October 27, 2012 Saturday

October 27, 2012 Saturday
DD Sally called last night after I was asleep. Abby talked to her. While driving from Haines to Tok a wheel came off the truck.I don’t know many details but they were not hurt.Because of the impending storm, Sally has moved her flight forward. I now expect her on Monday.
This farm will run OK without electricity apart from the freezers and the milking machine. In a pinch I can milk by hand. The freezers, well I just don’t know.
DD Abby and I drove to the Bread Shack in Auburn and met DIL Amy and the kids. After coffee and croissants, they drove Abby to the airport for her flight to CA. Later Abby called and said all was well, her flight was about to be called. I drove home uneventfully but cruised on past Towles, forgetting to stop for chicken feed, so will have to go down tomorrow. All the livestock was in good shape and happy.
October 28, 2012 Sunday
The weather today was warm and quiet.
I ran in to Dixfield to pick up the feed that I should have stopped for yesterday. I can’t think of anything extra that it might be helpful to stock up on except if we really do lose power for a long enough time to melt stuff in the freezer, Sally and I could can things. So I bought some more jar lids. I already have a lot of jars, since I did very little canning this year. NPR is issuing repeated warnings to take this storm seriously and I am trying to, but for as long as I can remember the weather service has a perfect record of hyping storms that turn out to fizzle while not being able to predict the really messy ones. I presume others are reacting similarly.
The cows were doing a lot of running today. Maybe that means something.
Later…. Sally went to the airport in Fairbanks to check in and her flight was cancelled. Now it is to be Thursday. I will have to wait a few more days but am glad the airline is taking all precautions. I talked to Bret. She was going to have to miss Bret’s dinner party so the nice thing is, now she can be there. Not only that, she will have a couple of days to spend in Fairbanks, something she always looks forward to.
The headquarters of Martin’s company is in New Jersey and they are all closed down for the storm so he is thinking of coming up here with Milo tomorrow for a day of hunting before the storm. Bret has been studying the NOAA map and says it looks like the main thing I will get is a great deal of rain.
October 29, 2012 Monday
Like the rest of the citizens of the northeast, I spent a lot of time today nervously listening to the radio for updates on Hurricane Sandy. Most of the day was perfectly ordinary with merely light winds, low cloud and occasional light rain although now at 9PM, the weather is worsening. DS Martin drove up from Biddeford with his dog Milo to try for birds and see what I needed done. The woods and fields were full of deer hunters and the birds were in hiding so he did not stay out long. I fed him a delicious dinner of lamb shanks simmered with rice and veg. He installed a heavy bolt on the front door.
I talked to DD Sally. She told me all about their accident last Thursday while driving from Haines to Tok. While crossing Canada the left rear wheel came off their truck at 50mph with a semi not far behind. The car did a 360 followed by a 190 and ended up on the same side of the road. Tom should have been an Indie driver. The semi managed to stop and no one was hurt. There is very little traffic on the AlCan. All those who passed stopped to offer aid but no aid arrived. Sally finally got a ride with a woman from Border Patrol who actually knew how to contact a towing service. Sally went to a motel and Tom waited 7 hours with the truck. Turned out the tow truck driver had been in White Horse. Tom got pretty discouraged as he had no communication but fortunately had his cold weather gear as he will be going north soon. Back at the garage, it proved possible to put the wheel back on and they proceeded to Tok for a big dinner on Saturday. Then on Sunday they all went to Fairbanks and had another wonderful dinner as planned.
Sally now has a ticket for Thursday.
October 31, 2012 Wednesday, Halloween
Yesterday the people in five states were assessing their hurricane Sandy damage. Maine was lucky. I lost power here very briefly. There was heavy rain but minor flooding. The rain continues today but much lighter. Last night the sheep came in wet and were still wet this morning.. The barn smells like wet wool. They did not want to go out today. I had to push them out the door. They just stood there bunched up.
Today is Halloween. I made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies which I over baked. Sigh. That is what the kids will get. I can’t make a new batch.
I also made the same cake again that made a hit last week with Abby. This time I flavored it with orange extract and candied ginger.
Twice in a week Fern’s production has dropped below 2 gallons.
November 01, 2012 Thursday
Fern was down to 1 ½ gallons this morning.
Mitra has gone to pick up Sally in Portland.
Later: We had a nice lunch of soup and cake. We said goodbye to Mitra who had to get home to her animals. Before leaving she popped the worm pills down the cats for me. She really should have been a vet. Sally went directly out with Willie-dog to check the north fence. Nancy, my helper, had already reported that the farthest posts next to the river were under water. The river is over its banks.
The cows need hay now that they are shut out of the north field pending fence repair. I gave them half a bale.

Notes on Mary Pipher’s essay on the anatomy of denial entitled: Our world is dying and we’re all in denial
http://www.alternet.org/visions/wake-our-world-dying-and-were-all-denial?akid=9567.127002.O3dChs&rd=1&src=newsletter730596&t=3http://www.alternet.org/visions/wake-our-world-dying-and-were-all-denial?akid=9567.127002.O3dChs&rd=1&src=newsletter730596&t=3
Thank you, Mary. This may be the best thing yet written on the anatomy of denial. I especially appreciate that you avoided specifics as to which personal actions are the greenest.
I just came in from milking my cow. I brought in two gallons of life supporting nourishment produced by my cow Fern. Fern translates the sun and rain that falls on my small acreage into milk. With superb efficiency she borrows the energy in cellulose (think grass, upon which humans starve) and reinvests it into a food more perfect than anything in the supermarket. No mangrove swamps or rain forests were destroyed in the manufacture of this product. No water to float a battleship was diverted for her purposes. No grain that might otherwise have been cracked into ethanol or bargained to the starving was apportioned to her use. Her daily eight gallon drink of water was given back as milk, exhaled into the atmosphere to fall as rain or peed onto the pasture to encourage the grass. Fern accomplished this feat without burning any gas miles. She did this through the magic of wild fermentation in her rumen, the same process employed by cabbage worms and everything else that lives by splitting cellulose. Right now is the moment to abandon the fiction that cows are high on the food chain. The only things that live lower on the food chain than cows and caterpillars are bacteria. It’s sun-grass-rumen fermentation-complete protein-milk, your one stop food factory; the cow did all the work and tomorrow she will do it all over again.
Fern’s predecessor, old Helen Hefferlump, finally got so arthritic that we knew making it through another Maine winter would be a painful hardship and we needed to end her suffering. Should we wait until she broke her hip on the ice? The options were burying her (impossible in frozen ground) or putting her into the freezer where she would feed many people for a year. Why would Helen prefer to be wasted? Our local butcher said he and his family were raised on aged dairy cows and the meat would amaze us. He was right. And it needs to be made crystal clear that avoiding meat in the belief that one is taking strain off the planet is an urban myth. Something eats everything. Life and death merge. Taking animals out of the equation just leaves a vacuum to be filled by insects. Our prevailing livestock production system is grotesque but at its worst does not remotely approach the waste attributed to it; those mega water requirements and fossil fuel demands attributed to livestock are scary memes, their numbers too vast for mental arithmetic. Efforts to discover any research basis for these beliefs will founder because none exist. Food policy based on fictional numbers is doomed. Pursuit of an anti-meat agenda will delay effective investment of our energies much as creativity has been squandered on the falsities of corn-based ethanol. Because the choice is not between “getting over the meat habit and freeing up grain for hungry multitudes.” and never will be. A plant-based diet depends on stoop labor or fossil fuel. Apart from animal traction, there is no other way to achieve it. Equitable distribution of either sweat or petroleum based crops depends entirely on who owns them. Is there a government somewhere – anywhere - you trust to distribute food without fear or favor, now or ever?
The real waste in our existing food production system comes from pulling food out of the loop between soil and eaters, commodifying it, bashing it around to its nutritional detriment, and selling it back to consumers who have already paid for it once with subsidies and then will fork over at the cash register and will pay again at the doctor’s office. The assumption that glues together the corporate food system is that you and I will not and should not be bothered with home or strictly local food production. I have spent most of my eight decades living the real food truth that yes, you can produce your own food without any help from agribiz and with minimal dependence on fossil fuel, or none.Not only can you do this but it is a source of satisfaction, even joy. You always know you are doing something worthwhile. But why should you believe One Cow Granny in Maine? If you doubt my facts read the essays at www.real-food.com. The small local farm including animals is the only reliable land-based food production unit. It is a microcosm of the natural world. It creates no environmental debt. It is safe. And you will own it.
November 02, 2012 Friday
Yesterday was Day 21 from Fern’s breeding. Her production was way down yesterday but up a quart today to 1 ¾ gallons. I got 10 eggs. All the hens and chicks are doing well.
DD Sally was off doing fence repair by 9:30 am. Later we went to town and picked up more fencing. She has temporarily closed off Pocket Field and brought all the critters in to clean up the Paddock Garden. She found more squashes that I had missed. We still don’t have as many as a last year but more than I thought.
DIL Amy is up at camp with two of her lovely friends for Girls’Weekend. They stopped in to visit for a bit. I gave them milk and eggs.
Today is Grandson Tommy’s 22nd birthday.
©Copyright 2012 Joann S. Rogers