starting around here. Winter wheat has already been planted and is coming up.

We had some light snow last night and some of it actually stuck long enough for me to see it as I went out to do chores in the barn. I need to get out and finish cleaning up my garden, composting the corn stalks and picking that last pumpkin. Its sunny today and the next few days aren’t supposed to be too bad but I think winter is closing in.

I had to rescue a hen this morning. We have one who won’t stay in the pen with the rest of the hens, she’s always out with the turkeys. This morning she had managed to get into a fenced off area where we keep junk- rolls of old fence, metal panels, timbers etc. This area is sort of a buffer area between the dog yard and the pasture in back of the barn. There is a metal panel 4 foot high along the bottom at the pasture side with 3 foot of wire at the top of that. The panel keeps the dogs from spending all day barking at the horses or chickens when they are let out.

Somehow this bird had managed to get over seven feet of fence into that space. The dogs could see her and they were going nuts. She tried to fly back over when she saw me but couldn’t make it. I had to go around through 3 gates to get her, carefully working my way through old junk once inside. Not a good way to start the morning. Once she was safe I returned to the barn to see I had left the door open to the hay storage area and Lily and Charley were in there happily munching away- they had found the mother load.

I am trying to teach Charley to lead. He does not like being told what to do at all. He’s little enough I can handle him but he can be a real stinker. We went for a short walk through the pasture today but all he wanted to do was rear and buck. The wind makes him frisky and it makes me cold and willing to quit early.

Tina, our youngest Jack Russell terrier also had an adventure. We bought her a new collar, hot pink, because her old collar had gotten too small and she had been running around for weeks without one. First time we put it on she ran outside and came back inside with it in her mouth to play with- too loose. So Steve added another hole.

Yesterday while I was at work he noticed Tina wasn’t with the other dogs. It was sleeting outside and everyone else was inside. He started to go take a nap then decided he’d better check outside. There was Tina, hanging from the fence. She is a fence climber and her new collar had snagged on a bit of protruding wire, leaving her dangling- her hind feet were just able to touch ground. If she had struggled much and twisted the collar it may have been all over for her. Steve rescued her, a little cold and wet but not harmed otherwise. Needless to say the collar is off again. Thank goodness Steve had a bit of intuition there- he’s not usually the one to act on a hunch.

And so go the adventures of the farm.

Fine weather and horses

It’s a lovely day here in Michigan for Columbus Day. The trees are getting more colorful by the minute. It has been sunny and mild although that is supposed to end today. We still haven’t had a killer frost, if this is global warming I am pleased with it. I picked two tomatoes yesterday, the roses are blooming like crazy and the zinnias and marigolds are still going strong, as well as the hibiscus in front and the buddleia. The moonvine and the impatiens browned a little and quit blooming from the light frost but damage to the rest of things has been slight.

I have had some horsie fun. Last weekend little Charlie colicked. I came in the barn at supper time and found him rolling violently on the stall floor. I called the vet out and tried to keep him upright until he came. He was little enough I could sit on a chair and hold him across my lap but the struggling killed my back. The vet managed to get a pain shot in him and then tried to get some mineral oil down him but didn’t have a tube small enough so we held him and gave him syringes full of mineral oil. All night I checked on him every two hours. He was just standing in a corner with his belly contracting up and down and I was sure he would either need surgery or die. But when I went out after breakfast I could see his tail end was oily and he was feeling better. He must have passed his blockage.

I wormed him and Lily two days later and so far everything has seemed to be fine. Vet thought it might be worms, he said it’s common in foals to colic from worms. Horses have such delicate digestive systems.

My granddaughters came up the next day and Desiree, the youngest, loved brushing Lily and helping me work the burrs out of her mane. Lily is very good with kids. Desiree also got a thrill out of going in the hen house to collect eggs. We took them inside and washed them and then she got to arrange them in a carton to take home. Brianna went for a walk with her dad instead. I asked them to get me some red sumach off the far pasture fence because I wanted to do some art with it and my legs were bothering me too much to go get it myself.

All the horse fun and visitors must have lowered my immune system because on Tuesday I came down with a killer cold, the first I have had in a while. I was feeling very poorly through some of this gorgeous weather so I am glad I was feeling better the last couple days.

Lily had really eaten down all the grass in the small pen so we opened up the east pasture which curves around the pond to her and she is in horse heaven. It’s a nice pasture lined with trees on both sides but there is a bad spot in the fence up by the orchard that I worry about. Lily has the habit of going under instead of over fences and there is loose field fence along there. I fixed part of it today and hopefully she has enough to eat that she won’t be tempted to go anywhere. Last night she came in the barn to get her grain and then she and Charlie just went to sleep in the corner of the stall. It’s the first time I think I have seen her just rest. She is usually looking for something to eat. Since she has been out all day we haven’t fed her much hay but I worry she is getting fat off the grass. I don’t know how people keep these mini horses from getting fat.
I have been letting the chickens out to roam the pasture nearly every afternoon too. The turkeys are getting out all the time again and they have taken to roosting up on the top of the barn or house at night. I worry about them coming down inside the dog pen, even though they are big birds the dogs could really rip them up. One was sitting on the top of one of the kennels this morning, luckily he flew off before a dog noticed him. They come in the front of the barn now looking for cat food which could get them in trouble too.

Speaking of turkeys it’s almost time to get the big white one butchered. She is huge. I am going to have a hard time carrying a cage with her in it. I need to call and make the appointment. It’s harder to butcher when you have just one meat bird and its really tame, but that’s all these big white ones are good for. The bourbon reds and the blue slate we are going to keep and try to breed, if the dogs or an owl don’t get them.

Well this is Michigan after all. Beautiful today, blizzard tomorrow, you just never know. I better get out and enjoy it.

And Wall Street falls

Granny’s advice is serious today.

How does the old song go- “somebody told me Wall Street fell but I was so poor I couldn’t tell”. I have been able to be oddly calm in the face of the frenzied chaos that has been occurring in the financial world. We have just a little money in the bank and it’s been a long time since we had any stocks and bonds to worry about. It does affect my Dad- he had some money in managed pension accounts – but he owns his house and one other house and he and Mom can live on their Social Security without any great strain.

What a shame it is that retirees will bear so much of the burden of this disaster. They don’t have time to wait for a market recovery. I bet they wish the money was in a mattress instead of the stock market or at least a bank. We all learned from this.

While Steve and I survive on very little, we do survive. I guess that’s one time having a Social Security disability check is actually a benefit to the lifestyle. Who would have thought it? I have been hoping to get another book contract to ease our budget a bit and that might be slow in coming because of the financial mess but we can say we are better off than we were a year ago. Life is strange. I am so glad that the disability claim was settled when it was- if we were going through it now the news of the economy might have really put us over the edge.

I know what it feels like to go to bed scared that soon you won’t have a home. I have used food stamps and commodity foods. I feel for the people who are scared to death right now but it will get better. People are going to have to re-adjust their thinking about what a good living is all about.

We were all living on future earnings- there was a time when we did that too. Then Steve got sick. Everything changed rapidly. Never count on what you assume will be there someday. Live on what you have today.

Stop talking about a handout for those who were “taken advantage of” by big credit crooks offering adjustable rate mortgages – usually the handout promoter says mortgages made after 2002. Lots of people were smart enough to buy a home they could afford, with a conventional mortgage and they too are having problems making mortgage payments. They may have bought the house 20 years ago. But if you lost your job and can’t find a new one you are in as much trouble as the dreamer, who believed he was entitled to the house he wanted today and would find a way to pay for it tomorrow. Help everybody who is struggling.

Drop all interest rates to 4 % and give amnesty to all overdue mortgages. Put the unpaid months on the end of the loan. Adjust the loan principal to more correctly reflect the homes current value. If they can’t afford the new lower payment, then let the mortgage holder give the bank the title to the home and walk away without damage to their credit.

One thing not to invest in should be stocks for cell phones and cable TV corporations. People need to take those out of their budgets right away. Put up a TV antenna, watch local channels for free. Carry your cell for 911 calls only- they will work for that after you cancel the contract. The amount you save on those two things might give you enough to pay the mortgage.