Getting Stimulated

Yesterday I discovered a note from the IRS in my mailbox which mentioned that we are entitled to $1438.something something of stimulus payment. I wonder why they had to bother sending me this message, instead of just sending the check. But anyhow, I came across this amusing take on the matter on youtube, as we've been getting ourselves politically educated on the candidates' official (and, as in this case, unofficial) channels:



I love this, because, well, I have a weak spot for all things profane, and because it reminds me both of my favorite band Da Yoopers and Bulgarian rap videos (think Misho Shamara), which frequently featured half-dressed hot chicks juxtaposed against some utterly boring bureaucrats.

The Sublime and the Bucolic

The interesting thing is that back when I first told people that I wanted to live in the country, few took it seriously, and several thought that I was, plain and simple, out of my mind, and said so. So imagine my surprise when, with the help of the Facebook and odnoklasniki.ru, I got back in touch with a few of the old friends, only to discover that they, too, turns out, dream of spending at least some of their time in the country. I hear things like "Land is my cherished dream," "I'd love to own a datscha in addition to my city home," "I love organic food," and "Boy, is it ever satisfying to make things yourself." Then how come I am the only one living this dream?

"Honey," I said to him, "Turns out, everyone is an organic farmer at heart."
Him: "But of course!"

Bluebird Family

Here's a bluebird family history I found on YouTube:



Mine have moved to a new box, built a new nest, and so far I've seen four eggs. I also have wrens nesting with great vigor in my front yard, on the black cherry (cheremukha) in front of the deck, just what I wanted (there's a box there).

Updates

I know I haven't blogged for a while! Let's see what's been happenig to me recently.

I went on another great birding event down at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve, where I got increasingly better at identifying birds by sight and by sound. When Jacob and I repeated this trip on my birthday earlier this week, I was actually able to point out to him a whole bunch of birds - green heron, a common yellowthroat, yellow warbler, a female and a male orchard orioles, catbirds, house wrens, and more. He, on the other hand, spotted a male roufus-sided towhee, which I also identified for him. I am getting quite good, actually, but I also learned that it's best to go birdwatching with someone who knows more than you!

I got a gift certificate to the nicest nursery in town, and am going to buy myself a rose bush to plant on the side of the deck, next to the climbing red rose bush my best friend Ann gave me for my birthday last year. I love planting trees and bushes, in general. They are a bit like stock market investments (I learned this year!) - no good to you for the next ten to twenty years, but deeply satisfying when you get there.

I spent a bunch of time mulching today - weeded and mulched my lily-of-the-valley patch, as well as the said rose bush and the cornellian cherry tree (kizil in Russian, I believe), that Jacob picked out and gave me for my birthday last year. See, I am trying to increase the diversity of fruit I can grow on this farm, to add to my budding jam making business (something I am going to try this summer, see how it goes!). We already have a massive amount of elderberries, a large red and black raspberry patch, a sour cherry tree, an apple orchard, and a strawberry patch I personally planted two years ago. This year has been very cold, however, so there were barely any blossoms on any of the trees, and the strawberries are just starting to form. Can you believe it? We haven't even put in tomatoes and peppers for that reason, and it's already June. Little Josie helped with the mulching and is now uniformly covered with what we call "bullshit" - that is, literally the bull manure from the local bull sperm bank operation, mixed with sawdust, which served as bedding. (Don't worry, it's long ago composted into beautiful black dirt mixed with wood chips, and is not what you think).

Jacob and I planned our trip to NYC this summer, and made necessary arrangements armed with our debit card. I can't believe how expensive it is to stay at a hotel in NJ where my cousin's wedding is, but what you gonna do - I am planning to get wasted, and there's no question of driving. I am very much looking forward to seeing Ksusha and hopefully Ira in NYC during our stay - we are arriving on the 1st, and I am leaving on the 7th. I will be flying out of NYC instead of Boston, as originally planned, because it's simply not gonna work - sorry, K and Yorik! We'll be flying out of Milwaukee, where we have quite a few relatives, though, unfortunately, my favorite of Jacob's cousin's Peter is not going to be there, as he's currently in the army at Fort McCoy. Too bad, because the guy has a great take on the world.

Jacob and I went to watch Sex and the City: TM. I liked it, though I think the show worked best in 30-minute segments. I am now catching up on the 6 seasons of the show, of which I only watched a bit at AUBG. I am now on season 2.

I discovered a disturbing fact that the female bluebird is building a new nest. I don't think any babies hatched from the old nest, there used to be two blue eggs in there, now there's only one, and I have no idea what's going on - I wonder if it has to do with my touching the eggs back when I first discovered them. This time I didn't touch the egg but used a hand mirror instead, which is what you are supposed to do. I also discovered that the wrens, did, after all, stay to nest on my land, only instead of the front yard (where I could enjoy them), they made a nest in an old pole along the fence row on the back pasture. That's OK - I can still hear them on this side of the house. I also discovered a whole bunch of barn swallow nests. Gosh, I love birds.

I am going to La Crosse tomorrow, to the mall - something I do very rarely - so I can get myself a nice dress for that wedding in NYC. It can't be black - better be nice green or blue or my all-time favorite, red.

The grapes are looking good so far this year.

This weekend is the free for all fishing weekend when you can fish without buying a license, and Jacob, with his newly-discovered passion for fishing, is hopefully going to take me fishing for some trout. We both have no interest in any kind of hunting or fishing activity that doesn't directly translate into food on our table - so hopefully we catch the right kind of fish to keep.

I am warming up to John McCain, sort of, but I don't think Obama would be a disaster if he won. If he doesn't get assassinated or something. Unlike the majority of other people I know (except several Hundts, my husband, and my best friend Ann), I am not at all taken with Obama.

So that's what's new with me.

Big Birding Event

This past weekend I attended a fabulous birding event, with two professional "birders" - a DNR bird researcher guy and a lady whose occupation I forgot, but who was also real pro, or, shall I say, fanatic. The whole thing was organized by a woman named Maggie - Maggie is retired, I think, and a conservation activist - among other things, she's fighting against the giant electricity-generating wind turbines - a bit like Don Quixote (that's in one of the most leftist communities you'll ever encounter), because they apparently "take up" an acre of the sky each, and kill a lot of birds.

Anti-Bush and anti-corporation sentiments aside, it was a spectacular day. Nothing like spending a day with a group of birders (and Democrats). I invited my best friend Ann and her husband Chris to come along (all four of us support Ron Paul, I even have a bumper sticker saying the same), and the three of us drove through the increasingly more hill-billy-ated the deeper your got Crawford county, all on a bright (if cold) spring morning. Bright and early too - had to leave my house at 7 am. (Crawford is a poorer county to the south of Vernon, where I live).

The moment we drove up, a lady, who later turned out to be Maggie the organizer, ran to us with the excitement comparable to that of winning a jackpot, while pointing to the nearby bushes and the buzzing sound coming out of there. "It's a clay-colored sparrow!" she exclaimed in utter state of ecstasy, and kept on repeating that it's apparently extremely rare for the area, hence the excitement. (Really, the day I saw a hermit thrush on my West Slope was like that for me - people still give me "Oh wow!" when I tell them that I saw it here).

The best thing about those events is that you know 50% of the attendees - here was Mary, the long time YIHS literature teacher, Harriet - a very active and energetic lady who works both for the Organic Valley and the organic certification agency, while growing starter plants on the side, and the guy who gave a workshop on raising and processing chickens on a farm at the last year's Kickapoo Country Fair - a big propaganda fair put on by the OV, where, by the way, yours truly was asked to give a talk on canning and freezing this coming summer. There was also Lila, one of the people at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve (I think?), and some other people I've seen around before.

We started out by listening to the birds right in the yard, followed by a talk and a power point bird presentation - the focus was on identifying birds by their song above all else - during which time a white-tail male walked right up to the pavilion and grazed shamelessly on our hosts' flower beds, and hardly moved away when I sneaked out to use the bathroom ("shameless bastard," I kept thinking). Later we walked up on top of the ridge of their gorgeous property - a very consciously managed CRP land (the land that is kept free from farming or any other activity - so it can become a mini-reserve), where, for the first time in my life, I saw and heard black-and-white bobolinks and a cooper's hawk in the distance. We then later split into two groups - the "long way" group and the "short way" group. The "long way" group ventured down into the woods all the way down the hill to the Kickapoo river to focus on the deep-woods birds. That was exactly what I wanted to do, because my property is tiny, and completely devoid of any hint of woods, so forget trying to spot warblers!

Boy, did I ever learn a lot- first of all, I finally learned how to (sorta) tell apart the very similar songs of an American robin from that of a rose-breasted grosbeak, and both of them from the sore-throated song of a scarlet tanager. That was also the first time in my life when I heard tanagers, though I couldn't see them at all. Other birds I heard but couldn't see included indigo buntings (as a matter of fact, that day I had seen an indigo bunting, but it was, sadly, dead, which is why I was able to look at it closely - a brilliantly-colored bird!), Tennessee warblers, field sparrows (though I saw one at my feeder before), ovenbirds with their distinct "teacher-teacher-teacher" call, and American redstarts - a black-and-orange warbler, to whom an entire chapter has been dedicated in my favorite book The Land Remembers (written about a Crawford farm practically next door). The ones I both saw and heard included roufous-sided towhee, gray catbird, and a pair of gray-blue (I think that's what they are called) gnatcatchers going in and out of their dome-shaped nest. There were also some others that I can't remember right now. Apparently, this time a year you can get what they called "a warbler neck" from trying to catch a glimpse of a tiny bird up in the treetops right above your head.

One other interesting thing that came out of this excursion was the discovery that both Mary (the lit teacher) and I were Walden fanatics, having both read it as sophomores in college (indeeds it's as sophomoric a book as it gets), which, you remember, was literally THE most influential text in my life after Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, both of which gave me the idea that life takes its most perfect form when lived in close connection with the natural world. And you know how we discovered that? She mentioned that wood thrush (which we didn't hear that day) was Thoreau's favorite bird, and I quoted the exact lines from Walden where he states this very fact.

Anyhow, I learned an enormous amount of new birding information, and experienced things I'd never experience at home. I feel like I know so much more now, and, at the same time, I all too keenly realize the limitations of my small homestead with regard to the range of birds that you can get here - this might be a bluebird paradise, but no matter what you do, there will be no scarlet tanagers or wood thrushes waking you up in the morning here.

And since I simply couldn't get enough, and there was another birding event coming up next weekend, I've signed up to attend that one as well, having invited yet another friend along. This time we are going to birdwatch at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve down in La Farge.

New Title

Just to keep things fresh, I changed the blog title! The reference is of course to the known children's book, but, more generally, its purpose is to reflect the fact that we make our home in the rural area rich with wildlife (some forms of which are more welcome than others), as opposed to the urban setting. I also always liked the word "wild" - it suggested some romanticized non-conformity, some edge - while also evoking conservationism and ecology, the subject of my recent interest.

The lyrics in the "blog description" section are from the "Lovely Agnes" - a song by Sally Rogers. Jacob definitely wanted that song performed at the wedding, although it wasn't in the end. Julia sang "In This Heart" by Sinead O'Connor in church instead. I am pretty that Jacob's high school ex Kate helped harmonize. Those of you who were there will maybe remember this song:



I love the first verse, naturally, with my recent interest in birdwatching:

In this heart lies for you
A lark born only for you
Who sings only to you
My love
My love
My love

Why Live in the Country

There are lots of good reasons to live in the country, some of them more obvious than others. Here are mine:

1. You can grow a lot of your own food and "eat healthy" as people like to say these days.

2. If you are into gardening and birding, you can pursue those hobbies infinitely.

3. You and your children can enjoy fresh air.

4. Children will also enjoy a private park that is a farm, with a wide number of free and natural attractions (not counting property taxes, of course).

5. If you like the concept of a datscha - what every good Soviet is well familiar with - a country estate is like living on a datscha/resort all year round.

6. You can eat al fresco pretty much every warm and dry day of the year.

7. When you want a fancy steak, you head to the freezer, not the store. Not to mention that it costs much less than in a store.

8. Your children get to enjoy a mini-zoo.

9. Your children have something to do with themselves in the summer, which does not involve screen time. That's right - I mean chores.

10. Ditto for yourself and your spouse.

11. You never need to go to the gym or worry about your weight (not that I did before). As I said, you are already eating pretty darn healthy, and that involves fried chicken and red meat and fresh milk (if you don't wanna be milking - like I don't, there's always someone who does).

12. If you like wood heat, like I do, you can enjoy it all you want. And remember, firewood heats you twice!

13. Not only eating can be done al fresco...