Moon over Iowa farmland
Meara says, "I'm cuter than that stinky goat!".
Mama Cat in full squirted milk action
Half the pictures don't show her tongue! It's amazing how little milk she usually gets on her face with this method of consumption!
Moon over Iowa farmland
Meara says, "I'm cuter than that stinky goat!".
Mama Cat in full squirted milk action
Half the pictures don't show her tongue! It's amazing how little milk she usually gets on her face with this method of consumption!
I thought that I would share a few random photos from my day.
She's too big to fit into my coat anymore (at least with me in it too!)
I never really believed the stories about the farmers squirting milk directly into the mouths of barn cats before. Now I do. This is Mama Cat who has become part of my retinue for the Red feedings.
I wish I could capture one of her little hoppy jumps as she walks beside me!
This CANNOT become a habit because if there is one thing more annoying than a dog jumping up on you it has to be a large goat (which I think Red is going to be).
It's hard to see (because most of it isn't in the picture!) but Red's new favorite way to feed is sitting on my lap.
Milk Moustache!
Weezy on the ice. Parts of the creek are still frozen despite the very warm weather because they never get direct sun.
The Freshwater Mussels that formed the "mother of pearl" button industry in Iowa at the turn of the century are still found in creeks and rivers all over Iowa.
Tonight was one of those nights.
One of those nights where you step deep into the icy puddle because you were too busy looking up at the sky. And you don’t care.
One of those nights where many droplets of warm milk replacer were sprayed around the feedlot (much to the joy of the barn cats) because your eyes were pointed heavens ward not downward at your hungry charge.
One of those nights where the glow of the moon makes everything silvery and slightly ethereal and casts shadows. The barnyard, the dead weeds fluttering in the breeze, the cats slinking about, the goats in their pen, even the farm equipment parked for the season are all slightly magical.
One of those nights where even the animals seem awed by the beauty of the dark.
One of those nights that, when you see the lights of a plane flashing overhead, you feel sorry for the people missing this wondrous evening.
One of those nights that, despite the promise of a hot shower and a warm bed inside, you stay outside a few minutes longer.
One of those nights that you are happy to be alive.
I hope that you are having one of those nights.
Little Miss Red (as I am calling my young nursing charge) has taken to getting out of her pen and running to me when I am on my way to her. In fact, she is following me all the way back to the house when I leave! To say that it is terribly cute to have a little knee-high red goat following you home would be a massive understatement. She sort of skips along beside me wagging her little tail so hard that I am afraid that it might just wag right off!
Little Red in the Big World
However, once I am inside for a few minutes, she gets afraid and starts heeding her mama’s bellows (believe me, mama is BELLOWING at this point) and runs baaaaaaing back to her. Actually, it’s uncanny how much it actually sounds like, “Maaaaa!!!” in little Red’s case.
Mama bellowing to Red GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!!!!!
She is utterly unafraid of any of the animals around her much to her mama’s consternation. She only wants to find out if they have milk and if she can get some.
Some of the animals are naturally a little wigged-out by this. Especially if they are boy animals (doesn’t really matter the species).
I call her “Little Red” but really that is a complete misnomer. She is little in comparison to me or to the adult goats but she is by far and away the biggest baby despite being several days younger than the Christmas twins.
I can't get a picture of her with the other kids as she always comes running for me whenever I'm near. So here's a gratuitous bottle shot!
I am just waiting for the night or morning that I step out of the back porch to find her waiting for her meal!
Last night I drove to the Hampton Middle School to the democrats caucus. I’m pretty sure that if there had actually been a choice of candidates there would have been more people from my district than just 4. But, despite this, it was fun. There were goodies to eat and everyone was really nice. We watched a live streaming video of President Obama who answered a few (really canned) questions from Iowans around the state. I’ll be honest, I more listened than watched as it was on a little computer screen, I already know what the president looks like and I was busy knitting.
Somehow, I ended-up on the Committee of Committees. I agreed to be on it simply because I loved the name. I didn’t take any pictures because, quite simply, there weren’t enough people there and I would have been inclined to ask everyone if it was ok to publish their picture. I just didn’t feel that it was worth it, ya know?
The Republican caucus was one of the closest ones in history. I have to admit, I’m sort of glad that Rick Santorum did well, if only for the fact that he put in a lot of time in the state talking to people one on one driving around in his pick-up truck. I don’t actually want him to become president mind you, but it does go to show you that putting in the time, not just running tv ads like Rick Perry did, will get you a long way here!
I’ve not just been feeding baby goats and learning about Iowan politics lately. I’ve also been spinning! You might remember me posting about the Easyknits dyed Merino that I was spinning into (really) fine singles. Well, I filled three bobbins with that wool and plied them together to make a really lush, soft and just yummy yarn. This is the kind of yarn that gets stuffed down shirt fronts at knitting events. Really, it’s that good. It ended-up being really well-balanced as well after I plied it which was sort-of a first for me. The only disappointment for me? The red in the dyed wool ended-up being a lovely shade of pink in the finished yarn. Had I anticipated this happening, I probably would have just pulled it out and held onto it for another project. What I did instead was to simply take the finished yarn with the pink in it and skeined it separately.
Please excuse the flashes of gold, pieces of a Christmas bow were the only thing that I had handy to mark the meterage onto that was waterproof!
These skeins are a nice 3-ply DK weight yarn totaling a little over 640 meters total.
The two all blue/grey skeins were each 150 meters for 300 meters total.
The two pink/blue skeins totaled about 340 meters.
I have immediate plans for the two blue/grey skeins while I am still pondering the fate of the pink/blue skeins. They may end-up being made into something for a certain blue-eyed and blonde Finn that I happen to know:-)
The pictures that I took don’t honestly do the skeins justice. However, I was battling 30mph wind gusts, sub-freezing wind-chill and the fact that the sun was departing the sky rapidly in order to get these photographed.
Now, just so you don’t miss a day of goat-y goodness here is a completely dorky picture of me feeding the baby in the middle of the night. In the cold. And the dark. I have finally figured out how to hold the kid, feed it, and take a picture with my iPhone. Or scratch my nose.
Living in Iowa, like most places, has it’s good points and it’s bad points. I’m not completely sure which column to put the Iowa Caucuses under. On the plus side, we do get to see a lot of the presidential candidates. Then again, that can also be a bad point, depending on how many polling and campaigning calls you’ve answered in one day. I’d estimate that the total on the day that I answered the phone the most was probably around 30, all of them were auto calls. Because my folks are both registered Republicans, we sometimes get the same phone call up to 3 times (my brother is also a registered Republican and I think this is still his phone number for his registration). I’ve been answering nearly all of these calls and I wanted to share with you some of the highlights so far. So, for the 2012 Iowa Caucuses, here are my Republican Phone Call Awards*.
Best Live Volunteer: By far and away, Newt Gingrich wins this one hands down. Newt’s phone volunteer was absolutely lovely and nearly had me changing my party affiliation! She spoke with my mom for several minutes and not once went into bashing the “other guys” simply asking that my mom take a look at his website to get some more information. If other candiates had armies of volunteers like this lady this would be a lovely caucus!
Worst Live Volunteer(s): I fielded 2 calls from Rick Perry campaign workers and both of them were terrible. Not polite, barely understandable, and when I asked a question, downright sanctimonious. I’m not going to be voting for a guy with a name like an 80’s pop star anyway, but I have to tell you that if I had been thinking about it before those calls, I wouldn’t have been afterwards. Both guys needed to be sent to a school for basic phone manners.
Best Recorded Message: Oddly, the animated Susan for the Romney campaign with her helpful tips about arriving early for the caucus and telling us where exactly we (the Republicans in the house) are going to caucus were the most positive of the recorded messages we received. She was sort of like what you would expect the Butterball turkey hotline folks to sound like!
Worst Recorded Message: Any of the calls with state senators or people who had to give their entire resume before starting on their spiel were pretty terrible. I’d swear that on one of these calls the guy ended his resume with “Eagle Scout”. Candidates, if you find the person giving you an endorsement has to remind everyone on the phone who the hell they are, then their endorsement probably isn’t going to mean all that much anyway. Stick with the big names, ok? Nearly all the candidates fell down in this category.
Most Tempted to Stay on the Line: The auto calls that said, “Stay on the line for a live discussion with Michele Bachman,” because I actually would like to ask that woman a few questions, but I’m pretty sure I’d get hung-up on!
Most Confusing Call: I answered an autocall from Dan Quayle which made it sound as though he was running for president. I’m pretty sure he’s not, right? If he was stumping for someone else, it sure didn’t make it through on that call!
Best Candidate Autocall: Rick Santorum. He just sounds so spry compared to the others! Clear, well spoken and didn’t sound so… angry. Not sure that I want to vote for him but I would date him from those calls (ignoring the content of course!).
Worst Candidate Autocall: Newt. He was scarcely understandable. I’m not sure if it was because of the quality of the recording or if he just normally sounds like crap or if he was drunk or something but get that man away from the phone stat!
Most Phone Calls Overall: Mitt wins this one hands-down. At least half of all the calls were for Romney.
Least Phone Calls Overall: That Utah Governor dude. I think he’s making a point. Not sure what it is other than, “I don’t really want to be president.”
Now, for the record, I won’t be taking part in the Republican caucuses tomorrow night as I am a Democrat. I could change my party affiliation for one night but I would really feel like a fraud doing that as I sincerely do not like any of the candidates that the Republican party has fielded this year. I was hoping that both of the caucuses were going to be held in the same location so I could pop over and catch some of the hot Republican action for y’all (there’s a porn movie in that phrase somewhere), but alas I just found out today that they aren’t. So, I will see if I can get my mom to snap a few photos of the process and I will be recording what goes down at the Democratic caucuses because, I’m sure, y’all are on the edge of your seats for that one:-)
*As decided by a registered Democrat. Who answers the phone. A lot.
…this is what it looks like.
Normally this adolescent kitten is intent in destroying anything and everything in her path. At the very least, moving it to the floor or under the bed. But when she decides to take a little down time, she’s still one of the sweetest things on the planet.
First off, get y’all’s minds out of the gutter!!! Stop sniggering. I mean it. Or I’m going to turn this blog post right around!
There. Better.
So, in answer to your semi-snorted question, speckendicken is a meat pancake. Or, to me slightly more precise, it is a (usually) whole wheat pancake that has meat added to it during the cooking. In the case of the speckendicken that had for breakfast it was crumbled bacon and sausage. It can also have anise added as a flavoring. I’ll be the first to admit, it sounds a little disturbing when you hear it described, but it’s actually quite tasty!
Now, another question that you might be wondering about is, “why are you eating this on New Year’s Day? Why not black-eyed peas like everybody else?” So, the answer to this one is a tad more interesting. See, the bulk of the settlers that founded the town of Ackley were from a region of Germany called East Friesland (or East Frisia, depending on who you are talking to). This area of Germany has many interesting traits including a “different” form of spoken German and many different customs and traditions from the rest of the country. If you are thinking that this is an extremely localized custom to find in a small town in the middle of Iowa I have to tell you that it isn’t all that uncommon. When the plains of the US were settled, often it wasn’t done so much by individual settlers striking out alone (think Pa Ingalls going all over the plains of the Midwest with only his family) but by entire groups of people, sometimes most of a village in the old country would empty-out and more or less relocate. Sometimes one family or person would go and find a good place, write letters home praising their new home’s virtues, and the next ship coming to the states would be filled with most of the people under 40 from the old village! This was particularly true of the agricultural areas where having enough land for all the sons in a family had been a problem for many, many generations at this point.
When I was young, there were still a goodly number of older people who felt more comfortable speaking Friesland German than they did English or else a mix of the two. Apparently I knew enough of it from listening to it around me that I would answer people who were speaking German back in English. One of my dad’s favorite stories about when I was a small child is that he was talking to one of these older gentlemen one day and he said something about me being a cute little one. I had just gone to the Dr’s office for one of my check-ups the day before and was thus armed with information that this gentleman didn’t happen to know. I announced rather archly and with my dander completely up that I wasn’t little as I was in the 80% percentile in both height and weight! (Yes, to all of you who know me personally, I have always been this way:-)) Both men got a really good laugh from it and my dad got the message that speaking German around me wasn’t necessarily keeping information away from me.
It isn’t just Germans that did the entire town migrations however. North of us there are many Scandinavian towns and to the South of us there are Dutch towns. Because there was so much space here in the new world, sometimes a single village in the old country broke-up into 3 or 4 towns once they got here, usually along religious lines. It’s common to see a cluster of towns in a county that all have founders from the same area of the Old World, but each town is dominated by a single, different church. There is still a lot of “us” vs. “them” in some of these places, but a lot of that is starting to disappear as the older ones fall way. In most communities now, there are so many “new comers” (people who came after the founding group) that a lot of the old ways are falling to the side. Few speak Friesland German now in Ackley now. When I was asking questions at the Heritage breakfast about the reason that we were supposed to eat this Speckendicken on New Year’s, most of the folks there just shook their heads and said that it was probably for good luck. If any readers know any more about this, please let me know!
Outside of eating speckendicken, my New Year’s was remarkably boring. I had baby goat duty thus I was outside in the ever-increasing wind and cold feeding her at 8pm, midnight, 5am (I am NOT getting up at 4am, sorry baby), 8am and noon. So no glamorous party or rowdy drinking for me. Nope, at midnight I was freezing my bum off wearing my pj’s and a Carhartt coat with a baby goat snuggled-up inside it gulping down kid milk replacer like she was starving. I don’t honestly mind these middle of the night forays out to the goat shed to feed her. It would be easier, of course, if it were closer or lit. But really, it’s not that big of a deal to me. However, this is one of the unsexy parts of farming that most people don’t tell you about. Considering that I saw one of the Christmas Twins nibbling on some food today, I am hopeful that soon enough at least part of the little red girls food will be solids.
I hope that y’all had a wonderful and safe New Year’s no matter what you did!
May you have all the Wild Cherry Pepsi that you could ever wish for!
Sarah Jane Humke 