Cosumne Gal

"I want to take a picture of the three little ones in the family," I said. "Just put them on the couch together."

Grandma Nancy got Tommy on the couch, but he wouldn't wait for the other two.


"Just hang on, everybody, all we need is one picture."

Tessa hung onto Tommy. Grandma hung onto Charlie.


And it all went south from there.

Bob and Anna are cooking not one, but two, Thanksgiving dinners at my house this week. My only chore is to clean the house. Yuck. It's a TOTAL mess because I tore it apart looking for my glasses. I found them, under the last piece of furniture in the living room that I turned upside down.

I decided I needed to cook something, make some small contribution to the effort. So I did two things: I cooked and mashed the pumpkin for some pies and Anna's pumpkin cheesecake, and I made a Chocolate Chip Applesauce Cake.

This recipe is something my mom, Doris, used to make for my stepdad, Ben, to take to the mountains to the cow camp. It has the consistency of a fruit cake and travels very well. She liked to make it with mint flavored chocolate chips, but I haven't been able to find those for several years.


You can experiment with using different kind of chocolate for the 4 tablespoons - unsweetened baking chocolate, cocoa, or even melt some Hershey bars and use those. You can use different kinds of chips, and try different nuts and/or fruit. Don't make this cake unless you have lots of company, a little of it goes a long way.

When I read the Alexander McCall Smith books about the #1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana, this is the cake I imagine being served to visitors at the orphanage.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. The cats love this time of year because I bring home things like turkey gizzards from the store. Only for the outside cats, Wesley would take one and stuff it between the couch cushions, Gollie would eat the whole thing, walk two feet and erp it back up.

It's sometimes hard to meet and talk to people at a poultry show.

First, it's a noisy place. The roosters are crowing and it's hard to hear. I deal with this by smiling and nodding and hoping that at some point in the conversation I'll hear a key word or two, catch up, and everything will make sense.

Second, people are busy taking care of their birds. They don't relax until they get back to their hotel rooms at night, where they are isolated from each other.

At the show in Sonora this past weekend, circumstances were favorable for overcoming these two obstacles. The hotel had its own restaurant with a welcoming staff and, instead of staying in their rooms, people were encouraged to hang out in the restaurant and talk, drink coffee, or eat dessert. If people were sitting in a big enough booth, they'd make room for you.

I not only got to spend time with old friends this way, but also to make some new ones. There were two exhibitors from Utah. I've seen them at shows before and had a lot of questions to ask about their trips. There were some 4-H people who I didn't know that are from the same county where I live. I found out a lot about them and the poultry activities they like. I also watched their family consume an absolutely huge strawberry crepe. It took up an entire plate, was filled with ice cream and covered with fresh strawberries and a mountain of whipped cream. The rest of us had fun teasing them about it. I think they enjoyed the attention.

I got to meet and talk to a couple of people that I'd seen at shows before, but had never met. It turns out they've been showing for 40 years. They had some interesting perspectives and observations.

It was a nice show, put on by a really small, overworked committee that did a great job. Sonora is only 90 minutes from my house, along Hwy. 49 through the gold country. It's more a scenic route than one you'd take to get somewhere quick, but I've been on it so many times since I was a little kid, it's familiar and comfortable. I didn't get any pictures for you. The road winds and there is no shoulder, so it's wise to keep both hands on the steering wheel. I can tell you, however, that the local plants have benefitted from recent storms. The live oaks seem refreshed, the grass is starting to sprout.

I believe this is what the Indians called "First Grass." It sprouts in the fall with the first rains, then just sort of hangs around and doesn't grow much. It's not that nutritious for grazing animals. In about February the grass takes a growing spurt. This is called "Second Grass." Last year, with very sparse rain, the grasses grew rapidly in the Second Grass stage, putting all their effort into setting seeds. So the pastures were short and sparse, and the countryside went from green to dry yellow almost overnight. Unlike other parts of the country, there are few perennial grasses here, they are all annual.

I took almost 20 birds to the show. It was a lot of work but the birds are starting to settle into the routine and aren't as difficult to handle or get ready. One of my cockerels was Best RCCL out of the 73 birds in the class.


My Ancona pullet was Best Mediterranean. That's 3 out of 3 for her! She was also Reserve Large Fowl of the Show. I don't have a photo of her. She doesn't get much respect, does she? I'm hoping someday I'll get a copy of the nice win photo that was taken at the Fallon show.

This week is Thanksgiving, for those of you readers who don't live in the U.S. Bob is cooking one dinner here on Thursday and another here on Friday. He bought two turkeys and all the stuff that goes with them. My simple job is to clean house. Yuck. Last night I built a fire in the woodstove and messed around in the living room trying to clean a little. I sat on the couch for a minute, though, and fell asleep. It was midnight when I woke up and went to bed.

My glasses got lost somewhere in this process. I probably took them off and set them on the nearby footstool, then Wesley came along, stole them, and hid them somewhere. I'm still looking for them. I have torn apart the couch (it's still on its back with its feet in the air). Then I decided I should move the furniture in the living room as long as I was going to clean. Not a good job for one old crimpled lady to try by herself. Like I said, the couch is still on its back. I haven't decided if I should leave things the way they are and say the house is messy because I couldn't find my glasses and couldn't see the dirt. Or if I should just pretend it's fine because I really canNOT see the dirt, so who cares?

There is a small chance that I just put the glasses down somewhere unusual and because I don't have them, I can't see them. I seem to do things like that more and more. I keep expecting to hear them crunch under my feet.

In the meantime, the cat is once again in the dog house.

I have donated to SPCA, and along the way my email address seems to have been shared with everyone who is looking for a share of animal and do-good money. At the same time, a couple of the Facebook pages I follow have been turned into places where people take the opportunity to "get rid of" their unwanted animals.

First, there are the people who go to shelters and "adopt" dogs, mostly pitbulls, just hours before they're euthanized. This would be okay, but then they turn around and post pictures and beg for someone else to take the dogs and give them a "furever home." I think, "You mean, unlike the temporary one you are providing?"

Here's another one: "Free kitty, 6 weeks old, my older cat doesn't like her." And I think, "Then why do you have her in the first place? How did you end up with her, did one of your unspayed cats give birth to her? Did you take her thinking she was cute and now your older cat is pissing on things? And how can you have had a 6 week old kitten long enough to know these things?"

Also, because I've stuck with Wesley through all the bad times, I look down my nose at people who can't be bothered to try to make things work. Yes, that's self-righteous. Too bad.

This week there was a woman giving away a small dog she'd had for 6 years because now that she has a baby she doesn't have time to spend with the dog.

There was a grandmother trying to give away a one year old pitbull mix (she was calling it Lab and Border Collie) that was proving to be too big for her two year old grandchild. (No duh, dipshit.)

And finally, there is a woman trying to give away her father's 4 year old chihuahua mix because her mother died and her father can't deal with pee pads all over anymore.

None of these people see anything wrong with what they're doing. They'll say, "If I can't find a really good home (I read this as "with a better, more responsible person than I am") I will have to take it to a shelter."

On both sides of my family there are animal lovers. The kind that, when they take on an animal, make a commitment for the rest of its life. We don't always have animals if there's something else going on in our lives that will prevent us from making that commitment. We understand and practice responsibility.

I'm getting so tired of the buttheads who can't see that their problems are not resulting from people like us who aren't responding to their pleas, but with themselves. Why do we need to feel guilty? I keep asking myself that, and unfriending people and pages on Facebook that make me nuts.

Wesley is growing to be a very big cat. Not big like Biscuit. Biscuit has a big tomcat head, and a big muscled body. Wesley is tall and elegant, with a long swishy tail.

Wesley actually does try to be good sometimes. He still knocks things off the counter. He is still mean to Gollie, though when I feed them he backs off and lets her eat first. I still have the barrier up to the den because I need to put birds in there when I wash them for a show.

So how, then, is he actually trying to be good? When I won't get up in the morning and he tries to knock my iPhone off the bedstand, I only have to snarl "Get DOWN!" once and he'll leave it. When I have company, he isn't so bad about tasting them (though I don't trust him yet and I still spend a small fortune to keep Bandaids on hand).

He'll actually sit on my lap sometimes and not end his petting session with a bite. I'll know he's totally reformed when I don't end the day with a bloody paper towel coaster under my tea cup.

I seldom go out to dinner, I don't like to eat very much after 3, and I really prefer breakfast food or a nice salad at lunch.

At least twice a month I meet one old friend or another for breakfast at Bert's Diner, where the waitresses know us and don't mind if we sit around and jabber for hours.

This past week my office mate when I worked had a day off. I got to have breakfast with Melanie at a restaurant neither of us had tried before. I really, really miss this lady. What a way to spend your last working years, sharing an office with someone who's fun and a great worker.

Choosing clothes when you live on a farm is quite different from when you live in town.

If there is a choice, one typically wears denim. This is not because of a retarded sense of style, it has practical applications. Only denim sheds hay, shavings, and dirt. Only denim won't rip immediately if it comes into contact with barbed wire, chunks of wood, or sharp cage edges.

I can wear other things to town, but not if I need to feed horses on the way to the car. I love sweaters. If I put on a sweater, though, I need to use a pitchfork to throw hay to the horses. It's pretty much guaranteed that will be the day Dusty shoves the chunk of hay back over the fence at me and it goes right down the neck of the sweater. There is no hay that exists that won't totally ruin a sweater. Grass hay has seeds that burrow in, oat hay has even more insidious seeds, and alfalfa will crumble and you'll be picking pieces out of the sweater for the rest of the day.

I have been known to wear a long sleeved coat over my sweater just to get the horses fed. Or leave the sweater in the car and change into it later. Walking back to the house to do this is not an option when walking is a time-consuming chore and you need to get on the road quickly.

One thing I love, but never buy, is something like this.


Does anyone who lives on a farm or ranch ever wear velour? If so, how do you manage it?

I'm think people who have pets probably don't wear much velour, either.

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this topic before. And that I'll be talking about it again, sometime.

On one of the diabetes sites I frequent, they recently had a questionnaire for the members to answer. One of the questions was, "Are there any effects from your Diabetes that affect your daily life?"

At first I thought, "not really." My choice of food is what I'd need to eat whether or not I'm diabetic. I have to get new glasses every year, but that's because my eyes keep getting better and the old glasses are too strong. I couldn't think of anything.

Then I got up from my computer chair and started to walk across the room for another cup of bulletproof coffee. My brain was working great, my body from the knees up was ready and willing to stride purposefully. But not from the knees down.

Some days I have to wonder if someone came in at night and transplanted lower legs from a 90 year old person onto my body. They just don't coordinate with the rest of the body. Nor with the brain.

I have neuropathy from the knees down. Okay, so I won't be running a marathon. But the main problem is that my feet seem to morph constantly. A footprint taken 2 years ago won't match one taken today. I know this because I have custom-made orthothotics that are 2 years old and they don't fit at all.

I have a small fortune invested in shoes. Not because I love shoes. I hate shoes. But I have several pairs because I can't wear any one pair all day or I'll end up with blisters or soreness somewhere. Some days I wear one shoe on one foot and a different type of shoe on the other foot.

And, NO, it doesn't help to have custom orthotics or custom shoes. Those have been the worst. They're big, heavy, and bulky and because they're rigid, they make lots of blisters.

I don't even try to wear shoes that match my "outfit." I consider what I'll be doing for the next couple of hours: driving? (there are some shoes that rub blisters on my heels when I'm driving); walking? (only a couple of pair that won't make the ball of my foot sore...and that's WITH pads and bandaids added); slopping around outside in the garden or cleaning pens? (that requires yet another pair of shoes).

Aside from the shoes on my shoe rack, I have at least 20 pairs stored in a plastic bin in the closet. Those are the ones I could wear two years ago that my feet no longer like, including at least 5 pairs of expensive Arcopedicos. You know the story of The Princess and the Pea? Well, I have pea-brained feet.

It wasn't always like this. I used to walk the 1-1/3 miles around the field behind the house barefoot. I had really tough feet. Even now, I don't have typical diabetic feet. My blood sugar is low, blisters heal easily in a couple of days, my feet don't swell.

In addition to all the shoes, I have a drawer full of bandaids and I've tried every pad and pair of inserts that are sold. And I have many, many pairs of socks. Because some shoes require socks with extra padding around the back, some require thin socks.

I'm not the only person I know who shuffles around because of foot problems. And what I live with now is really a big improvement over a few years ago. So it doesn't bother me much until the brain wants to take the body somewhere quickly and the feet won't cooperate. It's pretty much like dragging two balls and two chains.

Want to take the garbage can out to the road? No problem except by the time the feet shuffle out there, the brain has been out and back 4 times, the upper legs are bored, the arms want to push the can over and just leave it there (maybe with a little provocation from the brain).

I'm not just a Pisces, I'm a double Pisces (sun and moon). That appears to indicate an affliction with feet. It makes as much sense as anything the podiatrist has come up with.

Do I do anything besides go to chicken shows? Sure, but just not in October.

I put more than 2500 miles on my car last month, with trips up and down the valley. Ventura is a long trip, and technically it's in the nastiness of Southern California, but it's at the extreme north end of that area, so going through the SC traffic is not required.

I went down Hwy. 99, up over the Grapevine pass, then the Ventura turnoff is immediately to the right. It sort of skirts the hills at the edge of the border between Northern and Southern California. My timing was not great, as soon as I turned west the sun was right smack in my face. I couldn't really read the road signs. As it turns out, I didn't have to. The highway just joined neatly with 101 at its end and the show turnoff was just a couple of miles up 101. Things like that scarcely ever happen.

This is how the hills looked all over California that week, without rain for quite some time.



Dry, dry, dry. No grass for cows. While I was at the show, however, it did rain in Northern California and now, just a few days later, the hills are starting to get green.

This show, like most, is held at a county fairgrounds. It's a little more scenic because it's right next to the ocean and not in the poorest part of a dusty valley city. This is the closest I got to the ocean, though.


I sorta saw it from my car on the way to the fairgrounds. That's okay, I'm not a big fan of the ocean. You know what? There are no tsunami signs in Ventura like there are up on the coast in Northern California. Do you suppose they don't get them in Ventura? Or maybe they think signs would depress the property values.

I was at the show for about 3 minutes when I realized I had forgotten my dolly and would have to carry the boxes full of chickens. I'm pretty strong and the boxes don't weigh much, but I can't walk and hold things at the same time. I had gotten to the show before anyone else who had a dolly, so couldn't borrow one. Luckily one of the junior exhibitors (Garrett, for those of you who know) helped me. A lot of the exhibitors are even older than I am, and I hate to ask them for help. Anyway, it worked out.

I took 7 birds to sell and ended up selling 8. The last one was actually one that I showed. Here is one of the buyers:


I love selling birds to 4-H kids.

I won Best of Breed with this guy. He had messed up his comb and wattles in the carrier, but the judge still liked him.


It was my Ancona pullet that did the best this time. She was Best Mediterranean and got to be up on championship row. That was as far as she got, but that's pretty good for a chicken that lives in the mutt pen at home.


Best of Show went to a bird owned by the team of Jones and Leonard.


I had taken my new iPad with me and worked for an hour trying to set its alarm so I would get up at 6 a.m. About 30 seconds after the alarm went off, I discovered why the hotel I was staying in is called The Clocktower Inn. I did get up early Sunday morning to have some breakfast before picking up the birds. Here is a typical, lovely Southern Cal sunrise scene: palm trees and a McDonald's sign. I didn't eat at McD's.


I was going to go back home the way I came, but a friend suggested 101 instead. I'm glad I took that route. First, it's much more scenic.


But also there was a lot less traffic until I got close to San Jose in the north, and there were practically NO trucks! It's amazing how much more polite the other drivers are when they're not dealing with the frustration of truck traffic.

Near Salinas, everything is irrigated and green. Every square inch of ground has been dedicated to farming.


See the area up there between the hills? Even that had crops on it. In another few years, maybe this area will have terraces all the way up the hills like they do in China. I think the Salinas area has done a much better job than Sacramento County about keeping development from encroaching on farm land. Sac County is an ugly, totally lost cause. And it's probably the worst place in the state for development because it has the #1 potential for flooding of any location in the United States. Developers and county supervisors have collaborated to let houses be built all over the floodplains. Where do you suppose they'll be the first time there's a catastrophic flood? Living off their profits somewhere else.

Anyway, the poultry show was fun. The show banquet on Saturday night is the best anywhere because it's prepared by a TV chef who is really good. He also makes sumptuous desserts that people can bid on, and they go for lots of money. The (other) people at my table of 8 bid on a large bottle of cognac and a box of fancy cupcakes. It was fun to watch them all get a bit tipsy.

I've had lots of work to catch up on. I took 16 birds to the auction on Sunday. I got the car windshield replaced, I had an appointment with a dietician, I bought and unloaded 20 sacks of pellets for the stove, I had to move birds around after the auction, and I am a month behind on the Dominique Club newsletter. The house is a mess (thank you, Wesley) and there's a lot of laundry to do.

And so, I also got behind in blogging.