Our five senses are considered to be the ability to see, hear, feel, taste and smell. The question before us is how we would gain any evidence of anything if all five senses were not present. What we gain from the use of our five senses, (In my case only four and a fraction) is intelligence. If we had none of the five ways of gathering data, we would, I imagine, have no intelligence. There would be no evidence. We would have no information. Any idea we then had would be based on the absence of information.
Increasingly there is a lack of the sixth sense that allows us to reason. Without this ability, the sense called “common sense”, we are not able to believe.

Why am I known as JBTHEMILKER

The story goes way back to when I was in the fifth grade in Concord Mass. I was in a 5th grade class of about 200 students. I assume about half of those were girls. Of the boys in my class, there were three boys named Chris Smith. There were five boys named Jeff Brown. I was one of the Jeff Browns.
There was some confusion at times. At one point, Jeff Brown was called to report to the principal’s office. I assumed, as two of the other Jeff Browns did, that I had done something wrong and headed off to face my punishment. As it turned out, none of the Jeff Browns, who went to the principal’s office had done what we had been summonsed for. It was one of the two, who had not reported.
Each of the Jeff Browns found a way to distinguish himself from the others. I was one of three, Jeff A Brown, Jeff B Brown, and Jeff C Brown. We all used our full names with the accent on the middle initial. So I became know as Jeff B Brown, with the accent on the B.
When I left that school system to go away to boarding school, I found there were many other Jeff Browns in the world. I wanted to have a unique name. I could not get people to call me Jeff B Brown anymore. I, too soon, became just one more of the many Jeff’s to be found anywhere I went. In my first writing class in college, we were all asked to use pen names. There was one student in that college named Preston Ralph MacKinnon. We all called him “PR”. I liked the way using the two first initials sounded. It was in that creative writing calls in college that I first used the name “JB”. I soon became known as JB Brown. From then on when I introduced myself, I would call myself JB Brown.
I wrote for many years under the name JB Brown.
In 1998 I was living on a dairy farm. I became friends with the son of the father-son operation on the dairy farm. I was working as a local truck driver, but I was always intrigued by the farm, the cows and the operation of milking and feeding the herd.
Rick was the son. He was very tired of milking. He would milk in the afternoon, at 2 pm, six times a week, and he would also milk one time, on Sunday morning, at 2 am, so his father could have a day off.
No matter what else was going on around the farm, planting, haying, corn to be chopped, the cows always had to be milked and they had to be milked on time.
Rick was sick of milking. He had been in partnership with his dad for about 20 years. I would go down to the milking parlor and talk to him when I was home and he was milking. At first when I was in the milking parlor with Rick during the milking, the cows would act out, but as I started to come more and more, and as I got to know the animals, they got more comfortable with me. Rick would let me help with the milking. He started by showing me how to put the suction cups on, then he let me control the flow of cows, six coming in as six were going out. Slowly, over several months, Rick gained more trust in my ability. He would allow me to gather the cows in the waiting room, and he would allow me to help set all the valves of the apparatus so he could cut down on the time it took to get the milking done.
After I had been helping him for several months, on a, “come if you have time” sort of basis, I bought an old farm pick-up from the farm. (Bear with me here. This all has to do with my name.) The Old 1973 Ford F250 was in need of a lot of work. Rick would offer to install parts that I bought for my new truck, if I would milk for him. The farm had a shop right along side the milking parlor. He could put new brakes on my truck while I did the milking. He was happy to be doing something other then milking, yet he was close enough, that if I had a question, or needed help, I could get him quick enough. I thoroughly enjoyed the milking. I had 104 cows, who loved and depended on me. I made as many deals with Rick as I could so I would be able to do the milking. The old Ford ran like a top, and I got more and more chances to milk the cows.
Rick was in the middle of a heated custody battle with his ex-wife over his three kids. They had had two children, an eight-year-old boy, Levi, and an 11-year-old girl, Jennifer. Then when she got pregnant again, she left him and divorced him, and she wanted to have full custody over their kids. Rick was in this battle all the time I knew him. It was a big part of what we talked about as I helped him to milk. We became very close friends and confidants.
Well, Rick ended up taking a shotgun one night and he shot his wife, his three month out daughter, Levi and himself. Jennifer got away alive but she had been shot in the femur, the upper leg. Jennifer lay with her dead family until the father came to milk at 2 am and saw the lights all on and the ex’s car in the driveway and went to investigate. After Rick’s death I made a deal with Bob, the father. I would milk the cows 12 times a week for room and board plus a small wage. I would step into his son’s boots as best I could. This meant the father was able to pretty much retire. He just milked twice a week so I could have a day off. I was milking at two in the morning and two in the afternoon. I had a job I really liked.
Rick had had a computer. I never had used one. I had been loaned a laptop to do a bit of writing on, just enough to know that I wanted a computer with a word processing program on it. I had never had any experience with the Internet at this point. When Rick died and I started milking, I got most of his cloths. (I am wearing a pair of his dress boots, right now) I was asked if there was anything else of his that I wanted. I asked if I could use his computer.
So, I was now on the Internet for the very first time. I had to pick a screen name. I tried JB that was too short. I tried JB Brown. That had been taken. The next one I tried was JBTHEMILKER. That one was OK! I was JB and I was a milker. I liked my new screen name. Everything I have written, (and I have done a considerable amount) from then until now, I have written under the screen name of JBTHEMILKER. I still maintain the same AOL address that I established there at the dairy farm, JBTHEMILKER@aol.com. I love to get emails. Feel free if you are reading this to send me an email. I make it a priority to answer my emails.

I shall.

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

It is funny in a way that this thread came up today. One of my halfway thought through plans was to hop in my car and see if I could make it to a fellow JSH person’s home. My rationality kicked in. Even if I made it there, I would not have the money to make it back. There is an impending ice storm headed this way, and I have church responsibilities tomorrow.
I would like nothing more than to show up on someone’s door step.

I can picture myself looking around for the plates and silverware as Britty works in the kitchen to create this masterpiece. Wouldn’t it be heaven to be there waiting for her culinary delight to come to the table.

Tell me... How does one become part of this harem?

Coco,
I assume when you get no feed back to something you post, that means that they all loved it. I post many times and get very little feedback. Don't let it get you down. You are still as good as you were before you posted it.
JB, author of the “Peko Mine” thread in the General section that doesn’t get any replies.

Tanny

Down on the farm in Bradford, we had a verity of critters. Pigs were always a popular animal with me down there. I would raise sows, the females. I had a female, and I would get her bred by borrowing a bore, a male pig. I would then have little piglets. Hopefully I would have them at the beginning of the summer when the price for young pigs was the best. I would sell all the piglets but one or two, keeping only females. I would then raise her up until she was old enough to be a mother pig. I would let a pig have two batches of piglets, and then she would be sold as a still good mother pig. That way I never had to butcher a pig. I kept them as pets. By selling all the males, and the mothers as mothers, I never had to kill any pigs and I always had a few around the place.
Tanny was the runt of a litter of 17 piglets. Her Mom did a champion job at raising the 16 others, but when Tanny came to the dairy bar to get her meal, her Mom would shoo her away. So Tanny became a "Cosset" pig. That is, she was a bottle fed pig. We had her in the house from the day after she was born. She was started on the Colostrum we had frozen. That's the first milk from a cow after they have a calf.
Tanny survived the start, and was raised in the house. She had a nest box under the wood stove where she slept. Through her formative years of childhood to adolescence she was a family pet. She slept in a basket under the stove at night and was out in the yard with the dogs and cats and chickens and whoever else was out there during the day. When someone would drive into the yard she would come running up to great them, a trick she had learned from Blue Dog, our Airedale and her best buddy. Tanny was never sure if she was a misshapen dog, or a cat, or a human who couldn't stand. Her treat was to wait until Blue Dog had had all he wanted from his dog dish, she would go over and finish anything he had left in the bowl. Blue Dog and Tanny became fast friends.
As she got older and healthier after a shaky start, she had run of the house. She had a wading pool in the front yard. She would laze in that. She was a tan colored pig, and we always used to say she was working on her tan when she would lie out in her plastic wading pool.
That lasted until her wedding. Borus the bore came for a mouth long stay when Tanny was of an age to be courting. The two of them had a month long love affair out in Tanny's new home in the barn. From the time Borus showed up at the farm, Tanny was no longer aloud in the house. She by this time was a good-sized sow, and was too big to be in the house. While Borus was dating her, she was locked in the barn, something she never thought was just. But when Borus left, she was again let out from time to time. She would squeal and beg to be let out of the barn whenever anyone drove into the yard.
The place in the barn became like her place under the stove, she would go there to sleep, but she had run of the yard. She just was no longer allowed in the house.
As I said I let each mother pig have two litters. Tanny had had her second at the time I am thinking of. She was a big girl by this time. Being free to roam, she found plenty to eat, and she grew to be a very plump and happy sow. She might have tipped the scale at about 5 to 6 hundred pounds.
Well, Laurie had to make a trip down to her folks house, down in Territown, NY. I was working down in town as a millwright in one of the local reel mills. While Laurie was away, and I was at work, I tried to keep Tanny locked up in the barn. But this one morning, I couldn't get her to come up from the pound where she was busy digging and playing in the mud. The reel mill was a time clock sort of job, and it was time for me to go. She wasn't going to go in the barn, she wasn't ready, and it was time for me to go to work. I left her out, and went down to work. I came up to the house at lunchtime. I wanted to have her locked in the barn. Laurie was coming home that day. I wanted Tammy to be in the barn when she got home. Lunch is just 30 minutes at the reel shop, and it is a five-minute drive up the hill to our farm. I came up and Tanny greeted me, running up from the pound. I asked her to go in the barn, coaxing her with a dipper of grain. But she wanted to play... Lunchtime was near over, and she was still out, I had to leave her and go back down to work.
My neighbor was coming down the hill as I was going out, I stopped him and asked if he could just go down and put Tanny in the barn. She was a frequent visitor up to their house, and he was used to bringing her down the hill and locking her in the barn. I sped off down over the hill, trying to get back to work before the whistle blew.
Well, I had bought a fifty-pound bag of dog food, and I had put it down just inside the door. There was a trashcan it was supposed to be in, but with me, alone in the house, it had not gotten into the can yet. It was still sitting just inside the kitchen door. Now, our kitchen door in that old farmhouse was not hermetically sealed. By that, I mean the sent of the dog food was able to penetrate that door. Tanny came to the kitchen door wanting, most likely, to come in the house. She often would stand at the back door and beg to come in, but by this time she was not allowed in there, not at all. She must have sniffed that dog food, and it brought back fond memories. The dog dish and the treats she had gotten as a kid, eating out of Blue Dog's bowl. That was a raised panel door, an old one, one we were all sort of found of. But Tanny found it the only thing between her and a treat. She came in through the door, making tooth picks, most of them broke in the center, of that raised panel door.
The fifty-pound bag of dog food was indeed a nice treat. But then she wanted a little something more. She knew the fridge had food in it. When we used to open the fridge, she would get cool milk, or a treat of some sort put in her bowl. She finished off the dog food and gave a thought to a nice drink of cool milk to wash it all down. She opened the door to the fridge, and looked through the items on the door. She found that easiest if she just placed them all on the floor. She opened them by breaking bottles and eating whatever she could break open. The milk was near the back on the top shelf. To get that down she just got her snout up there and raked the selves down onto the floor. That worked well, now everything was out of the fridge, shelves and all. Several containers had broken so she could have a good little meal.
After the fridge, the pantry was right there. A pan of brownies I had baked for a treat for Laurie when she got home was on the top shelf. Tanny got that down, and in so doing took all the shelves down and everything on them. She found the cans could be opened by biting down on them. She wouldn't get all of what was in them, but it would be all over the floor for a later snack. That was all real good. Now, for one last treat. I had made a pine kitchen table. In the center of that pine table was a decorative little vase of popcorn. Tanny just climbed up on the table, reached for the popcorn. When I built that table, I had not planned on the stress factor of a six-hundred-pound pig climbing up onto it. The pine table couldn't stand the strain and broke in to several small pieces, just about right for kindling.
By then Tanny was full it was time for a nap. What better place than her old spot under the wood stove. She was bigger now then she had been when she last went under the stove. In getting down under there she dislodged the stovepipe and spread soot all over the living room. I guess that was not as comfortable as she had remembered it. She then went into Grammy's bedroom, the only bedroom on the ground floor. The bed looked like a good place for a nap. Laurie had spent a year making a quilt, and that was on Grammy's bed. Tammy wanted to readjust things a bit to make it a bit more comfortable. After all, she always dug around a bit in the mud before she lay down for a nap. It was only natural to use her snout, covered with the remainder of the contents of the kitchen, to dig a hole in the center of the bed. She dug down through the quilt, the blankets and the sheets, and into the mattress. There must have been something in that mattress that smelled like it needed a bit more investigating, because she dug right down though the mattress and into the bed springs.
That was how I found her when I got home. As I came into the kitchen, I thought we had been broke into. I followed her trail of destruction, and found her asleep on Granny's Bed.
Now, a normal pig BM, from a two hundred-pound pig, is about the size you see every morning in the toilet. Tanny was now three times that weight, and she had had a large meal. (Fifty pounds of dog food was the first course.) Her BM was of a great size, and she had not even bothered to get up off Granny's bed to defecate. So there she lay, with a BM behind her on the bed, the size of a cat curled up, sitting behind her.
I yelled at her and shooed her out of the house. I got her to go in the barn, when you got mad at her she would go there. I was mad at her.
Just as I was locking the gate on her pen, I saw the headlights from Laurie’s car, returning from a week down with her folks.
Laurie was not pleased with me.

Down on the farm in Bradford, we had a verity of critters. Pigs were always a popular animal with me down there. I would raise sows, the females. I had a female, and I would get her bred by borrowing a bore, a male pig. I would then have little piglets. Hopefully I would have them at the beginning of the summer when the price for young pigs was the best. I would sell all the piglets but one or two, keeping only females. I would then raise her up until she was old enough to be a mother pig. I would let a pig have two batches of piglets, and then she would be sold as a still good mother pig. That way I never had to butcher a pig. I kept them as pets. By selling all the males, and the mothers as mothers, I never had to kill any pigs and I always had a few around the place.
Tanny was the runt of a litter of 17 piglets. Her Mom did a champion job at raising the 16 others, but when Tanny came to the dairy bar to get her meal, her Mom would shoo her away. So Tanny became a "Cosset" pig. That is, she was a bottle fed pig. We had her in the house from the day after she was born. She was started on the Colostrum we had frozen. That's the first milk from a cow after they have a calf.
Tanny survived the start, and was raised in the house. She had a nest box under the wood stove where she slept. Through her formative years of childhood to adolescence she was a family pet. She slept in a basket under the stove at night and was out in the yard with the dogs and cats and chickens and whoever else was out there during the day. When someone would drive into the yard she would come running up to great them, a trick she had learned from Blue Dog, our Airedale and her best buddy. Tanny was never sure if she was a misshapen dog, or a cat, or a human who couldn't stand. Her treat was to wait until Blue Dog had had all he wanted from his dog dish, she would go over and finish anything he had left in the bowl. Blue Dog and Tanny became fast friends.
As she got older and healthier after a shaky start, she had run of the house. She had a wading pool in the front yard. She would laze in that. She was a tan colored pig, and we always used to say she was working on her tan when she would lie out in her plastic wading pool.
That lasted until her wedding. Borus the bore came for a mouth long stay when Tanny was of an age to be courting. The two of them had a month long love affair out in Tanny's new home in the barn. From the time Borus showed up at the farm, Tanny was no longer aloud in the house. She by this time was a good-sized sow, and was too big to be in the house. While Borus was dating her, she was locked in the barn, something she never thought was just. But when Borus left, she was again let out from time to time. She would squeal and beg to be let out of the barn whenever anyone drove into the yard.
The place in the barn became like her place under the stove, she would go there to sleep, but she had run of the yard. She just was no longer allowed in the house.
As I said I let each mother pig have two litters. Tanny had had her second at the time I am thinking of. She was a big girl by this time. Being free to roam, she found plenty to eat, and she grew to be a very plump and happy sow. She might have tipped the scale at about 5 to 6 hundred pounds.
Well, Laurie had to make a trip down to her folks house, down in Territown, NY. I was working down in town as a millwright in one of the local reel mills. While Laurie was away, and I was at work, I tried to keep Tanny locked up in the barn. But this one morning, I couldn't get her to come up from the pound where she was busy digging and playing in the mud. The reel mill was a time clock sort of job, and it was time for me to go. She wasn't going to go in the barn, she wasn't ready, and it was time for me to go to work. I left her out, and went down to work. I came up to the house at lunchtime. I wanted to have her locked in the barn. Laurie was coming home that day. I wanted Tammy to be in the barn when she got home. Lunch is just 30 minutes at the reel shop, and it is a five-minute drive up the hill to our farm. I came up and Tanny greeted me, running up from the pound. I asked her to go in the barn, coaxing her with a dipper of grain. But she wanted to play... Lunchtime was near over, and she was still out, I had to leave her and go back down to work.
My neighbor was coming down the hill as I was going out, I stopped him and asked if he could just go down and put Tanny in the barn. She was a frequent visitor up to their house, and he was used to bringing her down the hill and locking her in the barn. I sped off down over the hill, trying to get back to work before the whistle blew.
Well, I had bought a fifty-pound bag of dog food, and I had put it down just inside the door. There was a trashcan it was supposed to be in, but with me, alone in the house, it had not gotten into the can yet. It was still sitting just inside the kitchen door. Now, our kitchen door in that old farmhouse was not hermetically sealed. By that, I mean the sent of the dog food was able to penetrate that door. Tanny came to the kitchen door wanting, most likely, to come in the house. She often would stand at the back door and beg to come in, but by this time she was not allowed in there, not at all. She must have sniffed that dog food, and it brought back fond memories. The dog dish and the treats she had gotten as a kid, eating out of Blue Dog's bowl. That was a raised panel door, an old one, one we were all sort of found of. But Tanny found it the only thing between her and a treat. She came in through the door, making tooth picks, most of them broke in the center, of that raised panel door.
The fifty-pound bag of dog food was indeed a nice treat. But then she wanted a little something more. She knew the fridge had food in it. When we used to open the fridge, she would get cool milk, or a treat of some sort put in her bowl. She finished off the dog food and gave a thought to a nice drink of cool milk to wash it all down. She opened the door to the fridge, and looked through the items on the door. She found that easiest if she just placed them all on the floor. She opened them by breaking bottles and eating whatever she could break open. The milk was near the back on the top shelf. To get that down she just got her snout up there and raked the selves down onto the floor. That worked well, now everything was out of the fridge, shelves and all. Several containers had broken so she could have a good little meal.
After the fridge, the pantry was right there. A pan of brownies I had baked for a treat for Laurie when she got home was on the top shelf. Tanny got that down, and in so doing took all the shelves down and everything on them. She found the cans could be opened by biting down on them. She wouldn't get all of what was in them, but it would be all over the floor for a later snack. That was all real good. Now, for one last treat. I had made a pine kitchen table. In the center of that pine table was a decorative little vase of popcorn. Tanny just climbed up on the table, reached for the popcorn. When I built that table, I had not planned on the stress factor of a six-hundred-pound pig climbing up onto it. The pine table couldn't stand the strain and broke in to several small pieces, just about right for kindling.
By then Tanny was full it was time for a nap. What better place than her old spot under the wood stove. She was bigger now then she had been when she last went under the stove. In getting down under there she dislodged the stovepipe and spread soot all over the living room. I guess that was not as comfortable as she had remembered it. She then went into Grammy's bedroom, the only bedroom on the ground floor. The bed looked like a good place for a nap. Laurie had spent a year making a quilt, and that was on Grammy's bed. Tammy wanted to readjust things a bit to make it a bit more comfortable. After all, she always dug around a bit in the mud before she lay down for a nap. It was only natural to use her snout, covered with the remainder of the contents of the kitchen, to dig a hole in the center of the bed. She dug down through the quilt, the blankets and the sheets, and into the mattress. There must have been something in that mattress that smelled like it needed a bit more investigating, because she dug right down though the mattress and into the bed springs.
That was how I found her when I got home. As I came into the kitchen, I thought we had been broke into. I followed her trail of destruction, and found her asleep on Granny's Bed.
Now, a normal pig BM, from a two hundred-pound pig, is about the size you see every morning in the toilet. Tanny was now three times that weight, and she had had a large meal. (Fifty pounds of dog food was the first course.) Her BM was of a great size, and she had not even bothered to get up off Granny's bed to defecate. So there she lay, with a BM behind her on the bed, the size of a cat curled up, sitting behind her.
I yelled at her and shooed her out of the house. I got her to go in the barn, when you got mad at her she would go there. I was mad at her.
Just as I was locking the gate on her pen, I saw the headlights from Laurie’s car, returning from a week down with her folks.
Laurie was not pleased with me.

Now this was a case of maybe one too many pets.

One way to make the very best of that bone chilling weather would be to snuggle up on a couch with someone from this site. I bet you could get any number of volunteers.

The sun is shining and each email I get forecast a storm of doom and gloom. They say even here in the Washington DC area we are going to get a wintery mix of snow changing to sleet and freezing rain. It will be a challenge, it looks like, just to get to church in the morning. In the meantime the sun is shining and it is a new day, one I hope to make the best of. Winter will not come back until this afternoon. Make the best of it.

Chocolate
Shortly after Laurie and I got married, I considered it quality time with my new bride to take her along with me up to the livestock Auction in Thetford Vermont. The Gray's Auction house had a weekly livestock auction. At that auction they sold all types of livestock. The farmer and/or anyone could bring their animals up to the auction house on a Monday, and starting at two in the afternoon, the animals would be auctioned off to the highest bidder. They sold almost everything by the peace, so that everyone knew just how much they were bidding. It was a very friendly atmosphere of farmers coming together to sell what they would rather have money for and buy what was being sold at a good price. The auction would go on until everything in the auction hall had been auctioned off. It always went till at least ten in the evening, and if there were a large number of animals that week, the auction could go until two or three in the morning. Herb Gray would make an announcement at the start of each auction, I don't remember the whole of it, but the gist was that they would sell most any and all animals with the exception of reptiles, cats dogs and small children.
There was also a selection of .... stuff. (Junk I would call it) They would sell anything that had to do with life on the farm. This might include fence posts, saddles, cream separators, horse blankets, tools, I even saw shaving cream sold up there on Monday afternoon. It all has something to do with life on the farm.
I had been making it a part of my week to go up there and spend my Mondays at the auction house. When I got married, my auction going days diminished. But if I didn't have other work to do, Laurie and I would get into whatever vehicle she had running that week, and we would make the minimum of a two hour drive up to the auction house.
It was on one such trip to the Thetford auction that Chocolate came into my life. Chocolate was a dark Brown Swiss cow.
As a customer, buyer, seller, spectator, at the auction, there are bleachers to sit on. The animals come through the sales ring and are auctioned off in front of you. Some animals come though in lots. The auctioneer, Herb Gray will announce in his loud voice what the deal is as each lot is sold. A common way they did it was to bring in four to a lot. The first time he would say "Choice.” This meant you could choose witch animal you wanted out of the four animals being sold. You would pay the going price for the one/ones you selected. Then he would say "Buy the peace and take two" In which case the bid winner would pick two from the group and he would own them for the price he won the bidding at. Most lots finished with "buy the peace and take the lot" This would usually bring a lower bid and the winner would have to take all the remaining critters from the lot, each costing whatever they had bid.
Al would do the calling. He had a song or chant he would call out in a melodious voice, always seeking the best price for each animal. Once you got used to Al’s chant, you would always know just where he was in the bidding. It was a joy to sit and listen as Al sang to you for the afternoon, always enticing the audience to contribute to his song. Herb was the ringmaster, calling the shots. He owned the business and directed every move of the auction hall. Becky, Herbs wife with bright red hair and a bright smile would document each sale. Herb's three Kids would shuffle the animals around, bringing the lots though the ring, and putting them in pens where they could be found by their new owners after they were sold.
I had found out a long time ago, that I liked to do more then just sit in the stands and watch the animals go by. When they were selling something I had no interest in I would stand out where the animals arrived. There was a paid auction worker who would tag each animal as it came in. He would then tell the seller where the animal had to be penned. There were usually two pens for pigs, a sheep and goat pen, Heifer calf pen, bob calf pen, the old milking parlor in the auction barn was used to keep the dairy cows ready to be sold. This collection of pens was very fluid and dynamic, it would change not only from week-to-week as different animals came into season, But as the sale went on, the pens would change from animals for sale, to sold animals waiting to be picked up.
If there was something being sold in the sale ring that I was not interested in, I could be found out where the small animals came in. After they were tagged, they needed to go in the correct pen. There were gates to be opened and piglets to be carried. Gates to be closed and bystanders to be separated so the animal could get through. Sheep could be a challenge to get into the pen where you wanted them. I had some experience with getting sheep to do as I wanted. Goats could be fun as well. It sometimes came down to a bit of a competition to see who was better at getting the animals to go where they needed to be.
I enjoyed the work, and Laurie always had a good time when she would come along as well. It gives you a good chance to get a close up look at the animals, you see who brought them in, what they looked like coming off the truck (or out of the back seat of a car).
Most weeks I would bring something up, to pay for the day. However, I would also usually end up as the highest bidder for something, and I would have something to take back home. Rusty was Herb's youngest boy. He was sort of in charge of what came into the ring next. If he wanted five sheep, he would get in the pen and shoo the five he wanted as a lot out into the corridor, then I would help get them through the gates needed to get them to the auction ring. He liked to keep the pace up, always have something in the ring to be sold off. After they were sold they would come back, we tried to keep from having two-way traffic in a corridor, they would go out one way and come in another. There were many gates to be manned and an occasional slow critter to be helped along. This was all strictly voluntary, but it often had its benefits. Sometimes the caller would sell a critter for a low price, by just taking the bid of the person who opened the bidding, this would get people to bid better.
Laurie and I unloaded Chocolate out of the little pick-up she had come up in. Chocolate was a week-old calf. She was the color of Milk chocolate, she had some Brown Swiss in her and she was as cute as a button. Laurie found out she was over ten days old and she had been on her Mom for all that time. This meant she had had her Mom's Colostrum and would be well started and ready to be bottle fed. Rusty was right there and Laurie expressed to him that we would like this Calf. We penned her with the other heifer calves waiting to be sold.
After the dinner break is when the heifer calves are sold. Laurie and I were in the stands waiting for this cute little calf to come through. We waited and waited, and they kept selling lot after lot, but the one we were waiting for didn't seem to come. I would sometimes start the bidding. This would start the bidding going and I seldom ended up with the winning Bid. If I did get it, it was for far less then I felt it should have sold for. We watched and waited for the tag number 23 we knew had been put on the calf we wanted, but she didn't show. I began to think that maybe I had missed her somehow. When all the heifer calves had sold I went back to the calf pens and looked, there she was, lying down in the corner. Rusty was just passing the pen, I hailed him and said we have one more heifer calf here, he isn't marked as sold. He muttered that she had been sold.
The cows all go in the early evening, I am not going to buy a cow, so I help move them from pen to pen as that part of the sale is going on, opening and closing gates and getting them to move along.
Late in the night it got so the only thing left to be sold were the bob calves. I didn't want a steer or a beef animal, I certainly didn't ever want to raise a bull, so I was behind the scenes moving the calves about. I checked over in what had been the heifer pen earlier in the day, there was the milk chocolate colored heifer calf. They needed to use that pen for the sold bob calves, one of the workers went out and checked with Becky to see who had bought the heifer, to see if they could get her out. Becky said "No, That number has not come through."
I was aware of all of this, and I went out to see when the calf went. I figured they would announce that it was a heifer calf, and auction it off. Rusty was up on the lectern, and he wanted to get the sale going. Chocolate was in the first lot of six bob calves to come out.
"Ok, we'll do choice one time and who will get us started at fifty dollars, fifty, fifty do I have fifty, fifty, fifty, fifty, Twenty-five anywhere? Do I see twenty? Fifteen ten anywhere can I have five dollars for choice? ” I signaled.
"Sold! To JB Brown down in the front row, You want them all JB?"
"No, I want the Swiss one, number 23, the brown one right there."
The next time Rusty sang his song the price was up around $50 where it should have been.
Well, you can bet that next time the people in the stands were a bit closer to the edge of their seats and ready to signal, hoping that Rusty would slide them a quick one. I had bought a heifer calve for the price of a sick bob calf. For just $5 I had a female cow who would live to have seven calves of her own.
To be continued....

JB Brown

I vote they add this feature. I like to send and recieve pictures.

Cloudy, you are right. There is deference between a stray cat, one without a home and the feral cat, a cat born to a wild cat that has never known domestication.

I guess now we have a female of good standing who can tame an un-tameable feline. That would fit for our feral cat lady.

Tanny

Down on the farm in Bradford, we had a verity of critters. Pigs were always a popular animal with me down there. I would raise sows, the females. I had a female, and I would get her bred by borrowing a bore, a male pig. I would then have little piglets. Hopefully I would have them at the beginning of the summer when the price for young pigs was the best. I would sell all the piglets but one or two, keeping only females. I would then raise her up until she was old enough to be a mother pig. I would let a pig have two batches of piglets, and then she would be sold as a still good mother pig. That way I never had to butcher a pig. I kept them as pets. By selling all the males, and the mothers as mothers, I never had to kill any pigs and I always had a few around the place.
Tanny was the runt of a litter of 17 piglets. Her Mom did a champion job at raising the 16 others, but when Tanny came to the dairy bar to get her meal, her Mom would shoo her away. So Tanny became a "Cosset" pig. That is, she was a bottle fed pig. We had her in the house from the day after she was born. She was started on the Colostrum we had frozen. That's the first milk from a cow after they have a calf.
Tanny survived the start, and was raised in the house. She had a nest box under the wood stove where she slept. Through her formative years of childhood to adolescence she was a family pet. She slept in a basket under the stove at night and was out in the yard with the dogs and cats and chickens and whoever else was out there during the day. When someone would drive into the yard she would come running up to great them, a trick she had learned from Blue Dog, our Airedale and her best buddy. Tanny was never sure if she was a misshapen dog, or a cat, or a human who couldn't stand. Her treat was to wait until Blue Dog had had all he wanted from his dog dish, she would go over and finish anything he had left in the bowl. Blue Dog and Tanny became fast friends.
As she got older and healthier after a shaky start, she had run of the house. She had a wading pool in the front yard. She would laze in that. She was a tan colored pig, and we always used to say she was working on her tan when she would lie out in her plastic wading pool.
That lasted until her wedding. Borus the bore came for a mouth long stay when Tanny was of an age to be courting. The two of them had a month long love affair out in Tanny's new home in the barn. From the time Borus showed up at the farm, Tanny was no longer aloud in the house. She by this time was a good-sized sow, and was too big to be in the house. While Borus was dating her, she was locked in the barn, something she never thought was just. But when Borus left, she was again let out from time to time. She would squeal and beg to be let out of the barn whenever anyone drove into the yard.
The place in the barn became like her place under the stove, she would go there to sleep, but she had run of the yard. She just was no longer allowed in the house.
As I said I let each mother pig have two litters. Tanny had had her second at the time I am thinking of. She was a big girl by this time. Being free to roam, she found plenty to eat, and she grew to be a very plump and happy sow. She might have tipped the scale at about 5 to 6 hundred pounds.
Well, Laurie had to make a trip down to her folks house, down in Territown, NY. I was working down in town as a millwright in one of the local reel mills. While Laurie was away, and I was at work, I tried to keep Tanny locked up in the barn. But this one morning, I couldn't get her to come up from the pound where she was busy digging and playing in the mud. The reel mill was a time clock sort of job, and it was time for me to go. She wasn't going to go in the barn, she wasn't ready, and it was time for me to go to work. I left her out, and went down to work. I came up to the house at lunchtime. I wanted to have her locked in the barn. Laurie was coming home that day. I wanted Tammy to be in the barn when she got home. Lunch is just 30 minutes at the reel shop, and it is a five-minute drive up the hill to our farm. I came up and Tanny greeted me, running up from the pound. I asked her to go in the barn, coaxing her with a dipper of grain. But she wanted to play... Lunchtime was near over, and she was still out, I had to leave her and go back down to work.
My neighbor was coming down the hill as I was going out, I stopped him and asked if he could just go down and put Tanny in the barn. She was a frequent visitor up to their house, and he was used to bringing her down the hill and locking her in the barn. I sped off down over the hill, trying to get back to work before the whistle blew.
Well, I had bought a fifty-pound bag of dog food, and I had put it down just inside the door. There was a trashcan it was supposed to be in, but with me, alone in the house, it had not gotten into the can yet. It was still sitting just inside the kitchen door. Now, our kitchen door in that old farmhouse was not hermetically sealed. By that, I mean the sent of the dog food was able to penetrate that door. Tanny came to the kitchen door wanting, most likely, to come in the house. She often would stand at the back door and beg to come in, but by this time she was not allowed in there, not at all. She must have sniffed that dog food, and it brought back fond memories. The dog dish and the treats she had gotten as a kid, eating out of Blue Dog's bowl. That was a raised panel door, an old one, one we were all sort of found of. But Tanny found it the only thing between her and a treat. She came in through the door, making tooth picks, most of them broke in the center, of that raised panel door.
The fifty-pound bag of dog food was indeed a nice treat. But then she wanted a little something more. She knew the fridge had food in it. When we used to open the fridge, she would get cool milk, or a treat of some sort put in her bowl. She finished off the dog food and gave a thought to a nice drink of cool milk to wash it all down. She opened the door to the fridge, and looked through the items on the door. She found that easiest if she just placed them all on the floor. She opened them by breaking bottles and eating whatever she could break open. The milk was near the back on the top shelf. To get that down she just got her snout up there and raked the selves down onto the floor. That worked well, now everything was out of the fridge, shelves and all. Several containers had broken so she could have a good little meal.
After the fridge, the pantry was right there. A pan of brownies I had baked for a treat for Laurie when she got home was on the top shelf. Tanny got that down, and in so doing took all the shelves down and everything on them. She found the cans could be opened by biting down on them. She wouldn't get all of what was in them, but it would be all over the floor for a later snack. That was all real good. Now, for one last treat. I had made a pine kitchen table. In the center of that pine table was a decorative little vase of popcorn. Tanny just climbed up on the table, reached for the popcorn. When I built that table, I had not planned on the stress factor of a six-hundred-pound pig climbing up onto it. The pine table couldn't stand the strain and broke in to several small pieces, just about right for kindling.
By then Tanny was full it was time for a nap. What better place than her old spot under the wood stove. She was bigger now then she had been when she last went under the stove. In getting down under there she dislodged the stovepipe and spread soot all over the living room. I guess that was not as comfortable as she had remembered it. She then went into Grammy's bedroom, the only bedroom on the ground floor. The bed looked like a good place for a nap. Laurie had spent a year making a quilt, and that was on Grammy's bed. Tammy wanted to readjust things a bit to make it a bit more comfortable. After all, she always dug around a bit in the mud before she lay down for a nap. It was only natural to use her snout, covered with the remainder of the contents of the kitchen, to dig a hole in the center of the bed. She dug down through the quilt, the blankets and the sheets, and into the mattress. There must have been something in that mattress that smelled like it needed a bit more investigating, because she dug right down though the mattress and into the bed springs.
That was how I found her when I got home. As I came into the kitchen, I thought we had been broke into. I followed her trail of destruction, and found her asleep on Granny's Bed.
Now, a normal pig BM, from a two hundred-pound pig, is about the size you see every morning in the toilet. Tanny was now three times that weight, and she had had a large meal. (Fifty pounds of dog food was the first course.) Her BM was of a great size, and she had not even bothered to get up off Granny's bed to defecate. So there she lay, with a BM behind her on the bed, the size of a cat curled up, sitting behind her.
I yelled at her and shooed her out of the house. I got her to go in the barn, when you got mad at her she would go there. I was mad at her.
Just as I was locking the gate on her pen, I saw the headlights from Laurie’s car, returning from a week down with her folks.
Laurie was not pleased with me.

Any feed-back?

I figure a lady in my life would make my living more worthwhile. I would have someone to do things for. It is hard to work so hard just to be able to keep working, not doing anyone any real good. I want someone I can remember things with and someone who will say thank you and who I can say thank you to.

I am here, looking at my empty mailbox and the thread I posted as it sinks to page three.