Stories from the Vet

Audrey can hardly wait to get to work this morning.

---Clean the cat cages. Check.
---Wash a dog. Check.
---Give medications. Check.
---Take the turtle out of the freezer. Check.

Yep. Audrey gets to tube feed a turtle today. This little cupcake didn't see the minimum speed sign on the highway, and got in the wrong lane. A passerby repaired her shell with vet-approved SuperGlue, but she's turning up her stubby turtle nose at the delectable mealworm and tomato salad they serve in Turtle Hospital. So she has to be tube fed. Not a big fan of having a feeding tube run down her throat, she pouts and clamps her jaws, swipes her prissy little toenails against the vet's tender hands, pulls her head back into her shell and slams the door.

Audrey wanted to feed her last night, but the supervising vet had to leave for a birthday party. She promised Aud this morning's feeding. "If she doesn't cooperate," the vet said, "we'll just stick her in the freezer until she slows down."

Might be good to set a little timer or something.

An ornate box turtle photo from the Web. Box turtles, unlike other turtles, have a hinge in the plastron, the plate that makes up the bottom of their shell. This allows them to shut themselves away from prying paws, claws, and veterinary assistants.

Water Lilies

Almost a century ago, Claude Monet was getting old. He had cataracts in both eyes, but still he loved to sit in his French garden and paint his water lilies......over and over and over. Nearly 250 water lily paintings from the last thirty years of his life have survived.

I begin to understand his fascination with the way lilies and bridges go together.

Water lilies are queer, elegant plants with alien-looking seed pods.

Casually called water lilies, they are known in the botanical world as American lotus. Lotus are quite prolific, even considered a weed in some places because of how rapidly they spread. Their roots are edible - American Indians dug them up for food. The floating leaves are flat pancakes on the water, resting pads for toad launches. But as the stems rise, the leaves droop into a graceful cup.

I like the reflections in the water.

The Flamboyant Vickie

My flamboyant niece Vickie came to Farm Camp last week, probably her fourth or fifth time as a camper. Over the years, she's done it all -- cut hay, milked cows, loaded bales, ridden horses, made pickles, painted the chicken coop. Not the sort of work you'd expect out of a city slicker, but this girl's got pluck.

This girl's got pizazz, too. She convinced Rachel that the polka dotted shoes would be a great gift for Erica. She was right.

Because my brother works for an airline, Vickie flies standby. Sometimes that means long delays in or near an airport, trying to get on the next flight. When this happened last weekend, we stumbled across the *National Championship* RollerSports Competition in downtown Omaha. We all expected that this would be pretty much like Olympic figure skating, only with a basketball floor where the ice should be.

What we found instead is that roller skating is for everyone,

from grandpa.........

to soccer mom.............

to cool dude punk.

After you skate, you have your picture made----just like at the Olympics?

And some people think there's nothing to see and do in Nebraska!

Bad Day Farming

Something hydraulic broke---something that held the loader bucket out front up off the ground. The bucket dug in and the tractor ran right up over itself at eighteen miles per hour. Must have been a pretty wild ride.


This is not my photo, not my farm. Just a reminder to be careful and thankful. Someone's day is probably worse than yours.

Happy Birthday

This girl has been making our hearts sing

for fifteen years! I think she's going to have

a great day and a great life.

Echinacea

The Echinacea are blooming!

Commonly called purple coneflowers, Echinacea are native to this part of the country, and they thrive here. Their name comes from the Greek word, "echino", meaning spiny. Remember the echidna, a spiny anteater in Australia? Same Greek root word.

Echinacea blooms always make me think of our artist friend, Susie. She and her sisters have come to Farm Camp a few times. Three years ago, she gave art lessons to Audrey when the echinacea happened to be in bloom.

Here is the cheerful result:

McCormick Morning

Ths sun is up and shining on John's horse-drawn mower.

Archimedes in Nebraska

John bought a new (used) auger. If you don't know what an auger is, you're in good company: the sheriff asked, "Is that one of those tube things on wheels?" I had to call the sheriff because


Brett was going to haul this auger through town behind a pickup. It sticks up nearly fourteen feet when it's towed, and we wondered if that was enough to argue with power lines or traffic lights.

The sheriff had it right--a tube on wheels, with a simple, grand, ingenious rotating screw in the center. Our new one is ten inches in diameter, reaches forty feet towards the sky when in use, and will carry truckloads of corn from the ground to the top of a grain bin at the rate of 3600 bushels per hour---a bushel every second. The technology behind an auger is thousands of years old, developed by a Greek mathematician and inventor named Archimedes. Before combines and grain bins existed, "Archimedes screws"--augers--were used to move water from low-lying areas to higher irrigation canals. They are still used today to drain lowlands in Holland.

To find out whether our King Kong auger was going leave a trail of mayhem as it ripped through town, the sheriff had to call the police department, which usually sleeps on Saturday afternoons. The policeman had to call the Department of Roads, also napping. Before anyone got an answer to anything, the sheriff called back....."I don't know how high the stop lights are, but I think I just saw your man passing through town." No mayhem, no sparks, no screaming, no crumbling buildings on this sleepy Saturday afternoon.

The new auger actually employs three Archimedes' screws, in different orientations, to get the grain from where it spills out underneath the truck to the top of the grain bin. This one is the shortest of the three, in a hopper on the ground that receives the grain as it pours out of the truck.

How To Shop

At the mall, I saw this anonymous grandpa teaching his grandson how to shop with the womenfolk.

Fabric

One of the local seamstresses, wearing her new skirt purchased

on the recent shopping trip.

Last week the GeorgiaGirl and I braved the big city for some shopping before her return to school. At her request, we ventured into the bright lights and vibrant hues of a fabric store.

Fabric stores, with their oceans of colorful opportunities, always deceive me, tempt me, lure me. If I bring home just one piece of something beautiful and soft, the thinking goes, I'll jump in and sew with my daughters---Marmee with her four little women, peacefully and joyfully making happy memories together at home.

Then I remember my wretched, 1970s-era bathrobe. My mother, an accomplished seamstress, had volunteered to teach her teen-aged daughter to sew. For my very first project, I chose a housecoat. The fabric had great, garish purple swirls and bright orange dots in cotton and polyester.

I ripped out and restitched, ripped and restitched, ripped and restitched the circular, set-in sleeve until I wanted to hurl fabric, sewing machine, and my poor mother into the abyss. I finally got a death grip on the sleeve and rammed the presser foot past all objections, swallowing up gathers and basting threads in great gulps and wads. I didn't care.

With the sleeves mangled into place, I attacked the buttonholes. The buttonhole attachment jumped and clattered back and forth behind the presser foot, leaving ragged strips of bright orange thread under my impatient hand. The thread refused to lie in the neat rows of a buttonhole, poking randomly out of the uneven cuts like clumps of hair on a red-headed boy. Bullheaded and angry, I decided that sewing wasn't for me.

Nine or ten years later I was expecting my first child. Nesting instinct must have overshadowed sewing memories, and I made myself another robe. Thrilled with the joy of new life, I was as gentle and careful sewing this second robe (snaps, no buttons) as I had been angry and impatient with the first. God can do a lot with a human soul in nine or ten years.

Nonetheless, I know my talents lie elsewhere. I still love the colors and textures of a fabric store, but don't often allow myself past the fingering and dreaming stage. I will not be sewing a garment any time soon. But look what fun some other people are going to have over the next few weeks!

Never Too Old

Zucchini

I was going to make another little post about my garden but, as usual, the zucchini took over.

What's wrong with this picture?

a. The guy is sleeping on a hard floor in the middle of the day.

b. He's using a running shoe for a pillow, for Pete's sake!!!


c. Stress.



d. All of the above.

Garden Time

Every morning at 6:30 we have garden time. Well, OK......a few mornings a week, at 6:40 or so, some of us have garden time. It was Audrey's idea, and it is a grand one. Usually, by August, I am ready to mow off or plow under; a neglected garden is not a pretty sight, and ours curses or blesses me from right outside the kitchen window. But this year, thanks to garden time, the garden is not only produtive, but also lovely.

Audrey's first job at garden time is to search for squash bug eggs. She usually finds them. If you don't pick them off, they will hatch into a thousand squash bug nymphs. Nymphs suck the juices out of the vines, killing them. Worse, they grow into adults who provide the next set of eggs and nymphs

These are sqaush bug eggs, and the mature bug who probably laid them. I should have taken another shot of the bug, since this one is slightly out of focus, but I was in too big of a hurry to kill it.

Merrill's sunflowers are thriving. Her photo, on the right, won a purple ribbon (that's the best!) at the county fair last week.

I'm not sure Merrill was completely thrilled about weeding her sunflowers or being in front of a camera this morning at dawn, but she was a very good sport!

See you tomorrow at 6:30 a.m.!

G and G

Perhaps "Grandmother and Grandfather" was too much of a mouthful for little ones, so my parents came to be known as "G and G" or, sometimes, just "the Gs."

We like to welcome these two native Texans to our northern abode with a front-porch tribute to their heritage.

G, aka my dad, knows how to take apart a clock and make it work again. Since my clock wasn't ticking, he gave me a tour of its vital organs, including a mathematical discussion of pendulum length---note his scribbled algebraic formulas on the newspaper.

When I was in high school, I might ask Dad for help solving for x, and wind up with a dissection of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. My dad can turn a watermelon seed into a calculus problem and then show you fifteen ways to solve it. This is not a useless skill; he might decide to write you a computer program, fix your broken step or rewire your basement, all because he sees every practical problem as a series of fascinating mathematical relationships. Each one is a siren song to his numerical brain.

The other G doesn't see everything through an algabraic eye. She and I turned a lug of apricots into jam one evening. We gave an absent-minded nod to ratios, temperatures, heat conductivity of metals, and the properties of a vacuum, but were more focused on the senses....taste, smell, color.

I think we'll get Dad on our team when we open the first jar.