Farm News

Farm News
Sunday morning, after chores, 36° with mud, ice, and snow

Zoe's Trip to the City
Of Rosie's five bunnies, one is mostly white with nice brown spots. Tuesday morning she made her second tour of various Lawrence health care facilities while I had fun revisiting City Centered Pump Plumbers, the outfit in the fancy building. I was there to hear them tell me that I was a responsible pumping adult, and that I could retain my license to write drivel. Well, as I said earlier, that building was the kind that only a rodent could navigate through efficiently, but, although I didn't have a rodent with me, I had the next best thing, a lagomorph, commonly called a rabbit. We were able to go straight to the correct office in record time, climbing stairs instead of using elevators.

When the nice women in the office saw the bunny they were quite delighted, as I knew they would be. There is nothing like a bunny to attract women. Some fellers are of the opinion that a large Rottweiler makes them look studly and that will attract women. They may be right but I'm pretty sure my method attracts more women than their method. It may be that they are looking to attract only specific kinds of women, but my experience has led me to think that having lots of women around is usually a good idea, and it doesn't make much difference what kind or age of women they are.

If there are some women around, some of them will probably fix something to eat. That is good. Several of them will find reasons for men to not engage in such silliness as taking a rabbit to visit the cardiologist. That is not good. Occasionally, one of them will kiss the nearest old geezer. That possibility completely rules the whole thing, so, having lots of women around is a good idea.
Anyway, what happened in that office was that those nice young women named the bunny 'Zoe', which sounded fine to the bunny and didn't bother me at all. 'Zoe' she became, and off we went to more adventures. We stopped in at several other offices that we had visited before and visited several other offices we hadn't been in before. Zoe thought it was all quite interesting and had a nice time.

Editor Visits Cardiologist
While Zoe was gaining her name and entertaining nice women, this editor was visiting the cardiologist for a follow up on what they found when they peeked into my heart. Basically, everything was about as good as could be expected, with nothing showing that would interfere with my plan to live to age 115.

Because this was just a follow up, I saw a nurse practitioner instead of an MD. No problem, the only MD in the place that I like is an inscrutable weirdo who makes delphic pronouncements. His most recent diagnosis, as given to me, was, “There's mischief afoot.”

Sophia, the nurse practitioner, is a beautiful young woman, originally from Russia, with a voice that makes one think of wildflowers nodding in a gentle breeze on the steppes. I'm such a country sucker I fall for these acts pretty easily. Actually, she is an agent of the Cardiologist's Conspiracy, a group of physicians and nurses determined to treat me for high blood pressure.
I have never had high blood pressure in my life, as far as I know. Usually, it's low, sometimes quite low. The Cardiologist's Conspiracy, though, wants me to take blood pressure lowering medication. Sophia touched her fingertips to my chest as she listened to my heart. Of course my blood pressure went up a bit, it would have been ungentlemanly not to.

I ended up with a prescription for some chemical concoction that would lower my blood pressure, and it did just that. After four days the pressure was down to 98/58 and I was down to lying on my back with my head low in order to maintain consciousness. And that is why Farm News doesn't amount to much this week.

Same Sex Marriage
The Kansas legislature has been found to be in violation of the Kansas constitution by the Kansas supreme court because the legislature has not adequately funded education. The legislature has responded by passing a call for a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage.
Everyone understands that same sex marriage can be dangerous. Two women, both with PMS, who have lived together for twenty years, might present a real danger to each other and anyone nearby if they were married. However, I think that facing that sort of danger should be a personal choice, like smoking, and that the government shouldn't ban it, although the government might not want it done in public buildings. Therefore, I would accept a ban on same sex marriage in public buildings, including schools. What a unique approach to repairing an unconstitutional school finance problem!

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Farm News 01-23-05

Farm News
Sunday morning, after chores, 20° and sunny

Nyn Has Bunnies
Monday morning Nyn had bunnies. I had just about given up on her, figuring she was just fooling all this time. When I did chores Monday morning everything was as it had been, but when I looked in on her at about 10:00 she had a nest box full of fur and it looked like something was wiggling in there.

Thursday Calvin and I looked at the bunnies and found five. They were all nice and plump and starting to grow fur. One of them looks sort of like Fluff, their father, and three of them appear to be black. I don't know for sure what color the last one is, we were mostly checking to see that they were healthy.

Saturday it became quite cold again, but Nyn's bunnies put on their fur coats in time and were furry, fat, happy, and wiggly Saturday evening. The cold hasn't seemed to bother them at all. I spread straw on the top of their cage to help stop drafts and discovered it became noticeably warmer in the cage under the straw.

Calvin Buys a Truck
Look out America, here comes Calvin in his 1971 Ford F-100 four-wheel drive pickup truck. It's brown and covered with white spots and drips that look like a lot of chicken poop. The overall effect is charming, reminding one of a brick wall with pigeon droppings; all it needs are some flowers in the bed. Also, it is very noisy, an important feature for many teenage males.

Calvin bought the truck and drove it home, a distance of about two miles on unpaved county roads, and then spent the next day obtaining liability insurance ($124 per month for a young male), license plates, etc. Finally, it was ready! He had his license and so did the truck. He hopped in, drove it to town, filled the gas tank, and made it halfway back home before the truck died and refused to start again. Does fate like to pick on teenagers?

The problem was a defective fuel line, a piece of flexible tubing about two feet long. A quick trip the next day to the auto parts store, where Phil, who knows how to act knowledgeable about auto parts, quickly gave him exactly the part he needed. Calvin took it home and, bingo, he is driving again. Look out America, here comes Calvin.

Mud Replaces Ice
After more than a week of hard, gleaming ice-covered rural roads, the thaw came, bringing roads of soft, sticky, mud punctuated with ice in the shady spots. The thaw was brief, and Saturday the high was 24° with winds gusting to 45 mph. Calvin has a job cutting firewood for a neighbor this weekend. I dropped by where he was cutting and he was freezing his toes off. It is amazing the things men go through just so they will have good stories to tell their grandchildren.


Drusilla Lays Again
Actually, though I don't have any way to know which hen provided the egg, there was a nice bantam egg in the barn, and Drusilla gets the credit because of her seniority. Unless you keep them inside with artificial lighting hens will shut down egg production in the winter. Being the senior hen, when Drusilla lays her first egg of the year it is a message to all the other hens to get busy and start laying eggs again. The day after I found Drusilla's egg there were five eggs in the hen house produced by the young Rhode Island Red pullets we raised last summer.

Editor, Long a Fool, Becomes Chief Fool
Wednesday evening, with five members present, this editor was elected President of the FOOLs, (Friends Of the Oskaloosa Library) by a vote of 4-0. Paula abstained because she didn't think that it would be seemly for the Librarian to be voting for her husband/house-pet as Chief Fool. I voted for myself because the three women voting for me told me to. Their argument was that only a man could be dumb enough to become Chief Fool, and I was the only man present. Thus, I am entering office with a strong mandate.

My first initiative was to gain approval for purchase of a badge maker, one of those machines that can press out pin-on buttons. When the FOOLs first started . . ..

Let me back up a bit. Oskaloosa is famous for bossy old women. It was the first city in Kansas to have an all female city government, which, unfortunately, was probably the high point in effective city governance. Among the famous bossy women of Oskaloosa, Louise was one of the bossiest. When Louise said, “Hop!” she expected an uprising. Louise told me to run for the school board, and I ran. Louise told me to make a fool of myself, and I helped start the FOOLs. Louise finally retired and now lives in another state, but I'm still stuck with a bunch of jobs she gave me, and so are a lot of other people in town (and we all miss Louise). Anyway, that explains why I do what these bossy women tell me to do, it's part of the local culture.

Now, when the FOOLs first started we had buttons made that said such things as, “I MADE A FOOL OF MYSELF IN OSKALOOSA,” or, “I FOOL AROUND WITH BOOKS.” The shop where we had our buttons made closed years ago and we have never found another source. When our new button making machine arrives, though, we will again be able to make buttons that help fools identify themselves. I expect a surge in memberships when we begin again giving a button with every $5 membership.

The annual Valentine's Day Death by Chocolate celebration is rapidly approaching, an event where a bunch of the bossy old women try to outdo each other in producing chocolate delights which are then sold to raise money and the community cholesterol level. On February 11th the public meeting room at the library will be filled with more fat and sugar than a barrel of candied whale blubber.

“Because you're retired,” is the reason the bossy old women gave when they told me I was responsible for producing the posters and notices about Death by Chocolate. This year the posters will feature Christmas, the tom turkey who lives here. If you are unable to see the connection between turkeys and chocolate then you need to elevate your psyche to a higher plane.


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To subscribe or unsubscribe send an email to FarmNews@RuralNet1.com with either subscribe or unsubscribe in the subject line. If you wish to contribute a few paragraphs or address complaints to the editor, put them in an email and send them to the same address with something else in the subject line. The editor reserves the right to steal ideas submitted, rewrite submissions, and sign false names to them whenever it strikes his fancy to do so.