Scent Diary, July 18-24, 2011

So this has been a really frustrating week…

Monday, July 18: Considerably hotter than yesterday; by 1 pm the upstairs floor was completely miserable, several degrees hotter than the 80F downstairs. I turned the air conditioning back on. Went to fetch The CEO from a field he was mowing, and realized that Eddie Van’s left rear tire was absolutely flat, so I put the spare tire on. I got Bookworm to help me, because one of the things my dad never taught me how to do was to change a tire. Everyone should know how to change a tire. Bookworm may be small, but she’s strong, and she needs to be able to do it, so I made her do at least a piece of every single step. SOTMorning: Love, Chloe, which was an utter disaster. People recoiled from my arm in horror.

SOTAfternoon, when I thought we would have time to get the tire fixed or replaced and then get to the theater to see Part 2 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: a combination of Cristina Bertrand #3 and Samsara, both of which are strongly jasmine. I had put on the CB3 first, and found it a little too chilly, so the Samsara warmed it up. I don’t usually like to layer, but this one worked out fine. In any case, the tire guys finished with the van after the movie had started, so we decided to try again on Tuesday.

Silvia, The Queen

My mother-in-law Barbara has gone out of town for a few days, to a conference, which means that I am currently in charge of feeding her rotten cat, Fidel. (Fidel is not noticeably more spoiled rotten than Queen Silvia.) Fidel is mostly white, with gray tabby markings on his flanks and tail, and a mark on his face that looks for all the world like a mustache! He was mostly Bill’s cat and spent a lot of the day sleeping on Bill’s lap, so he’s been lonely lately.

Tuesday, July 19: Miserably hot again, 90F and very humid. SOTD: several, actually! I was mostly wearing Lumiere Noire pour femme, but also put on, for comparison’s sake, Agent Provocateur DD and Une Rose. It rained a little past noon, and then The CEO’s uncle called to let us know that there were several calves out on his road. Because The CEO was gone to a New River Land Trust meeting, and we were here without him, the kids and I had to go and get them back into the field. Actually, Bookworm did most of the work. There were six heifers who had jumped the Front Field cattle guard, and it was the second time they’d gotten out today, so we were instructed via cell phone by The CEO to put them into the Airport Field instead since they had figured out how to defeat the cattle guard. However, when Bookworm and Gaze went to get behind them and drive them toward the open gate into the Airport Field, two of them turned around and jumped the cattle guard to get back into the Front Field with the rest of the heifer calves, and one jumped the (really bad) fence into the Pond Field with the cows. Two came down the road nicely and went into the Airport Field as calmly as you could wish for, but one of them went through the fence into the Pond Field at another location, breaking at least two strands of barbed wire. Then she stood there looking at her friends on the other side of the road in the Airport Field, so we opened the Pond Field gate and let her walk across the road into the Airport Field.

And all of this during a thunderstorm, with buckets of rain…

After which, since I was already wet, I took a shower and got ready for our second try at seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2. Put on La Myrrhe. I let Bookworm drive the 10 miles to R—-, for the 3 pm showing. We were very disappointed to find out that a local summer camp had bought all the tickets for the 3 pm showing for both today and tomorrow, and the theater was sold out! It’s also playing at 6 and 9pm, but the 9 seemed too late to Bookworm to stay up, and she had cross-country conditioning every day at 6, so that one’s out too. Looks like we’re out of business until Thursday.

When The CEO got home from a Land Trust meeting, he went out to check on a small group of cows in the Dobbins Pasture field, and found a really tiny premature calf. It was alive – unusual for such an early calf – but its mama was too excited to stand still and make it easy for him to nurse. So The CEO came home to thaw out some colostrum (I’ll bet you didn’t know we had that in the freezer!), and when he went back, he found that the calf had rolled under the fence and into the creek. This was not good – a newborn calf’s temperature needs to be kept up for several hours after birth, and being in the creek was dangerous both because of the body chill and the danger of drowning. However, the calf did take the bottle of colostrum and stood up again. He’ll have to be watched, and if his mama is still freaked out, we may have to feed him supplemental bottles.

I just hugged Taz good night, and it made him burp. Which made me laugh.

Wednesday, July 20: The CEO left this morning on a trip to visit all the Agricultural Technology students’ summer internships. I went outside to get into Eddie Van and go over to Barbara’s house to feed Fidel – and found that the front left tire was flat. Really, really flat. So I took the Ranger (his name is Walker, for reasons that should be obvious). Now I need to change the tire agaaaaain, which I’m not happy about, so I can get it fixed. Grr.

SOTD: Jour Ensoleille. Hot again. Mid-90s today, and humid. It must be July. Been watching Season 2 of Glee on Hulu with Bookworm… oh boy, the romance drama! Also, some embarrassing songs.

CEO took off today for his jaunt around the state, checking on the department’s summer internships. He’ll be back on Saturday. Jeff the Hired Guy reports that the preemie calf is standing up and making a good effort at nursing.

Thursday, July 21: Mowed the grass and got horribly sweaty. Did four loads of laundry. SOTD: Mary Greenwell Plum. Finally, finally took Bookworm to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II. It’s a pretty good adaptation; I could quibble to a small degree, but by and large, we were pleased. My opinion on movies based on books is generally that the closer the movie is to the book, the better, but often I’m disappointed.

(Cases in point: Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Billy Bathgate – both great books, not-so-great movies. The only two cases in which I like the movie better than the book: The Wizard of Oz and Forrest Gump. The book Wizard of Oz involves spunky, 20’s-slang-spouting nine-year-old Dorothy in a weird world – there’s no epiphany for her that home is wonderful. And I’m not fond of satire as a genre, as inForrest Gump – a cynical romp through a ridiculous world. Many people would say it is a ridiculous world, and I’m not arguing that it isn’t… exactly… I’m just saying that I am not a big fan of satire, except for ThePrincess Bride, which is actually only satirical in parts, and if you’re just after the “good parts,” you can skip the rest of it. The movie, by the way, is the “good parts,” plot-only version. I adore the movie, but the book is excellent as well.)

SOTEvening: Cuir de Lancome. Man, I ought to take every one of my usual “summer” scents out of the hatbox and pack ’em away. They’re not doing me any good at all. Too light, too chilly, too… somethin’. And when I’m not craving galbanum and fresh florals in hot weather, there’s something wrong with me… I’m not sure what.

Friday, July 22: Hot again. This is the week of the fair, and none of us is the least bit interested in going – it’s just too hot. Testing today: Tom Ford Champaca Absolute, and Shalimar Parfum Initial, neither of which are doing it for me. Champaca Abs is pretty for ten minutes and then unpleasant. Parfum Initial is dreadful for two hours and then nice. Guess it evened out. Sort of.

Saw The CEO’s sister E and her daughter, Primrose, who are visiting while Curiosity and his dad are at Boy Scout camp. They’re leaving after the family reunion tomorrow. Went to see Cars 2 – I’d thought it would be silly, but I enjoyed the light-hearted take on James Bond films.

Black calf from Wikimedia Commons (not ours!)

The CEO called and asked us to go give the premature calf at the Dobbins pasture field half a bottle. It took longer than usual to get the bottle ready – Taz snuck up on me and hugged me while I was putting milk powder into the bottle, and it spilled all over the work surface in the laundry room. So I had to clean it up, because that stuff is sticky. Then Bookworm came in and I told her to, I quote, “put the lid on that bottle and shake it up, while I put on my shoes.” I handed her a half-full bottle with half-a-bottle’s worth of milk powder in it, and sat down to put on my shoes… only to look up and see that she’d filled it full to the brim with more water. Bad. Essentially, she’d watered down the bottle such that this calf (only as big as a medium-small dog) would only get half the nutrition that he really should be getting. So we had to start over. And then we got to the field and found that the mama cow (ear tag X13) was standing over something black and lumpy on the ground.

Yep, dead calf. Really, really dead. Then we had a concern that the cow might have had another twin, and I had to go and look closely at the dead calf to see if it was the one that had been born on Tuesday. If it had an ear tag in its left ear, it was the one that fell into the creek. However, the dead calf was lying on his left side, so that I had to get really close to it to try to lift its head and see if it was the creek calf. The mama cow objected, so Bookworm grabbed the Hot Shot out of the back and waved her off with it while I grabbed a stick and lifted the calf’s head up. It did have an ear tag. We left the calf there so that The CEO and Jeff could do a Weekend at Bernie’s with the calf and convince the cow to walk onto the cattle truck to be hauled to the hay shed and checked by the vet.

Saturday, July 23: Yet again, hot and humid. Bleah. SOTD: uhh… I don’t think I even put any – wait. Yes, I did. It was L’Artisan Mon Numero 8, and it was gone in ten minutes, leaving a slight faint smell of baby powder on my arm.

It threatened to rain, but did not actually do it here. After The CEO got home, he took the boys to an autograph signing and Salem Red Sox baseball game. I think they had fun – they came home with a Kris Negron bat and cap from a silent auction ($23). Kris played for the Red Sox a couple of seasons ago, and is now on the roster for the Cincinnati Reds, playing AAA ball with the Louisville Bats. He seems to be a nice guy; he was always pleased to throw used balls up into the stands where the little boys stand with their mitts, begging.

Bookworm would have gone with them, except that she had promised to volunteer at the table for our local Congressman at the fair. When she got back, she and I watched another episode of Glee. Seems like we’re doing a lot of horrified shrieks while watching Season 2, as in “I cannot BELIEVE that just happened!” or “I cannot BELIEVE how stupid these people are! The adults are worse than the teenagers!” or “Did they REALLY put this on TV???” We were particularly appalled by the alcohol awareness (cough, cough) episode.

Went to bed in Shalimar Light. Yes, the Blue Juice. I don’t apologize for it.

Sunday, July 24: Warm and humid in the morning. SOTD: PdN Le Temps d’une Fete, which I lurve beyond all reason. We got home from church, had lunch, and then The CEO and Bookworm took off to rake and bale a small field, hoping to get done before the storms came. Didn’t happen. It rained buckets.  I’m tired…  Scent of Bedtime was Shalimar Light again, yum.

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Getting Up The Cows

The CEO, Bookworm, and I headed out in the Gator so we could get up some cows on Sunday afternoon, about 4:30. It was hot, but not ridiculously hot – 85F, with a little breeze – and the Gator is open, so when you’re going 15mph it feels like you’re speeding, and the wind blows your hair back, even if you are wearing a Virginia Beef hat borrowed from your husband. We went to the barn lot, down the gravel road lined on both sides with fences hung with honeysuckle vines (smelling heavenly on the hot wind!), and in through the Seven-Acre Field, calling the cows and bull that were in that field out of it. The grass was tall and headed out in that field, so that grass seeds kept flying at us, stinging my arms, as the Gator went through it.

Bookworm driving the Gator

What The CEO needed was a particular portion of the herd to move from one field through another to the small field he uses as a staging area for the barn lot. The barn lot is largely dirt, through years of use, and it holds a disused barn and the working pens and headchute. Generally the cows don’t want to go in there, because it’s not full of grass, and of course it probably smells like cow distress. In the same way that it’s difficult to entice the cat to get into the cat carrier when the only place she ever goes in it is to the vet’s office, where someone will poke her and prod her and mess with her teeth and give her shots, it’s hard to coax cows to go through a gate into a dirt field where they’ve been poked and prodded and given shots. They’re not that dumb.

The cows started the afternoon in a small field that’s referred to as “Weston’s,” so called because The CEO’s father’s first cousin Weston used to live in the house that adjoins it. Weston is a Presbyterian minister, he’s 78 years old, and he hasn’t lived in that house for probably 50 years, but it’s Weston’s Field by long habit.

Cows in the Twenty-Acre Field

When we got to Weston’s Field, The CEO started calling the cows to see if he could just call them into the next field without chasing anything. “Whooo, cows, come on. Whooo, cows, come on.” He dropped me off in what’s called the Back Side with a sorting stick (a three-foot length of black plastic pipe) near the gate and told me, “Stand here and don’t let ’em go down the hill. Make ’em go that way,” pointing toward the wooded area at the top of the hill. He and Bookworm went into Weston’s Field in the Gator, making sure that no animal had been left behind, as cows began coming into the Back Side.

Sometimes they’ll come willingly into a new field, because they’ve come to associate the “whooo, cows” call with fresh grass. I like to imagine that they’re thinking, “Hey, they just opened up a new section of the buffet! Come on, girls, let’s go!” In this case, they came happily into the new field and immediately started munching. If you’ve never been close to a group of 60 large animals, all munching at the same time, it’s interesting. It’s loud.

Cows are interesting, anyway: for one thing, they’re big. Most of ours are of mixed breed, what’s called a “commercial herd.” In our area of the country, that generally means a mixture of Angus, Hereford, Simmental, Charolais, and/or Gelbvieh genetics, and we’ve got elements of all those breeds in our herd. Most of our cows are black because the coat color, from Angus genetics, is dominant. However, because Simmentals and Gelbvieh are multicolored, Herefords are red with white faces, and Charolais are white, the dominant black coat doesn’t always win. We’ve got red cows, brown cows, dull yellow cows, white cows, even grayish and orange cows, making up about 25% of the whole herd, as you might expect if you remember your Mendelian genetics from high school: the incidence of dominant phenotype is about 75%, with recessive phenotypes presenting about 25% of the time. The white face of the Hereford breed comes out fairly often, with white patches on the faces of black cows. (My father-in-law had about five color designations for cows: black, brown, red, white, and yaller. Yaller could refer to anything from yellow to beige through gray to that odd orange color.)

This big red cow is one of the Beefmasters.

We also happen to own about 15 Beefmaster cows, purchased secondhand from an enormous ranch facility in the western states that went bankrupt. Beefmaster is an acknowledged breed on its own, consisting of 50% Brahman, 25% Hereford, and 25% Shorthorn and especially well-adapted to the dry, hot conditions in the western US. They’re good big cows that usually have big healthy calves, and they’re good mamas – but they’re flighty and sometimes aggressive. They have independent streaks, which is somewhat contrary to the herd instinct that tends to be pretty strong in domesticated cattle. Cattle are like deer and antelope and wildebeest and all those herd animals that you’ve probably seen documentaries about on Wild Kingdom: wolves or dingoes or cheetahs cutting an animal out of the herd and hounding it until it’s alone and exhausted. Cows are no dummies when it comes to safety, and they like to stay together… unless they’re Beefmasters.

But back to what I was saying: cows are big. A full-grown commercial cow will generally weigh about 1100 to 1400 pounds. They have big liquid eyes and ridiculously long eyelashes and you can see the muscles move in their flanks as they walk, and if a cow managed to bump into you, you’d probably fall down. Our cows tend toward calmness, except for the Beefmasters, and unless they have newborn calves to protect, are not prone to aggressive behavior.  (Of course there’s always a couple of wild, nervous ones, but by and large they tend to be pretty calm.)  They have big teeth and big jaws, and the munching sounds are loud when they eat, whether it’s grass, hay, or silage.

Bulls weigh in at anywhere from 1800 to 2200 pounds, depending on breed, age and condition, and they can be five to six feet tall at the shoulder, making some of them as tall at the head as NBA players. Most of our bulls – we have six on the farm, and two more bull calves that won’t start earning their keep for another year or so – are purebred Angus, and although they’re more aggressive than cows, they are relatively gentle. We don’t have any of those “Beware of the bull” signs posted; they tend to ignore humans unless they think they’re getting access to fresh pasture or hot babes. (True bull factoid that inordinately irritates me, because of the correlation to human male sexuality: Bulls like cows. They really, really like cows – all cows, regardless of the color of their coats or the size of their udders. But they love heifers. We’ve had relatively calm-natured bulls plow right through barbed wire fences to get to a field full of young cows.)

So these cows came into the Back Side and immediately started to munch. They kept grabbing mouthfuls as Bookworm and I walked behind them, calling things like, “Cows, move!” and “Let’s go, ladies!” Then a few of them took off into the pond, and it was a pain to get them out of the water and moving forward again. Then the vanguard got spooked and headed down the hill, away from the gate into the Seven-Acre field, and we had to let them run awhile and get calmed down before getting behind them again and driving them up the hill toward the gate.

Here’s another thing about cows: they may look really slow and stupid, but they can run fast. We’re not talking racehorse fast here, but definitely faster-than-humans fast. Bookworm can almost keep up with them, but then she’s in great shape. A good sprinter, which she’s not, might be able to outmatch a cow over a short distance.

The Seven-Acre Field, seen from the working pens

Eventually we did get the cows into the Seven-Acre field, and The CEO said to us, “I’ve got to go open the gate into the barn lot. I’ll be back.” So Bookworm and I stood on top of the field and swatted at bugs and panted (me more than her), while The CEO wrestled with the gate. We couldn’t quite see what was wrong with it; all we could see was that it wasn’t moving and he was doing something to it. The cattle went through their regular roll call, cows bawling out for their calves and calves bawling, “Mom! Hey, Mom!” and then, once they realized all were present and accounted for and nobody was chasing them, they settled down to munch grass, standing in the small area of shade under a black walnut tree.

The afternoon had slid into early evening, and the sky had gone a softer blue. A breeze stirred the hair about our foreheads, bringing with it the weedy, astringent odor of trampled herbage and a faint whiff of honeysuckle from the fencerow. Bookworm whirred her sorting stick in the air, for something to do, and from the Whittaker Woods field, we could hear a woodpecker absurdly loud in its pursuit of bugs. Birds sang. The breeze blew about us again, this time bearing the animal smell of cattle with the hot-bread smell of grass seeds drying.

Cows munched. We swatted at bugs. Wind blew, birds sang, the woodpecker thocked at his tree again. It was peaceful.

Head chute in the working pens

And then The CEO opened the gate and came back up the hill toward us in the Gator, and it was off to the races again, driving cows along the fence to the corner and then down the hill toward the gate. I’ve done this before when the cattle get to the corner and run down the hill and up the other side, and then they get to the gate corner and sheer off, going the other way. The Seven-Acre field is relatively small, but if you find yourself chasing a couple dozen tons of animal around it, it’s plenty big. However, this time it worked as it was supposed to work, and the cows went through the gate into the barn lot.

So after much congratulatory chatter, we got into the Gator and headed home, down by the Old Homeplace, by the spring, down the gravel lane I am now calling Allée des Chévrefeuilles, and turned the corner for home. The sky had gone periwinkle blue, and my clothes were wet with sweat, and the air-conditioned house felt like a little piece of heaven. We ate dinner very late, after our showers, and stumbled to bed early.

Honeysuckle down the gravel road

The next day there would be another bunch of cattle to move.

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