Sunday, June 17, 2007: A whole week's worth of news!

Last Sunday, Claire, Christina and I went to Burlington. Claire needed to look for a job (she goes to school at UVM) and Christina and I wanted to go somewhere other than Plattsburgh. Burlington is a great place. It is hippie paradise! Claire says none of her friends from school eat meat, and she said every restaurant in Burlington caters to the vegan lifestyle. We went to the awesome grocery store, City Market, to get sandwiches from their deli. Right next to the deli is the tofu and hummus, in the labeled “Hippie Cooler.” Also near the deli was the bread section. I’ve never seen so much organic and natural and wonderful looking bread in my life! The whole store was like that. I could have spent an hour just wandering around looking at what they had. I wish we had something like that in Chestertown. After lunch, we walked up and down Church Street. Church Street is pedestrian only and it has cobblestones. We went to Ben and Jerry’s and the Discovery Channel store. It is similar to Main Street in downtown Annapolis, but a little smaller. It was the Jazz Festival, so there was live music at almost every restaurant, and all the restaurants have outdoor seating. Finally, we went to North Beach Park, a little beach on Lake Champlain. It was starting to get overcast by the time we got there but we still sat on our beach towels in our swim suits for an hour or so.

An update on the corn: it is still growing and seems like it grows faster every week. The picture above was taken Monday and by Wednesday I bet you could tell the difference (if I took a picture on Wednesday). It will be knee high this week (well before the 4th of July, as the saying goes). I love how you can look right down the rows.

These are 3 yearling horses that ran over to the fence to act startled by my bike.
This week I had the Calves rotation. The two main jobs are feeding the calves and cleaning the barns. The youngest calves live in hutches, like giant doghouses. They have to live by themselves because this reduces disease transmission (were one of them to get sick—right now all of ours are healthy!). They all get milk replacer twice a day plus grain. Right now the oldest one is being weaned off the milk replacer, and she’s not happy about it. She starts mooing when she sees the farm truck pull up, and doesn’t quit until we leave. There were three calves born Sunday night, two heifers and a bull. Two were twins but the two heifers were born in the pen so they weren’t sure whether they were twins or whether it was a heifer and a bull. This was a problem because when there is a heifer-bull pair of twins, the hormones of the male twin circulate through the female twin’s placenta and this causes her to be sterile, and she is called a freemartin. It doesn’t do any good to have a sterile heifer on a dairy farm, so we had to find out so we didn’t send the wrong heifer to the sale.

On Tuesday, I helped pull another calf, a big white bull. He was almost 2 weeks early, and for the first couple days was really unsteady on his feet. That made it really difficult to train him to drink from a bucket because his balance and strength weren’t good enough for him to stand up and drink the whole bucket at once! He’s a pro at it n

Wednesday was Kristy's birthday and we had a surprise cookout for her. She had no idea we were planning it. Here is the whole bunch of us. Top row: Eric, Monique, Christina, Blake, Steven Mooney, Kristy. Bottom row: Claire (my roommate), Lindsay, me, Roxanne, Melisa, Katy, Anna.
On Thursday, I picked out one of my show heifers. Here she is:
I had a list of names like Clover and Daisy, but she seemed spunkier than that. Then she jumped out of her pen. The next day I thought of Firefly, and then I thought, she's more like a grasshopper than a firefly, and then I thought of crickets, so Cricket it is. She's Cricket the cow. Also, I went to bed at 8:30 so I could get enough sleep to function on Friday after doing cow watch at 4 am.
There is no better way to get to know cows than to just watch them for a few hours at a time. I think I have already mentioned that I think they are more like dogs than they are like horses. Lindsay said they have great senses of humor and I think these pictures demonstrate that well:
Resting her head on her neighbor...

Fell asleep and her tongue is falling out of her mouth...Rolling her tongue...
Sleeping all curled up...
The other cool thing about being up on the catwalk from 4-5 am is that you get to see into the feed truck:
Friday there was an open house for the grand opening of a new exhibit at the farm museum, of antique vehicles. There was a barbecue and everyone who works at Miner was there. The vehicles were cool, too. There were 2 carriages and 2 sleighs, a horse-drawn school bus, and a sprinkler wagon. After that, the crops guys needed help covering the feed bunk they’ve been filling with first cut haylage. That involved dragging huge pieces of plastic up the hill of chopped hay and weighting it down, first with 50-pound gravel bags at the top and sides and then with old tires every where else. We all got really dirty from the tires—there’s no way to store a tire that it won’t get rainwater inside, and these tires were really gross! I will definitely need new sneakers now…

Saturday and today (Sunday) I only had to work in the morning, and yesterday was really sunny and hot, so Blake, Christina and I went to the beach. It was another beach on Lake Champlain, on Isle La Motte at St. Anne's Shrine. We napped in the sun, swam in the lake, the ice cream truck came...it was a fun afternoon.