Cute colt

Our neighbors had a little colt born yesterday. We went over to admire the new arrival (still unnamed) -- what a doll!

Needless to say, mama was being very protective. Our neighbors tied her for a few minutes while they examined the baby.

As we watched, the colt dozed off right in front of us, standing on his feet.

Have you ever seen anything so knock-kneed?

The other horses were wildly curious about the newcomer, of course.

But mama carefully tucked her baby away for the night, out of sight.

Sweet dreams!

Rest in peace, Ray

Today I found out that the incomparable author Ray Bradbury has passed away at the age of 91.

Growing up with three nerdy brothers as I did, Ray Bradbury's books were a constant fixture in our house. Along with Isaac Asimov, Bradbury helped shape the supple minds of three young boys and guide them into the sciences, which is why two of my three brothers are now engineers.



While I was never the science fiction buffs my brothers were -- I don't think there's a single Bradbury book they didn't devour -- even I was enthralled by The Illustrated Man.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for contributing such a remarkable body of literature that took people off the Earth and into the realms of fantasy.

Spring weather

This -- THIS -- is why north Idaho gardeners have a hard time getting their vegetables to grow.

June 6 and the temperature is 36F, pouring rain, and howling wind. Not exactly conducive to good growing conditions.

We have a fire in the wood stove because this morning the temperature in the house was 56F.

However despite the charming spring weather, the potatoes (which, not incidentally, like cool weather) are thriving.

After two weeks in the ground, the peas are juuuust starting to emerge. (Blurry photo, sorry.)

Best of all -- and despite the weather -- the wheat is sprouting! If we look carefully, we can see a faint green fuzz on the field.

Now let's hope the wheat field doesn't drown.



Just to show how fickle spring weather can be around these parts, Monday was warm (75F) and humid, so much so that we ventured our first trip to the (deserted) lake for the season.

Younger Daughter found an eerie-looking outstretched skeleton of a bird under the water, probably a seagull.

Younger Daughter bravely ventured into the chilly water. Older Daughter declined.

We didn't linger long, however, as the clouds were becoming more threatening. In fact we got home just before a massive storm cell came through with veritable sheets of rain, thunder and lightning, and howling wind. According to the weather report, conditions were even ripe for tornadoes, something almost unheard of in these parts. Hard to believe we were splashing in the water minutes before.

My garden isn't nearly as planted as I would like it to be. In this I can truthfully blame the weather.

The human touch

Some time ago, I bookmarked an article called "We expect more from technology and less from each other" by Sherry Turkle. The writer tells how she was attending a Boston Globe panel on "cyberetiquette" which included such advice as no texting at family dinner, no texting in restaurants, and don't bring your laptop to your children's sporting events (no matter how tempting). In short, how to be polite in a linked society.

Ms. Turkle highlighted a question from a genuinely exhausted and harassed woman in the audience who explained that as a working mother, she had very little time to talk to her friends, to e-mail, to text, to keep up. "Actually," she confessed, "the only time I have is at night, after I'm off work and before I go home, when I go family shopping at Trader Joe's [a supermarket]. But the guy at the checkout line, he wants to talk. I just want to be on my phone, into my texts and Facebook. Do I have the right to just ignore him?"

Most of the panel speakers responded with sympathy and confirmed that this woman did indeed have the right to privacy and shouldn't be disturbed as she used her smart phone during a checkout procedure.

But Ms. Turkle had a different perspective. She wrote, "I said that we all know that the job that the man at the checkout counter was doing can now be done by a machine. But until he is replaced by a machine, I think he should be treated as a person, with all the rights of a person. And that includes a bit of human exchange, since that is clearly what makes his job tolerable for him, makes him feel that in his job, this job that could be done by a machine, he is still a human being." [Emphasis added.]

Needless to say, her answer was not exactly greeted with cries of enthusiasm and warm empathetic understanding. Instead, people didn't want to hear it.

The fact is, people have lost the art of polite chitchat. Many people do indeed view checkout clerks and other service personnel as invisible machines, there to silently and efficiently perform their service function and nothing else.

It reminds me of a line from Bill Bryson's excellent book At Home, a fascinating history of domestic life (largely from an English perspective).

In the chapter covering domestic servants, Mr. Bryson observed that most people during the nineteenth century (the age of servants) were no more fond of their servants than we are today of our appliances -- they were merely ambulatory machines whose sole purpose in life was to serve, tirelessly and thanklessly.

It's an uncomfortable observation and an attitude which we, today, in our modern times, would like to claim we would never have. Until, of course, we encounter a checkout clerk or a hotel chambermaid or a garbage collector or other person whose job is to make our existence more comfortable, sanitary, or efficient.

And how do we treat them?

"What once would have seemed like 'good service,'" notes Ms. Turkle in reference to checkout clerks making polite chitchat, "is now an inconvenience... We also want technology to step in as we invite people to step back. It used to be that we imagined that our mobile phones would be for us to talk to each other. Now, our mobile phones are there to talk to us."

Yikes. I don't know if I like the direction this is taking. At what point do we lock ourselves in a room with our technology and deny all human interaction because our smart phones and laptops offer us a window into the outside world?

Politeness and manners -- and a human touch -- is the lubricant that makes our society tolerable. If we're too tired and exhausted after a long day's work to engage in polite chitchat with a checkout clerk -- and thus make his job more tolerable and enjoyable -- then we need to examine our attitude and whether or not we consider the checkout clerk to be merely a human "appliance."

"[S]mitten with technology," concludes Mr. Turkle, "...we don't much want to talk about these problems. But it's time to talk."

I agree. Talk.  Don't text.

Thoughts?

Tornado tracks

I found this last night on SurvivalBlog (here's the direct link for a larger version). Fascinating.

This is 56 years of tornado tracks, graded by F-scale. SurvivalBlog makes note that the scale of the tracks is exaggerated and made more linear than actually occurred.

Sweet nothings

This week it was my turn to bring dessert for our weekly neighborhood potlucks. I decided I wanted to try something different, so I dug through my recipe box and pulled out something called Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups.

I had to buy baking chocolate, but I already had everything else I needed.

I opened a sheet of puff pastry (there are two sheets per box)...

...and sliced each sheet into 18 small squares, which I then rolled until they were about 4" by 4". These I tucked into muffin cups.

Though the recipe didn't call for it, I decided to add bit of corn syrup...

...which I mixed into the peanut butter.

Then I broke up some baking chocolate into small pieces.

Then to each bit of puff pastry tucked into the muffin cups, I added a dab of sweetened peanut butter...

...and topped it with a piece of chocolate (this was semi-sweet chocolate, by the way). Then I baked them at 400F for 11 minutes.

They came out looking, well, puffy.

Meanwhile I figured, why not fill the puff pastry cups with something else besides just peanut butter and chocolate? I decided to experiment a bit.

This mixture is equal parts ricotta cheese and cream cheese, with some powdered sugar added to taste.

I added some orange juice concentrate to give it a little zip.

Then I whipped some cream...

...and sliced some strawberries.

Then I rolled out all the remaining puff pastry and tucked the pieces into muffin cups, and baked them empty. The theory was these would form nice tidy cups into which people could tuck their favorite ingredient. However for the most part they turned out (ahem) too puffy for that.

By this point it was too late to make anything else, so I just hoped people could sort of "pile" the puff pastry with their ingredient of choice. I packed everything into a basket and we went to the potluck.

Well oh my goodness, they were a huge hit. Besides the pre-made peanut butter ones, folks just piled mixtures of the other sweet ingredients onto the pastry and enjoyed the flavors. Out of the 36 pieces I brought, this was all that was left.

So I've decided to add these to my dessert repertoire and dubbed them "sweet nothings." You can put anything in them.

I love puff pastry, it's the most amazingly versatile (and delicious) base for so many dishes, both sweet and savory.

Mending fences

We needed to fix some fences. No surprise there. Fixing fences is one of the constants on any farm.

Two particular spots needed repair: the fence bordering the wheat field, and the fence bordering a neighbor's property we call "the pond property" (since, duh, it has a pond). At least four of our cows were casually stepping over the fence onto the pond property and grazing its lush grasses, and we needed to put a stop to it.

First, the wheat field fence. This is Smokey, grazing inside the wheat field. Her penchant for jumping fences (as well as a generally unpleasant personality) will shortly be earning her an honored place in our freezer. So far she's the only one to figure out how to slip through the admittedly pushed-down fence into this field.

Since the wheat hasn't grown yet, the only damage she causes is hoofprints in the soft ground; but as the wheat grows up, we don't want any cows grazing it down. That wheat has the potential to become a valuable asset, and we're not about to let a negative asset (Smokey) ruin it. (Smokey will be a more valuable asset when she's in the freezer.)

So Don and I went out and used baling twine (God bless baling twine!) to raise the pushed-down portion of the fence and attach it to the high-tension wire that ran across the top of the fence.

Very colorful and stylish, don't you agree?

So far it's worked. Here's Smokey seeing the patched-up fence for the first time. "Hey! What happened?"

Next we tackled the fence bordering the pond property. We still had our friend's tractor, so Don put the heavy tools in the bucket and drove it down to the bottom of the pasture (we also had some old T-posts and mashed-up chicken wire down there that we needed to bring up).

This fence didn't have a high-tension wire at the top, so the livestock (especially our horse) had gradually pushed the field fencing down in an effort to get the grass on the other side, which everyone knows is always greener. We had a roll of old barbed wire, so the first thing Don did was use the fence-tightener to ratchet a strand of high-tension barbed wire into position at the top.

You can see what the pushed-down fence looked like, and why it was easy for curious cows to merely hop over it onto the pond property.

We used wire this time, to attach the pulled-up field fence to the high-tension barbed wire strand.

So far the mended fences have worked, as we haven't noticed any cows where they shouldn't be.

We finished the fencing and moved onto different projects. Then about midway through the day, Don popped his head in the house to report something he'd just heard on the radio. It seems Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is hoping the United States can bale out Spain.

As the implication of this sunk in, I stared at my husband. "With WHAT?" I said. With our massive national debt, the idea of baling out Spain seems ludicrous.

Don made a motion as if turning the crank on a printing press. "By printing money," he replied.

We all know what that means. It means dollars will flood the market. It means what's worth $1 today will only be worth $0.50 tomorrow. It means prices will go up because money will be worth less.

"If there was one piece of news that could force an all out panic in a market already on the edge," reported Zero Hedge, "it is that outgoing (as in finally departing) US Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, was getting involved in the European Crisis. Sadly, this is precisely what happened."

"What are we, a bottomless pit of money?" I griped.

"No, we're a bottomless pit of debt," Don replied.

I read another dire headline in which the head of the World Bank warned that the financial markets could face a rerun of the Great Panic of 2008 and that Europe was heading for the "danger zone."

And it occurred to me: it's time for ALL of us to mend our fences. Patch those holes. Fix things so our assets (cattle, in our case) can't escape. Fix things so other assets (the wheat) won't get damaged. Remove any negative assets (debts) that can prove damaging.

If things get really really tough in this country -- if Geithner's (and therefore the current administration's) insane idea that America somehow has either the money or the authority to help bale out Spain, using manufactured fiat currency -- then all hell could easily break loose.

Not that most Americans will care, of course. We're too busy sitting on our collective behinds watching American Idol and wondering why our Doritos keep going up in price.

But thankfully there are others who are more vigilant, and they're reporting things I don't like to hear... because our fences aren't nearly as tight and well-mended as we could want.

Every single one of us has different types of fences, of assets, and holes that need fixing. What are yours? And what are you going to do about them?

These assets -- these holes -- these fences that need mending -- don't just include economic considerations. They also include relationships and knowledge.

Remember, preparedness is a three-legged stool: supplies, knowledge, and community. If you have gaps in your knowledge, now's the time to fill them. If your fences are failing because you don't know how to shoot a gun or make bread from scratch or pressure-can green beans, now's the time to learn.

And most importantly, there will never be a finer time to mend fences with friends and family. If there are holes in your community relationships, today would be an excellent time to start repairing them.  Make some phone calls.  Bake some cookies and bring them to your neighbors.  Mend those fences.