What to do if your heifer eats his award ribbon *

Sunday, I went to the state fair. The last time I remember visiting here was with a young Madison, and we watched the birth of an animal. (If I was working harder at my NY resolutions, I might know the date, time, and animal, but ten chores in a year are going slowly.) The other memory I have was the fear that she'd wander off or get snatched by someone in the crowd. 

This visit was quite different. First, I accompanied a participant, which meant I was behind the scenes. Second, I was not responsible for any children, and lastly, it was not scorching hot as I recall from my first trip.

SueG's daughter, Sydney, the local FFA chapter president, showed a heifer. I went to cheer her on. Which I learned later was a no-no--zero shouting or cheering. They really could've used me to liven things up a bit. The announcers were mumblers and offered zero entertainment. The south does not know exciting rodeo or 4H events. 

We left at dawn. Before the event, the two participating students needed to bathe and groom Salem and Bambi, and with temperatures in the early fifties, it was quite the chilly shower. Poor Bambi shivered through the entire experience, making me wish I could knit her a sweater. Or buy one at the craft exhibit. 

Once the heifers were fed and watered, we gained entry before the gates opened to the public, and we wandered about smelling fried food and visiting the other barns housing different animals. I spoke to many noisy critters and took excellent photos with my new iPhone. We had a large group of family and friends, and we consumed corn dogs, steak bites, chicken tenders, fries, pretzels, glazed donuts, peanut butter fudge, kettle corn, spicy nuts, pork rinds, iced tea, pineapple mango drinks, root beers, teas, and iced coffees. Somehow we did not get elephant ears or funnel cakes.

I didn't start eating right away and wandered alone, taking in all the sights and smells until I suddenly spotted a giraffe in a large tent erected between two food vendors. 

A giraffe???

The tent also housed llamas, goats, miniature horses, and two zebras, but the majority of the tent, running from one end to the other, was a raised pen for the giraffe. Two ladies sold a plastic sandwich bag of cut carrots to feed the zoo animals, and in the time I spent fascinated by a giraffe at a fair, the guy probably downed fifty carrots. At one point, he left the front of his pen and mosied to the rear. I thought for sure he was going to puke, but apparently, all he needed was a moment of quiet. 

He took a few deep breaths, centered himself, and wandered back to the front where his adoring public awaited with their bags of chopped carrots. If you were tall enough, you got a quick touch of his face before he pulled back with the carrot. I could've stayed all day watching the guy. Or maybe it was a girl. I did not obtain that information.

But, alas, my friends caroled me, and we headed back to the cattle barn. Salem and Bambi shared an area with a bred heifer from the Gainesville area, two heifers from a middle school in Lake City, and another heifer of who we weren't privy to her information. 

We had chairs among the tackle, hay, feed, and water station on the open end of the stall. That put us across from the public walkway where visitors could also stare at us if they chose. The barn was gigantic, housing more heifers than I could count. They surrounded us. Kids and owners walked them past us on their way to the bathing station, arena, or wherever, and occasionally they'd have to stop if others were in the way. This made me quite nervous. Not only were these animals HUGE, but they didn't care where they were when it came time to poop or pee. I wore my phone out Googling cattle information, starting with "do cows kick?"

The answer is yes, both to the side and the rear, and they do so when frightened or nervous, especially if one is in their blind spot areas. 

I opted to stand most of the time as this allowed me to get the hell out of the way. 

Eventually, we made our way to the arena for the show, where I did not cheer. I wondered whether a participant got docked points if someone cheered, and I suggested we applaud her opponents, but no one took me seriously.

Salem was not as agreeable as he'd been the day before in his event. He began the show following nicely, but then he said the hell with this and tried desperately to head back to the barn. He kept pressing his head into Sydney's side and protested with several loud moos, but Sydney kept her head and practiced what she'd learned in the last two months of caring for this leased heifer. She took fourth place out of thirteen young heifers. The judge's comments were about wishing Salem's ribs stuck out more, and we took that to mean Salem was fat.

Back to the barn, we trooped. Salem put up quite the fuss in the stall, objecting loudly to picture taking, pats, and nearness of humans. I Googled mooing. Cattle moo when:

• They are searching for their friends
• They want to make a baby
• Have lost their mother or their calf
• They are hungry or need to be milked
• They are stressed

Since our little heifer was too young to know about sex, I discounted all but the last one. I left her alone. 

The kids went off to enjoy the fair, and my friend and I sat with the heifers. We left once to get food and tour some exhibits, but most of our time was spent among the cattle, and we did our best to look like we knew what was what as the public strolled by. 

The other participants/owners enjoyed the fair, and we were worried some about the pregnant heifer (bred heifer) not having water. She was a hoot. I spent a lot of time chatting with her since she was the closest to me. She pushed her food bowl under the fence, and when one of the kids pushed it back, she waited until he'd turned his back, and she pushed it out again. She was my kind of gal. 

Sydney told us they weren't allowed to attend to the other animals, so we had to suffer as Nala (as I later learned her name) did, although we did discuss slipping her some water.

I lamented that our two heifers didn't have printed information displayed on the fence like the middle school heifers, and I suggested hanging their ribbons. The two girls decided it was too much effort, and while Salem and Bambi were closer to the public walkway and adored first, the two middle school heifers, who had their four ribbons proudly displayed next to their lamented information, received the "oohs" and "aahs."

SueG: "Next year, we will be better prepared."

Bambi, who placed eleventh in her division, took a nap. The two middle school heifers joined her. Salem chilled after a while and happily posed for photos and allowed some head patting before she too lay down to nap. 

As we sat, questions arose, and I continued Googling the answers. I now have a lot of knowledge concerning cattle, starting with that. They aren't cows; they are cattle. A cow is a female bovine who has given birth to at least one calf. We learned all the terms. When Bambi began licking the fence, I investigated that. Cattle do that out of boredom. We were learning a wealth of information.

The kids returned to feed their heifers one last time. The school leased the two animals for two months, and they were to return to their dairy farm on Monday. While they were doing this, I talked to Nala, and SueG watched the two middle school heifers who'd suddenly stood up. The heifer on the outside looked around and then leaned up and pulled down the white show ribbon. She then proceeded to eat the two trailing ribbons, spitting out the rosette. Heifer #2 then picked up the rosette and started munching. By now, I'd been alerted. We shouted for Sydney, and she rescued what was left. Heifer #1 enjoyed her meal so much she attempted to pull down another ribbon and the lamented information sheet, and we shouted and clapped our hands until she stopped misbehaving.

SueG: "Good thing we didn't hang our ribbons."

Me: "Please. Our heifers are smarter than these two."

I Googled "heifer eats award ribbon." It was the only piece of information for which Google had no answer. I worried for half an hour until Nala's owner appeared, and then I quizzed her. She said the owners should look for it to pass, and if it didn't, they'd need to see a vet. 

I shall title this blog entry something helpful now in case someone like me is searching for this information. Not that I can speak for the results, but let's go with the aforementioned information. Nala's owner was quite impressed with what information we'd picked up in our barn time.

Before we left, the middle school kids returned, and we tattled on their heifer. They were nonplussed. Hmph!

Before dusk, we said our goodbyes to the heifers and the fair and headed home. I had shavings and hay everywhere, and my dog refused to allow me into the house until he'd sniffed every scent on my shoes and pants. I assured him I was not going to begin raising heifers.

But I'm already looking forward to next year's fair!

*Apparently, check tomorrow's poop pile for the ribbon. Wash and display if you choose, but do so high enough that your heifer can't pull it down and consume again.

Blueberry picking 2019

The blueberry season opened in Florida a couple of weeks ago. The hubby and I got up early on a Saturday and made the hour drive to the nearest blueberry farm, where we split off on our separate way to fill our buckets. Since it was early in the season, we had to work a little harder to get the ripened fruit without destroying the green, but the day was a beautiful one with a slight cooling of temperatures that allowed us to work for over an hour.

It's peaceful out picking. Silence among nature; chirping crickets, buzzing bees, and singing birds. Then there are the parents of toddlers who awake before dawn on a Saturday. I imagine these parents want to wear these kids out with some activity and sunshine so that they'll take naps, but instead of using these little tykes to pick low on the bushes, these parents break the tranquility by shouting. 

Them: "Slow down. Stop! Janey, over here. Joey, don't touch."

One family had their kids loaded in a wagon, and to keep them entertained, just kept feeding them blueberries. I only hoped the kids didn't upchuck blueberries on the way home.

I out-picked Tom. My bucket came to 4.5 pounds while his bucket hovered around 3.9. A total of $42 for all our hard work, but I made two blueberry crumbles, and we shared with my MIL and my friend Jim.

I'll probably send Tom off one more time before the season ends to replenish our supply. The berries should be a tad sweeter by then, although the weather won't be as cool. Hence, the sending Tom part...

Moving Photos

One messy apartment - Kelly has assured me that all of her bookcase stuff is packed in boxes and ready to be moved. I'm not sure what the stuff in the bookcases in this picture is doing on the shelves, but I think someone is delusional.

Who dressed appropriately? - Last moving day Kelly and Darcy wore flip flops and Kelly fell down the stairs. This time Madison seems a tad off. And she wore a dress!

Hazel the Maid - I was unhappy that I wasn't offered a bandanna last moving time so Kelly made sure that I had one for Saturday. It was purple. I found the apron in one of the boxes and found that the outfit fit me to a "T". Unfortunately, then Kelly made me work harder as if I were her personal maid...

How many girls does it take to clean one closet? - This is Kelly's closet in the foyer of her apartment. It was full of board games and beach equipment. This was our second run of the day and it was actually evening. Can you tell someone was tired?

Summer Vacation - Days 10-12

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Originally uploaded by tcboos

Days 10, 11, and 12 - Leaving SC for Illinois

Our plan was to leave McClellanville by noon. That didn't happen. It is too nice here and we hated to leave. I have decided that I shall have a breakdown in a few months and have to recuperate right here in the guest house in the woods. It is without a doubt the nicest place.

I spent the evening and morning cleaning the guest house. That is what happens when you stay the longest. You are left cleaning up everyone else's mess! Madison and Darcy were very helpful vacuuming and folding laundry. Mandy helped me load up the car. We don't need the luggage carrier as Tom is home in Florida and so we put the third seat to make storage room.

We had lunch together at the dining table overlooking the bayou. We looked for the alligator that had been spotted the night before, but he was not to be seen, off sleeping under the cool water. James brought out his guitar and we sang and sang and sang. Mandy started each song, yelling, "Give me a G!" and we were off and singing. When we would finish a song, Macie would say, "More! More!" and off we would go. It was the perfect ending to a wonderful, wonderful, visit.

The only downside was that Connie had awakened with an orange hand. Her right hand was completely a yellowish orange on the palm and between her fingers. She was sure it was medically related as she is sucking down 14 different medications for her ailments, which are plenty. Her feet have bothered her off and on; she has good days and bad. James got on the computer and did some research, concluding that she had too much iron in her body.

Connie called her doctor (Stephanie, this you can relate to....remember last year?) and they said no, no, couldn't be the new iron medication she was on. They didn't seem to be too concerned.

We cried and waved goodbye to Joyce, James, Mandy, Evie, and Macie as they waved back from their porch. We had directions from James and we thought it would be funny to turn the wrong way out of their driveway, but we were too sad so we just honked and honked waving to the neighbor as well. We were off to Connie's friend Juanita's house in Mt. Carmel, Illinois, about 30 minutes from Evansville, IN.

Later that night in our hotel outside of Knoxville, TN Connie took off her shoes and both her feet were orange. I lay in bed while she showered wondering what I should do the next day; take her to a clinic, a hospital, call her doctor again, etc. When she came out of the shower and began putting on her lotion we discovered that the Vaseline lotion also included SELF TANNING in its ingredients.

Connie had been pouring the lotion into her right hand and rubbing her aching feet with it 24/7. Thus the mystery of the orange limbs was solved.

We spent the night where we picked up a huge black beetle that Connie found outside the Holiday Inn Express. We took it for my niece Gabby who is a bug lover. We thought it was dead, but it was still alive so we put it into a coffee cup with a lid and gave him some grass to munch. He rode up front in the cup holder until we stopped off in Evansville for 4 dozen Donut Bank donuts and some coffee and then the bug rode in the cup holder in Darcy's seat.

We arrived at Juanita's in time for some swimming and a dinner of Illinois sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes and cucumbers, and chicken. The weather was hot and everything a lush green. Mt. Carmel is a small town that reminds me of the past. If you blink you miss the town. Everyone walks everywhere and no one locks his/her doors.

The next morning I had my nails done in a hole in the wall beauty shop where I got all the Mt. Carmel gossip and quite a lot of scoop on Juanita. We went back to Juanita's friend's house where we swam all day in a beautiful pool surrounded by flowers. Juanita's great-granddaughter, Maya, joined us for the day and night. She is almost 5 and smart as a whip. She and the girls got along fine and played all day together. We toured Mt. Carmel by car and ate more corn and bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. We ended each evening with several hours of cards. So far I think that I am ahead in the money.

Later in the evening, Connie went out to her car to bring in the bug. Only there was no bug. He had climbed up the cup, pinched and pinched through the sippy hole until he made it bigger and slipped out. He was loose somewhere in the car. Madison and Darcy searched (Maya refused to help as she hates bugs) and found him crawling under the driver's seat. We captured him again, put him into a Ziploc container, fed him lettuce and researched his species on the computer.

Our discovery led us to the following facts: He is a scarab beetle. He eats dead animals and dung. He is probably thinking, "What the hell is this lettuce crap? Why have these people brought me from Tennessee to Illinois?"

We will have to pick him up some road kill tomorrow, I guess.

We've named him Arab the Scarab.

Summer Vacation 2007 - Day 2

Day Two- Savannah, GA

Three things I learned today in Savannah - by Darcy (8 yrs. old)

1. There are a lot of horses pulling carriages.

2. The waving girl died of a heartbroken.

3. Eat seafood!!

Three things I learned today in Savannah - by Madison (Ten yrs. old)

1. The waving girl statue was about a girl who stood at the Savannah River and waved a towel to the passing boats. She was waiting for her true love to return by ship. After 4 years, when he didn't return, she died of a broken heart.


2. Eli Whitney came to a plantation in Savannah to tutor the owner's three children. He invented the cotton gin, which picked the seeds from the cotton. It was an invention easily duplicated, so he only sold three of them before other people copied his design.

3. Georgia is known as the Peach State

Before we left Florida, I researched Savannah, a place I've always wanted to visit since reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. One of the things I found was a trolley tour that would take you through 16 stops around the city. You can ride the trolley all day, getting on and off as many times as you choose. Although my husband scoffed at this as he prefers to walk everywhere he goes, we agreed this would be easier for my mother and the children.

The lady at the front desk of our hotel suggested riding the trolley all the way through first, picking out the destinations that would interest us, and returning to debark at said destinations on the second go around. We took her advice.

Our tour guide was Terry. He was an older black gentleman with a sense of humor and quite a bit of knowledge about the city. He had his script and his schtick well-rehearsed. We started out at the Welcome Center and began touring the city.

The city of Savannah is ancient. It was established in the 1700s by James Oglethorpe, a member of Parliament. Savannah prospered with the discovery that certain crops did quite well in the humid heat of Georgia. These crops were rice, cotton, and peaches. Savannah was successfully captured by General Sherman during the Civil War. Sherman sent a telegram to President Lincoln, offering him the city of Savannah as a Christmas present, making it one of the few towns not burned by Sherman during the war.

There were several war monuments around the different 24 squares that the city was built around. One of the statues was commissioned from Canada. The city requested that the finished statue be delivered by ship so that it did not touch any Yankee land in its trip to its final resting place. The figure was then put in the square facing the enemy, north.

Other interesting points of interest in Savannah are the homes of Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts. Her birthplace and the house that she lived in after her marriage are two points of interest in any tour, as is the first house of the Girl Scouts. We skipped her birthplace, which is next door to a famous bed and breakfast that once housed Kevin Spacey while he filmed Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." and instead opted to check out the home of Andrew Low II, Juliette's father in law.

Inside the home is a little tourist shop where we watched program detailing old Andrew's life, and by the time it was over, we were doubled over from all of the tragedy that kept striking, not Andrew, but all the women in his life. It was worse than any soap opera.

Andrew married his first wife, and the two of them began work on building this mansion in Savannah, but before they could move in their four-year-old son died, his wife died in childbirth, and his uncle and partner in the cotton industry croaked as well. Poor William moved into this house with his two young daughters and eventually remarried. This wife bore him 5 children, one of whom died right after birth. You would think he would have learned by now to stay the hell away from his wife, but obviously, he was a horn dog because he knocked her up again, and she died during labor just like his first wife!! Connie and I were laughing and crying by the time that miserable saga was finished.

Andrew's son eventually inherited the house, married Juliette Gordon, and moved into the house. Their marriage was a miserable one (of course) because, on the day of their wedding, rice was thrown. Rice landed in Juliette's ear and gave her an infection that resulted in her going deaf. You can imagine where Connie and I were when that was told. Seriously....on the floor. On and on this history went.

We saw the Mercer house, the house in the book and movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. We saw the third oldest hospital ever built. We saw the cemetery where Confederate soldiers are buried. We heard of ghosts that inhabit several of the famous houses that line each square. We passed church after church after church. We finally got out at St. John's Baptist Church.

It was built in the 1800s but had recently been restored. We went inside and toured the church. It is beautiful with stained glass windows depicting stories from the Bible, large marble columns, intricate architecture, and starting on one side and circling the entire church are enclaves of the Easter scene of Jesus' trip to the altar where he was nailed to the cross.

Tom began explaining this to Madison, so I turned to Darcy and began teaching it to her. We started at the beginning and went all around the church with me trying to summarize the whole thing, and when I finished at the cross, Darcy looked at me and said:

Darcy: "But I thought Jesus was Santa Claus."

The homes are amazing; old and built exceptionally well. Each is a different architectural masterpiece. We couldn't begin to even see the whole city on our tour. I would have loved to have just walked the town reading every piece of information that is available on signs throughout, but the kids weren't all that enthralled, and Connie could not begin to do that walking.

We ate at a cafe in the Marketplace, and while in the Andrew Low house, it began to rain again. We waited it out for a while (that is how we came to watch the film on his life) and then decided to walk next door to the carriage house that Juliet had turned into the Girl Scouts headquarters. As we exited the Low house, it poured, and we hurried to the office only to find that the door was locked. But for three dollars apiece we could get inside. Yeah, because those Girl Scouts don't sell enough cookies in February and March!

We left and began hiking toward our car. We got as far as the overhang of another church (no entry allowed) where we waited while Tom ran the rest of the 3 blocks to retrieve our car. We were soaked to the skin, but glad we'd made the trip.

Day two ended with dinner at the Cracker Barrel (Connie stayed at the hotel) and a game of Hearts (I won!). Tomorrow we head to South Carolina to visit relatives and tour Charleston.