The Sucker Tattoo Has Got To Go

Seriously. 

This morning FarmDog started barking like a bird had landed on her head and was trying to ride her into battle. When I poked my head out the door to tell her to shut up, she looked at me, wagged all over, barked at the ground near a corner of the yard, and looked back at me and wagged again.

Clearly, Timmy was down the well again. 

So I went over to see what on earth she was going on about. And saw a pair of kittens.

So I go outside the yard to get a better look at them and see how likely it is that their mother will be coming back by to pick them up later (usually very likely,) and realized that they clearly had eye infections.

Being dry and dusty here it's pretty common for feral kittens to come up with minor eye infections, they generally get over them and all is well. The problem with these two was that their eyes were goobered shut.

And they were skinny.

Also my dog was whining and reaching a paw through the fence to paw near one of them as if to say "They're right there. They're babies. Alone. Damnit do something!" 

Anyway. Babies. Needed help. Need I elaborate on what happened?

It took me ten minutes to get one of em's eyes cleaned up enough to open, and it demonstrated the bad side of eye infections in feral kittens. 

See, usually the momma cat cleans their faces so the eyes don't get stuck shut. If they do, though, all that infection has nowhere to go, and builds up behind the eyelids. So when you do start getting things cleaned up a bit, you get... ooze. In a best case scenario. In a worst case scenario there's a good amount of pressure built up and there's squirting. 

We'll see how they do. One of them is a little worrying, but I'm not going to make a bet either way yet. I'll do everything I can and see what happens.

But something really needs to be done about the sucker tattoo on my forehead if the dog is reading it now...

Black and Silver? Salt and pepper? Wha?

People seem to get confused by the terms we use for our pups when I put up pictures. I can't blame them because the coloration terms make no sense at all unless you know how Schnauzer genetics work. Since I don't have any real content lately (I could bitch about the fact that our living room is a useless waste of space the way it's laid out and is entirely too easy to pile crap in all year because it doesn't get used except for my gaming corner and then September rolls around and it's "holy crap we have to clean the living room out" because company is coming but that's just boring) I decided to do a brief show and tell.

Meet the salt and pepper female. (I'm not naming her, I'm more attached to her than I should be already, she had a name but it was sort of dependent on Micro to make sense, and now it's just kind of depressing to use it soooo salt and pepper female)

She's a cutie, isn't she? I think she's going to wind up being a pretty close younger female version of her daddy, Fuzzy Pup. She's stout like he is and while it's still early days yet on coats I'm betting she's going to lean more towards his curly ultra soft coat than her mom's more wiry coat. Anyway, this morning we played for a while and then she obligingly fell asleep on my lap after giving up on dismembering me one digit at a time.

You can see in the above photo that she's clearly tan and black. Maybe the light markings on her face could be construed as "cream" rather than "tan" but she's definitely not anything you'd call salt and pepper, right? So is this just one of those weird-ass nonsense terms that people use for colors, like "blue roan" when clearly the horse is not actually blue? 

Nope. The reason this little brownish puppy color is called salt and pepper is because of a gene that schnauzers have. This gene causes the brown and tan pigments in the coat to "grey out" or some call it "bleaching out" but I don't like that term because it suggests we're throwing the puppies in the washing machine or something equally awful.

This greying out process starts when they're born, pretty much. Some pups grey faster than others. One of the black and silver males is already just barely cream on his markings, while his brother of the same coat coloration is still fairly tan. So let's take a look at the process in action, so to speak.

Here she is, natural lie to the coat. That really dark streak along her back will probably stay pretty black, or at least be a deep dove grey. Or maybe both. The hairs over her shoulders are banded (the bottoms are black, but the tips are tan) which means that'll probably grey out some, but behind her shoulders and down onto her butt there's no banding and she's blue-skinned there. (If you naired a black and white dog you'd see skin that matches their markings... the black areas would have a skin color that actually does kind of look blue.)

(I hope I don't need to say this but just in case: don't actually nair dogs... beyond just being rude imagine the feeling of nairing your fun bits all over your body.)

Anywho. Puppy:

So. How in the world can this puppy turn grey? Well there's a couple of things that do it, functionally. One is that as the hair grows the greying gene works on it, even if the tips don't fade all that much. Lookie here:

Especially on that left side you can see a really distinct shift. Have another one from a different spot, just to be thorough:

So the tips of the hair will fade out, the new hair growing in will grey more quickly than the hair that's already grown, and depending on the pup, sooner or later you'll get a dog with no brown left, just grey, white, and black. If the process is slow enough (as it may be in this little girl but only time will tell) it's possible that the grey won't show at all until she gets her puppy clip. Basically that's just a quick trim with the clippers, usually just before they go to their new homes, in a general approximation of a schnauzer cut. This does a couple things, first off it makes em look good for their new people, which is always a plus, but more importantly it makes their first experience with a set of clippers happen in an environment where they're comfortable, with people they know.

If a pup greys out slowly enough, it's possible that after their puppy clip, you wind up with a really weird looking pup, showing grey everywhere it was clipped and the tan everywhere they will eventually have "furniture." (That's the completely ridiculous and arbitrary term for the beard, eyebrows, and long hair left down the sides and on the legs of a schnauzer.)

That's where the second process I talked about earlier kicks in. Because eventually, the pup grows it's adult coat and loses the puppy coat. And the greying gene works on any new hairs grown from the get-go, instead of coming late to the game like it does when the pups are developing in the womb. So the new hairs will grow in already grey.

Another neat factoid about this gene is that while the new hairs grow in already grey that doesn't necessarily mean the gene shuts off. Fuzzy Pup is a beautiful deep velvety grey on his back when he's clipped. But let him grow out for a few weeks (or months, man I gotta get him clipped he looks more like a sheepdog than a schnauzer) and that deep lovely grey will fade to an equally lovely light grey, and eventually a silvery color on the ends.

Fuzzy Pup's dad has the same trait, where his coat will silver out if you let it grow long enough. The neat part about that is that Fuzzy Pup's dad is black.

There are other animals with color-change genes, too. Certain wild canids grow a different coat color for winter and summer, I've had a horse that I don't know what gene was responsible but she'd shed out a different coat color every spring. And the beautimous white Lipizzaner breed of horse, famous for all of those heart-stopping airs above the ground? They're born brown or black.

It's true though that few genomes are as flexible as the canine. The dog has gone from wolf to shi-tzu in a remarkably short amount of time, evolutionarily speaking. Look at the breeds that have been developed and reached the goal of the human mastermind behind it in a lifetime. Or even over a hundred years.

Dog: the longest running genetics experiment in history, and it's still going on.

Super Special Announcement!

I hinted at this on my personal Facebook earlier and a couple of people have been bugging me since. Of course, I had to wait until it was live.

The Farm Fam has now officially released our first cookbook: Granny Goodcookies

It's available on Amazon now, and contains 21 of our absolute favorite family desert recipes.

I don't think we did too bad for Farmmom and I's first collaborative effort, myself. It's very different writing prose and putting together a cook book so it has been a learning experience. Especially since this is a project we started a while back, then lost time for, and recently picked back up and finished.

Farmmom plans to put together more recipes, entrees and breads and... well, anything we've got, which includes the kinds of recipes that are most useful these days: those that make a meal from minimal ingredients.

That's the future though, and Granny Goodcookies is our test, to see if people actually want our recipes.

Go check it out and let us know what you think!

This is what I get

For getting optimistic. Yesterday afternoon micro started refusing food and continued to refuse food all day today. 

The only thing I can think is that pneumonia got set up in his lungs, but he's gone. 

So much for my super skills I guess. 

Meet Micro

He's pretty much been my life since Saturday. 

He's one of Jez's pups. A very special pup at that. See, Micro was probably a late fertilization. A product of a mash up of timing and fate to leave him with just a little less time to develop than everyone else. 

As a result he's got a cleft palate. Not even terribly cleft. Near as I can tell there's only one spot that is actually open to his sinuses, behind where his front teeth will be. But it means that a lot of things have to go just right before he can suck. He's managed it, but not consistently enough to keep him going. 

So when it became clear he wasn't doing well on Sunday, and I found the cleft, I started supplementing him. 

And frankly I was failing miserably. I'd never had to deal with a cleft puppy before. I knew they could be bottle fed, but most people recommended tube feeding instead. Unfortunately I didn't have the equipment or the skills for tube feeding. So we struggled on with the bottle. 

We found a position that he didn't seem to flood out in as often. We let him work on the bottle until he got tired, gave him a break, and started over again. We managed to get enough in him to keep him going, but that's it. 

By Wednesday morning I was pretty sure he wouldn't be alive for the next feeding. At four am I got up and he was still there and I prepared to spend an hour fighting along side him, because he just refused to give up, and I couldn't do any less. 

I was sitting there, extremely fuzzy headed from lack of sleep since I hadn't gotten more than an hour at a stretch for a couple of days, willing milk replacer into his little tummy. Nearly crying over how skeletal he was, but if I cried I couldn't see the occasional bubble coming out of the nipple, the only real sign of success I had. 

I thought to myself "If it were any other puppy, I'd be able to put him on his back and let instinct take over- swallow or drown. But he's already risking drowning every time he eats. And worse when he's flat on his back."

Pure stubborn refusal to give up had gotten me this far. I'd been asked by the vet if I was sure I didn't want to put him down, but I simply could not give up on him. I believed he'd probably die anyway but at least he wouldn't be the only one fighting for his survival. He could get some suction on my finger, since it blocked off the cleft, but I hadn't been able to find a nipple that worked for him. People baby nipples were just a bit too big and stiff to work any better than the puppy nipple which was too small to let him get sealed off. 

So at four am with a severe lack of sleep and grief waiting for me I dug deep down inside and found a new level of stubborn. And I started changing his angle a little at a time. Flat on his back was no good, he flooded out and we had to take a break to let him point his head down and suck on my finger to clear them out. 

Straight upright with his chin tipped up worked a little better but it was a struggle keeping him there. He didn't like pointing his nose to the sky. And he still wasn't getting enough.

So I split the difference. Halfway between on his back and basically standing him up on his butt. 

And the bubbles started rolling. I'd been scared of any positions even close to on his back because he flooded out so bad the first time I tried it. 

But we found it. The position that let him work the puppy nipple I'd opened up so that the slightest squeeze would give milk. The one that let it roll to where he could swallow and bypassed the cleft. 

And at that feeding he ate as much as he had the entire day before. 

An hour later it worked again. He didn't eat as much, but he wasn't as empty starting out either. 

All day it kept working. Sometimes more milk sometimes less. I figured out that two hours between feedings worked better than one. At an hour he still had milk in his belly enough that he was prone to starting to doze off. Which meant he wasn't swallowing as efficiently and he was more likely to flood out. At two hours he was ready to get his belly full again. 

And throughout the day, I saw him gaining physically. He rehydrated, and his ribs ever so slowly hid back behind a layer of flesh instead of pressing up against his skin. 

He's not out of the woods yet but he's headed in the right direction. Every couple of hours he gets his belly really full, then goes back to his momma for cuddles and cleanup. He's still miles behind the others, size wise. He probably won't catch up to them, but he's leaps and bounds ahead of where he was. 

As I write this Jez is outside for a potty break and the puppies are all napping or jostling for position. Micro is almost due for another meal but he's willing to nap till it shows up, if the big lunks will let him lay on them. 

I think Micro has taken over the motto "Never give up, never surrender!"

He's not in the clear, there are dozens of things that could still go wrong. But there's an inkling that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel now, and I know he won't stop fighting for it. 

How on earth can I do any less?

Happy Birthday, Sugar

Farmmom and I have been playing with old recipes putting together a cook book recently (yes it will be available to purchase and we're looking at doing more in the future) so I've been thinking a lot about the women who have gone before.

Today happens to be the birthday of one of them.

Sugar (yep, pretty much everybody called her that) was one of those old pioneer women that you just couldn't repress, and she was happiest in the kitchen whipping up tons of food for those she loved.

I was probably ten before she could be convinced to let anyone else take care of most of a holiday family meal, and she had grave misgivings about it even then. It wasn't that she didn't think the rest of the family could cook or that she didn't trust them in the kitchen, that was just her thing.

It didn't help that it was decided to have roasted cornish game hens instead of something more traditional.

She saw the little birds and asked "Where in the world did you find such scrawny chickens? I hope they were cheap!"

Farmmom told her they weren't chickens and they'd be tasty, just wait.

"We'll what are they then? They're not quail, I know that much."

Farmdad, being Farmdad, told her "They're pigeons. You told me there were too many of them roosting in the shop at the farm so I went out and shot a few."

Now, Sugar was convinced that pigeons were nothing but flying rats and no more fit to eat than prairie dogs, so she was less than impressed.

She couldn't stay out of the kitchen after that though. She'd sneak in to check on stuff. Personally I think she was checking on what foods might be contaminated via proximity by the "pigeons."

She did try it though, and declared pigeon pretty tasty. Farmdad told her it wasn't actually pigeon eventually, but from then on every so often for a holiday meal shed ask if we could have pigeon again.

She was a lively, intelligent, wonderful woman, who would have turned 106 today. I am immensely grateful for everything she taught me about life, including how to roll with the punches and make it work, with her tales of the dust bowl.

She taught me how to bake, to never be afraid to experiment with new things even if they don't turn out that well (the cupcakes baked in ice cream cones just never did work out the way she wanted them to, no matter how hard she tried) and that the secret ingredient is always love.

She also taught me by example to express my creative side and that it's worth the effort if it makes just one person smile, even if it's just yourself.

She took baked goods to the nursing home and made crafts for her family and friends. Anything from miniature thermal underwear made up of two intact pairs of tube socks to silk flowers with anatomically incorrect centers. (Ass-ters, pee-tunias, pussy-willows, and boob-gonias. She made the centers out of pantyhose and cotton batting.)

She was a rock and a soft place to land all in one and I will carry the lessons and the skills she taught me throughout my life. In fact, I recently found a quilting ring and a pillow top that I had begun many, many years ago, and started working on it again. I'm out of practice and my stitches aren't nearly as invisible as hers were, but ill get it back. Maybe one day I'll have the guts to break out the quilting rack she used for real quilts and start something big. I have a long way to go and plenty of practice material though. We have totes full of pillow top squares that she had picked out, so I shouldn't run short any time soon.

Happy Birthday, Sugar, we love and miss you.

Reasons I Love Small Town Life Number Umpty-Bajillion

With the lake filling up and the Parks and Wildlife guys ( I still have trouble remembering to call them that instead of Department of Wildlife ) having to water out there's been a lot of uproar.

Luckily our local guys are good sorts and passed concerns upward, which resulted in a meeting about it Monday night. They brought in the gentleman from the Department of Water Resources who had to make the decision in the end whether it was safe to raise the minimum water level a d everyone present got to have their questions answered by him, or the dam engineer for CPW or the local guys as appropriate.

I think everyone walked away with a better understanding, us of what limits they're having to work within, and them of the import of the lake area to the community. The meeting was officially scheduled just before close of business on Friday, set for 5:30 pm on Monday.

They moved it up to 5:00 over the weekend, because of the response, they wanted to be sure to have enough time to answer everything, and according to the sign in sheets there were 102 people that attended. Personally, I think it was more than that. I'm sure some of the folks missed signing in, but that was the official count.

As a result of that meeting, our little lake got moved up the priority list, we got a promise of a quick answer to the question of whether, and how much more water could be held. The answer we got yesterday was yes, hold another twelve feet of depth, but you have to widen the spillway.

And now, our little county is coming together. Our CPW agent asked for help spreading the word, following up on the offers of manpower and equipment that came out of the meeting Monday. And we're getting there. Farmers have volunteered their time and effort to help dig the spillway wider and word is spreading like wildfire through the county.

They closed the gates yesterday, holding just under thirty two feet of water in the lake. The Sheriff's department, some of the town police, and whatever citizens happened to be around all hand a hand in helping to close the floodgates.

Of course, there was another storm over the drainage basin last night, and it ran at least another four feet of water in, so they had to open them again, but it was very symbolic and heartwarming.

I've done my share of rabble rousing and we've volunteered what we have to help with the process, not only of widening the spillway, but of repairing the access road into the Hole. Honestly, I predict that this is going to be the cheapest CPW project of the year for the department, and if not that the only ones cheaper will be repainting the state-maintained bathrooms.

Once again, a rural community has stepped up to give of themselves and their time for something that is beloved.

This, folks, is my United States. This is the lifestyle and mindset that makes me proud to come from a nowhere little area in flyover country.

Ya'll come visit, we'll take you skiing on our lake.