Internet Outage – Thoughts From The Middle of Nowhere

I'm more excited than a gopher in soft dirt, my Internet's back. Monday the 11th, something went out on my Internet and it has taken until now to get it restored. It really has shown me how much I rely on the internet for my news and information. I wish to thank everyone that attempted to contact me and ask what the problem was. I appreciate your concern. Like I said, nothing earth shattering happened, just the Internet outage. n nI feel like I have been living in a vacuum. There is no paper available or anything so what little news I could catch on the radio and TV was all I had. I did not appreciate it. It is not as comprehensive as I am used to. I did write up a little that caught my attention each day. I had to keep up the habit, Enjoy. n n2/12/2007 n nI've decided my new hired hand's favorite word is, HUH. He doesn't get what I am saying most of the time and I feel I give very good directions. Most of it is his ears don't appear to work right. I told him, "take this bucket and get a third of a bucket of water for the chickens." He came back with a full bucket of water. When I asked him why he brought so much instead of a third like I asked he said, "I just say the bucket and heard water so brought a full bucket of water. I also told him I expected him to be out at midnight to start his shift. Right away he had a little trouble on his shift, almost lost a calf, and I asked him when he was out to check them. He said 1:00. I guess his definition of midnight is a little different than mine. I don't know if this is going to work out. n n2/13/2007 n nWith no Internet my news sources are very limited, I even get my paper through the Internet, so I don't have much to say about the news. I would be curious to hear what the lefty brigade of Montana blogs is saying about the Republican lawmakers wanting an apology from Linda McCullough, the Superintendent of Public Instruction. They claim she said Montana's school system is second rate, she says that is not what she said and she won't apologize. That is at least the gist of it I got on the local news. n nI heard an ad on the radio today claiming "a company" was offering guaranteed contracts to raise camolinna(sp?) in Montana. Now I am not a farmer so I'm not interested but a few things struck me. WHAT IS CAMOLINNA(sp?). WHAT IS IT USED FOR AND HOW IS IT GROWN. I also wonder why the ad doesn't mention the company. Is the company that shady that they don't want there name out there or what? This sounds really weird to me but who knows, maybe when the Internet is back i will look up what camolinna is and I will know a little more. n nIt's going to be cold tonight. I don't need this while calving, at least they aren't coming fast and furious yet, just getting started. The warm is supposed to come by weekend. I'll be happy. n n2/14/2007 n nI heard an interesting tidbit on the radio this morning. Something about Sen. Ted Kennedy and other "North Eastern lawmakers" are introducing a bill to prohibit the feeding of antibiotics to cattle or chickens. Now I've commented on the feeding of antibiotics to critters and I don't believe in it. I'm not to sure about prohibiting it by law though. On what basis are they going to do this? There is a theory out there that the feeding of antibiotics to animals is leading to drug resistants strains of bacteria in humans but I have never seen this to be proven, it is just a theory. While I don't like it I don't think there is enough evidence to prohibit it by law. Who knows. n nIn Montana news the House has tabled HB 2, which in Montana is the budget bill for the state operations. I only heard a quick blurb on the news but the Republicans decided to split the one bill into 6 separate bills. I assume this is to give each bill better attention instead of lumping all spending together into one. As normal the Democrats are crying foul. Children at play, what does a reasonable person do. I did enjoy <a href="http://governor.mt.gov/governor/govbio.asp">Gov. Brian Schweitzer</a>'s assertion that if they didn't pass his budget the way he wanted they would stay in session all summer. I hate to inform the Governor, but by the Montana Constitution the gavel has to come down no later than 90 days into the session. To go over that requires a special session and The Governor can't just call a special session willy nilly. It takes a certain number of Legislatures to do that. How many, I am not sure. The Governor is just blowing smoke in my opinion. n nI feel bad today. I missed my annual rant about made up holidays. Yes, every Valentines Day I rant about how stupid made up holidays are. What really proves my point is the number of readers I lose every year after my rant. I usually lose about 40% of my readers after Valentines Day. It real goes to show the amount of energy people have wrapped up in a holiday that Hallmark created. How brainwashed can you get. n n2/15/2007 n nTwo days ago it was about zero degrees and snow showers. Today it was 35 above and the sun shining. It was nice. Now the wind is supposed to blow with gusts up to 80 mph. With the snow on the ground we could get tremendous drifts. Wow, what fun. n n2/16/2007 n nWell, we got the wind but it was warm enough that the snow didn't drift. Just had to deal with the wind. I hate the wind. n nI heard on the evening news that the gal in Billings who so severely abused her own child he will be disabled for the rest of his life got 3 years in jail for her crime. Why is it in our society that you can kill and abuse the children and get just a slap on the wrist? If she would have done the same thing to a dog she would have spent 10 years or better in jail. Our society has problems. n nOn the same topic of screwed up, a counselor at a Billings school was convicted of, I forget how they said it, being a peeping Tom. He was caught watching one of his 14 year old students through the window of her home. He claimed he was there because he was interested in the Mom of the girl. What, Mom wasn't available so ogling the 14 year old girl was just a bonus for this pervert? The real great thing is the school district isn't sure they are going to terminate him or not. This seems like a real easy decision to me. Hell, while firing his ass they should just castrate him to. I'll never figure our justice system out. n n2/17/2007 n nI'll never figure people out. I hired the new hired hand fully knowing that he was deadly allergic to fresh cut hay. He said that when it was dried he could feed it in the winter, but fresh cut was deadly to him. We visited about this and I told him that if he really showed me something and did a good job for me we could work something out and he could work here in the summer and not have to do any haying. I would come up with alternate help. n nI'll guarantee you, he hasn't shown me something worth keeping him around here. I will definitely have to start looking for a guy before summer gets here. I told him I expect him to be able use his own judgment about things, but if I don't tell him exactly what to do, when to do it and how, he sits on his butt and does nothing. That's not showing me much. I pointed out to him a couple of boards that needed pounded in on the corral the other day and he has yet to fix them. Using your judgment is fixing these kinds of little things without me having to give you instructions after I point them out. We even had a little incident the first night he checked heifers that a calf almost froze to death. All this is not showing me anything, it's just showing me you want a paycheck, not that you will go out of your way to do me a good job. I really wonder about him. n nI'll guarantee that he is allergic to the dried hay to. It might not be deathly allergic, but he can barely get the job done feeding. Sometimes he pants and puffs and wheezes enough I'm not sure he is going to live. With all this trouble he has with hay, I really wonder why he tries to do this kind of work. All he can do is complain about previous employers and how they mistreat him. Working with him and seeing his limitations, I doubt all these people have mistreated him, he just isn't capable of doing this kind of work effectively. Sometimes you have to realize you aren't cut out for this kind of work and do something else. I've had quite a few guys come through my place and realize that. Hopefully this guy will to. It would be better for him in the long run. n n nI heard some farmers talking in town yesterday. They were talking about how great the snow was and how it's really going to help the country out. WHAT ALTERNATE UNIVERSE ARE THESE IDIOTS LIVING IN. The ground is frozen solid. Any moisture in this snow is going to run off as you can all ready see if you just open your eyes and look. Some people's children should look and think before they speak, they wouldn't look so stupid. n n2/18/2007 n nColony Collapse Disorder. A whole bee colony dying off and they have absolutely no clue as to why. How scary. I personally don't worry about any of my crops for bee pollination but this is scary for agriculture in general. What I heard on the Tube was that all the workers take off and leave the queen and babies behind. You have to wonder what is out of balance in the hive that causes it. If I remember my genetics right, the workers are all more closely related to each other than they are to the queen. So that they abandon the queen makes a weird kind of genetic sense in a way. I'll be curious to see what is causing this when they figure it out. A real life mystery. n n2/19/2007 n nCalving on the heifers has been real slow so far. As of this morning I only had 7 calves so far. It's changing though. Pulled one calf this afternoon and as of evening two more have had calves. When I turned the bulls out last summer the heifers must not have been cycling. The phase of the moon was wrong or something. It should pick up good now because a lot of them are real heavy. It's about time. n nThe new hired hand helped me pull the calf in the afternoon. He wanted to see how I done it so he could do it. When we were done he said that he didn't think he was going to be able to do it. He didn't think he could move out of the heifers way fast enough. I knew he wore a knee brace when I hired him but he assured me, "it doesn't slow me down." All I can think is that I'm an old, fat man with a ruptured disc in my back and I move faster than this guy. He needs to cowboy up. If this brace didn't slow him down I would have hated to know him before. What do I do? I don't know. n nUPDATE: <a href="http://www.agmrc.org/agmrc/commodity/grainsoilseeds/camelina/camelinaindustryprofile.htm">Camelina Industry Profile</a>. Learn something new everyday.