Blue Line Farm Welcome Guest | Login or Register

I’m swamped at work and home right now. Act surprised. That’s one thing I’ve found about uprooting yourself with the intent to start fresh somewhere else: wherever you go, there you are. You still bring your old personality and habits with you. The tasks are a bit different - I never had to fix the automatic cattle waterer in Chicago - but the fact that I am always too busy seems to have remained the same. Keep that in mind if you want to move out to the country and enjoy the simple life.

In any case,  since I am too busy to do a new post  I leave you with this quick post that’s been in my Drafts since December of 2007…

My kids are becoming “inured” to the surprises of country life. Heading into the stables this morning to feed the chickens (yes, we stable our chickens. I ordered some chicken tack, too, so we can ride them around for Christmas parades.) I heard our 8 year old exclaim, “Hello, possum,” to the possum stuck in the live trap and then walk over to the feed room. Several months ago this would have been an occasion to run back into the house and shout an alarm to groggy parents. Now, it hardly merits a hello.

Cath and I went back to Chicago for a quick weekend trip last week. It’s always interesting to go back. You settle into the old routines fast. Like taking off fast from a Stop sign so that the cabbie coming from the left won’t jump out ahead of you. Or wondering what demonic traffic engineer designed the roads around Woodfield Mall. Well, that’s a Schaumburg thing, not Chicago, but I’m lumping them together since I now live in the “country”, which exists outside of “the suburbs” (Northwest or otherwise), or “the city”.

Going back for a weekend is great for me. I get to go to Games Plus in Mt. Prospect, my favorite game store in the whole world. I get to grab some fancy dining (this time, at Davis Street Fish Market in Evanston - and a Hofbrau-related restaurant near Wrigley Field). I get to see which Daley friend/project/contributor is under investigation/indictment/arrest. It’s a lot of fun. Then, before the Monday morning commute, I come back here where my street is closed at one end for repaving so the normal few cars per hour is now down to zero.

I’m lucky to have a foot in both worlds. I can outdrive a cabbie. I can parallel park a big sedan. I can also repair a fence, operate a front loader, and cut firewood. I can appreciate the difference between a tapas bar and a topless bar (Aside: idea - a topless tapas bar called TaTa’s). I have a clout with the Cubs and with the local township zoning board. I can pluck a chicken (not well) and get through Union Station to the Metra Local. It’s a weird skill set, but fun. I’m still trying to figure out how to fit it all into my resume.

You don’t have to cut your ties with the city to move to the country. Or vice versa, I suppose. Both places have unique things to offer. For instance, in cities outside of Michigan, I here they have these things called “jobs”.  Here in the country we have something called “affordable housing” that isn’t Section 8.

Moving on to new business, I’d like to thank Mike for his naming suggestion. Cath was the final arbiter and chose “Wabash” and “Wilson” for the new calf names. Wabash is the one born first (to Blossom), proceeding in alphabetical order to Wilson (from Yarro), who managed to escape the fence briefly yesterday after Blossom started a stampede when I fired up the tractor to bring out the last round bale. She must have been hungry. What a cow. It reminded me of the queue at the Old Country Buffet on McCormick and California.

Well, we have two new calves, one bull and one heifer calf. Cath and I are proud that we actually pegged the correct due dates (within a week). Mostly. I am still the luckiest cattleman ever in that both births were unattended, but went off without a hitch. The one snag has come from an unlikely place: the names.

Being Blue Line Farm, we have a tradition of naming our cattle after Chicago El stops who’s names begin with that year’s ear tattoo letter. Thus, we have Thorndale, Uptown (not technically an el stop, but it was name her after the neighborhood or name her “UIC/Halsted”, Van Buren, etc.  This year’s letter is W and for the first time, we have actual choices. It’s confused the heck out of us. We’re used to having to pour over CTA maps to find an El stop we can use.

Rather than agonize over it, we thought we’d throw it out to you guys, our friends and readers. Here are your choices:

• Western (3 stops!)
• Wilson
• Wells
• Washington
• Washington/Wells
• Wabash (3 stops!)

Pick any two names and let us know your favorites! Hurry though! The calves are already becoming known as “the two red ones”!

Well, it must be Raccoon season again. I’m getting lots of hits and emails on the “Pepsi of Death” pages. I’m also missing a lot of cat food in the mornings, which means I need to set out the live trap to catch the raccoon(s) or opossums that are eating it over night.

Live Trap

For those of you dealing with raccoons, I recommend a live trap. Don’t get the small squirrel sized ones. You’ll need the larger kind. They cost a few dollars more (about $50 if I recall), but they’re more likely to actually trap an adult raccoon or possum. I just leave a trail of cat food running into the cage and it usually lures them right in. When I trap them, its usually right next to a box of old stereo equipment that’s on their path from the barn to the cat food in the stable. Raccoons will grab ANYTHING that they can reach while in the cage, so I’ll need new cables if I ever want to use my old record player. Keep that in mind when you place your cage.

Once you’ve trapped a raccoon, you need to either kill it or let it go. If the former, there are a variety of methods I won’t go into here. Besides, it’s a LIVE trap. You don’t need to kill it. I recommend letting them go in the Allegan State Forest, but anywhere that’s more than 3 miles (some say 7 miles) away from your house should do.

Fly Bait and Cola

That said, the thing that everyone wants to know is: How to Make the Pepsi of Death(tm). Please keep in mind that, while effective, the fly bait in the Pepsi trick may be illegal in your neck of the woods. Or it may only be legal on your home property. Or maybe no one will care. Suffice to say that you need to be aware of these things before walking into the state fish and wildlife office  asking about fly bait to kill raccoons.

The Secret Recipe

Actually, there is no “recipe”. Just get some fly bait (it usually comes in a cardboard tube like Parmesan cheese only the contents are blue and granular) and some cola (it doesn’t have to be Pepsi). Get a cereal bowl that you never ever want to eat out of again. Cover the bottom of the bowl with fly bait. Really spoon it in there. Then, fill bowl with cola. Stir up with spoon you never ever want to eat with again. Set it out for raccoons. Find dead raccoon(s) about 3 feet from bowl in morning.

That said, there are refinements. One, I use a disposable plastic bowl. Two, I use a disposable plastic spoon. That’s not very refined, but this whole method is a glorious improvisation. This is the Git R Done school of problem solving here. You won’t find this in kit form.

Will your pets get into it? I don’t know. My barn cats don’t. My chickens don’t. For some reason, opossums don’t seem to either. Just raccoons. Maybe that’s the beauty of the Pepsi of Death solution.  Maybe I’m just really lucky. I don’t have any dogs, so I don’t know if they’ll go after this stuff or not. Please use caution in case your neighbor’s dog likes to wander over and drink Pepsi out of bowls you’ve left out. While it would be interesting to find out in a scientific, controlled experiment sort of way, you don’t want to be the one conducting that research!

The End

An old farmer taught me this method. It really does work. The raccoon will completely finish the whole thing. Then, they will expire less than 10 feet away. Some folks will be upset with you for killing a poor raccoon, but your kids will find a whole, dead raccoon less traumatic than finding gory chicken parts scattered all over the barn, so tell them you did it for the children.

By the way, dispose of the raccoon properly. I recommend burying the thing if you can. No sense in poisoning a turkey buzzard, too. At the very least, bag it up and throw it in the trash can. Make sure to warn your wife if she happens to be away on vacation so that she doesn’t come home a few days later and go to throw things out of her car when she gets home and opens the trash can to a couple of dead raccoons that have been ripening in the 90 degree sun for 3 days. Trust me. You don’t want this to happen. I just know that’s all.

When all is said and done, I prefer my live trap. It gets opossums and raccoons and is more humane. Unless you let them go in the parking lot at work and they run out into the street and get run over by a car. Trust me. You don’t want this to happen. I just know that’s all.

Ok. Much has happened since my last post. I became unemployed, briefly self-employed, then hired, then sent to New York, then busy as heck trying to make things happen at my new job. Long story short: I’m not sure what passes for normal anymore, but would like to get back to it.

In the meantime, I was finally talked into signing up for Facebook by several old friends from high school. Wow.  What an incredible time sink! It’s fun to catch up with everyone, but if I thought boardgamegeek.com was a time sink, Facebook takes the cake.  If you could ever figure out how to make money doing it, you could have a full time job just keeping up with your friends on Facebook. (Oh, and hello to all my friends on Facebook who got updates because I’m now replicating this blog on my Facebook Notes)

It’s also an amazing example of a Community of Choice. I’ve talked about that previously, but let me explain. Communities used to be largely a geographical thing. You lived in a neighborhood, went to a church, hung out with people from work, etc. All of these associations are defined by geographic proximity for the most part. Sure, you could be a part of a larger community - the Chicago “theater” community or the “Northside Advanced Squad Leader players”, but again, these communities are defined by their geography.

In the digital age, we aren’t bound by geography anymore. We can form Communities of Choice digitally. I don’t have to hang out with a boring neighbor, or discuss books with an idiot at Church. I can go online and email Holly Jones about books and get an interesting discussion of Wuthering Heights (as an example only! If Holly’s read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, then we can talk books) that I enjoy more than the physical discussion locally. That’s really cool. In my opinion, the Internet saved pen and pencil gaming because it gave a geographically distributed sub-community (gamer geeks) a way to connect and reinforce that community.

However, there is a down side. The more time we spend online, the more we disassociate from our geographical community. How many of us know when the township officers meet? Or if there even IS a book club at the local library? Communities of Geography atrophy as we spend more time participating in virtual Communities of Choice.

No big deal. Or is it? Next time you go vote (the ultimate expression of  a Geographic Community, really), check out the average age of the poll workers. Chances are that they’re all about 70. What happens when they die? Will Boomers and Gen X get out of the house and volunteer to spend a day working the polls to insure fair elections? I hope so. I haven’t volunteered to work the polls yet, but I have spent a lot of  time doing local politics. At most meetings, I was the only one who still had kids at home. My generational cohort was elsewhere. And don’t even get me started on the future of lodges like the Moose and the Elks. They’re doomed.

Our cities and suburbs didn’t get to be ugly on purpsose. We were just all busy elsewhere and didn’t pay attention. What do you mean there’s no sidewalks here? What do you mean there’s no mass transit? Why didn’t someone think of that before? Truth, we and (let’s be fair here) our parents were busy elsewhere. Next time you’re at DisneyWorld on Main Street USA, ask yourself what’s so special about that street. Is it the lack of cars? The architecture? The (pretend, in this case) multi-use building with shops down below and apartments up top? Our communities don’t look like that because it’s easier not to worry about it and cheaper to build a prefab Walgreen’s box.

Alright, rant off. In any case, think about your geographic community the next time you post on a friend’s Facebook Wall. Your physical world will appreciate it! Next week: back to goofy ass farm stuff.