Peter Hendra wrote in
:

My wife's people (Maori's) in New Zealand

Wow...lucky guy! Maori women are a truly beautiful set of genes...(c;

Larry
--

On Apr 28, 8:07 pm, Larry wrote:
Peter Hendra wrote :

My wife's people (Maori's) in New Zealand

Wow...lucky guy! Maori women are a truly beautiful set of genes...(c;

Larry
--

You like the tatoo's....right ?

Joe

On 28 Apr 2007 18:32:57 -0700, Joe wrote:

On Apr 28, 8:07 pm, Larry wrote:
Peter Hendra wrote :

My wife's people (Maori's) in New Zealand

Wow...lucky guy! Maori women are a truly beautiful set of genes...(c;

Larry
--

You like the tatoo's....right ?

Joe
My Dear Joe and Larry,

Sorry guys, I too had to wait for the African articles in the National
Geographic (a la Bill Crosby) to come out for my sex education.

Sorry to burst your bubble but paint on tattoos are nowadays for the
tourists. My wife/owner no longer swings from tree to tree though she
did have her own horse at age 3 on the farm, climbs to the top of the
mast and dives under to clear the prop. without hesitation now - I
have developed whimpitis with age and only do so when she is not
around. The closest thing to a tattoo she has had is spending four
hours getting her hands and feet - even the soles - hennaed by some
Bedu women in Sudan. She is an accountant, a most boring occupation.

Sorry, her father does not dress in a piupiu (dressed flax skirt) and
run about amok with a spear and a jade club anymore. He hasn't the
time as he milks 180 dairy cows with electricity and a milking machine
and has beef cattle that have to be mustered out of the forest every
year on horseback as well as sheep. They may have eaten people up
until the late 19th century and had vicious inter tribal warfare (the
socially insensitive Christian missionaries put a a stop to that), but
today, apart from tribal and family customs, they live pretty much the
same as other Kiwians. My mother-in-law is even an Anglican
(Episcopalean to thee) minister - her 32 year long prayers for my
conversion have not yet been answered. I am still a staunch "pagan" to
use her words and shall eventually be consumed by hell fire. If so, I
am sure that I will be in the very best of company. I'd hate wings on
my back and white does not suit my complexion anyway.

cheers
Peter

P.S. to those simple souls out there. No, I am not anti-Christian
either AND I'm directing my intercourse (No, damn it!!! I'm not gay
either - look it up in the dictionary) at Larry and Joe.

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

He hasn't the
time as he milks 180 dairy cows with electricity and a milking machine


I was born and raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York. My grandfather
milked 360 head of the biggest Holstein milk producers on the planet, 3
times a day. I, on the other hand, have more sense than to work 18 hours a
day like he did most of his life. I do, though, have extensive experience
running milk machines, bailing hay all summer, loading silos, unloading
silos, feeding, shoveling sh*t and spreading it across pure snow all
winter, to the delight of the crops planted in the spring....

Joining the Navy in 1964 was one good, politically-correct way out of the
dairy business.....forever....(c;

I didn't find out until I was in the Navy that you DIDN'T pour pure cream
from Grandma's precious Guernsey's onto breakfast cereal! Those idiots
were putting SUGAR on it! Very strange, city folks. They think "milk" has
only 6% butterfat in it...which, to us farm boys, is like "skim milk"...(c;

Larry
--
Still supporting America's Dairy Farmers.....every day.

I was born and raised on a dairy farm in upstate New York. My grandfather
milked 360 head of the biggest Holstein milk producers on the planet, 3
times a day. I, on the other hand, have more sense than to work 18 hours a
day like he did most of his life. I do, though, have extensive experience
running milk machines, bailing hay all summer, loading silos, unloading
silos, feeding, shoveling sh*t and spreading it across pure snow all
winter, to the delight of the crops planted in the spring....

Joining the Navy in 1964 was one good, politically-correct way out of the
dairy business.....forever....(c;

I didn't find out until I was in the Navy that you DIDN'T pour pure cream
from Grandma's precious Guernsey's onto breakfast cereal! Those idiots
were putting SUGAR on it! Very strange, city folks. They think "milk" has
only 6% butterfat in it...which, to us farm boys, is like "skim milk"...(c;

Larry

Wow! And I thought that all American kids lived in cities and didn't
realise that milk came from cows but was just another factory product
- there were/are 9 year old kids in South Auckland (N.Z.) who thought
so as well.

I too lived on several farms as a kid and did as you did but we never
milked 3 times a day. N.Z. mainly had Jerseys (high milk fat content
and lovely natured) and Fresians (similar or same as Holsteins - with
high volume). As the farms I lived on took their milk to the local
cheese/butter factory in cans, in the morning, before stirring them
up, we would skim some of the settled cream off the top of and take
it back to be heated - clotted cream. As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,
choumolier (sp?), turnips, swedes and mangolds (the least three beet
crops). We also made ensilage - made by stacking cut undried grass or
green maize (plants and all) in a heap and excluding the air -
fermented and smelled a bit like sauerkraut. This would be fed out by
pitchfork on the back of a tractor.

No barns either so no alimentary wastes to shovel out apart from the
washdown sump in the milking shed every couple of years. We would just
use chain harrows to disintergrate and spread out the cow pats. Even
though the farm families got paid handsomely by the government for my
upkeep, I still had to work just the same as the other farm kids which
i am glad of now.

Sigh! Memories. feeding chooks (laying hens), collecting and cleaning
**** off eggs, making hay throughout the night because of impending
rain - so tired that I was found asleep in the full bath with my
overalls on, going to school on the school bus and managing to "cop a
fe--" from the early developer good time girl on the way, smell of cut
hay, training my own farm dog to fetch the cows "Get away back Flo",
going to stock sales and best of all, looking over my shoulder in the
dawn from the cow shed at the first light turning the snow cap on the
dormant volcano, Mount Taranaki a deep purple. (Google it - it is a
more perfect cone than is Fuji in Japan and doesn't have the heaps of
consumer rubbish up its flanks). Even now, when I hear the Rock group
"Deep Purple", I visualise that mountain. - I mentioned that N.Z. was
God's Own country didn't I?

You're right of course. Most of the brighter farm raised kids left for
either education or jobs elsewhere. It was the town kids who packed
the agricultural classes at high school. Tried to tell about to
dropout University friends of the Hippie era that farming, and in
particular subsistance farming, was damned hard work, but they had too
many stars in their eyes and thought they would sit back and watch
everthing grow while they lay in hammocks under a verandah smoking
good ol' Coromandel Green. Couldn't afford to drop out myself. I was
trying desperately to drop in.

Oh yes! The rules. On one farm I biult a stringers over plywood framed
and canvas and enamel paint 12 foot canoe from a magazine at school -
can't remember it but it was American - "Practical something or
other". The hardest part of building the BOAT was in the translation
of the text to English.

My God, I must be old. All of this was so long ago.

cheers
Peter

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;


Larry
--

"Larry" wrote in message
...


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel.
snip.............
Larry
--


Yeah, yeah...and you walked 20 miles to school...uphill both ways!

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:37:56 +0000, Larry wrote:

Certainly a different type of farming than that of New Zealand.
Seasonal snowfalls do sometimes cause a few problems in some parts of
the high country in the South Island but the stock - sheep and beef
cattle - is still left outside. In the rest of the country the grass
still grows in the winter, albeit less prolifically than in the flush
of spring and autumn - we don't experience a "fall" as the leaves of
the native trees stay on - much more sensible. I suppose that is why
New Zealand butter and cheddar cheese is able to be sold here in
Trinidad - low cost of production.

It sounds terribly romantic to have such snowfalls, to be able to ice
skate, ski and make snowmen outside your back door and feed the cows
in a barn, but the romance obviously pales to the farmer. If we want
snow, we have to drive several hours to the mountains, and only for a
couple of months of the year. My youngest son had to wait to get to
Afyon in central Turkey at the age of ten in order to make his first
snowman. Still, it was a beautiful setting. It was in the grounds of
the great mosque there which, with its 15th century spirally tiled
onion domed minaret is a work of art in itself. I had gone in to pray
and they (owner and son) played in the snow outside. I was amazed at
the locals who took off their shoes and socks to wash their feet in
the freezing water of the fountain before prayer and who walked
barefooted on the ice to the door. Still, they were used to it. The
streets were covered in solid ice. Difficult to drive and walk. The
housewives were putting the ashes from their fires on the snow in a
line so that people could more safely walk. Magical to us though. No
other tourists - apparently wrong season.

Did the power lines break because of the weight of the snow or due to
the copper becoming brittle with the intense cold? N ever seen such a
thing.

cheers
Jerry Attrick


Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,

I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;


Larry

On 2007-04-29 21:37:56 -0400, Larry said:

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

Ah yes, cold winter mornings. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin --
didn't have electric milkers so we milked by hand. When it's 30 or 40
below zero, it's really hard to get the fingers working to strip a cow!
And mucked out the milking parlor with pitchforks and shovels . . .
piled the manure on the "manure pile" which was frozen solid until
springtime. (Oh the smell of a Wisconsin farm in the springtime!)

We'd park the tractor (and the cars) on a hill so that we could start
it in the morning by rolling it down the hill and popping the clutch.
The tractor usually started, but the cars didn't, so after Dad started
the tractor we'd be towing the cars down the road with the tractor and
a log chain to start them. I was 38 before I'd buy a car with an
automatic transmission -- how was one to start THAT in the wintertime?
I remember driving the milk to the cheese factory in back of the old
pick-up in those old fashioned cans . . . I was 12 and wasn't allowed
to drive on the highway. But farm kids driving milk to the cheese
factory in the morning was evidently allowed. I never got stopped,
anyway.


If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

We never worried about the power going down because we didn't have
power. We lived on Great-Granddad's farm, and he grew up without
electricity and didn't figure he needed it in his 80s! Didn't believe
in indoor plumbing, either. When GGD died, my folks put in plumbing
and electricity before the next winter, but I was in college by then.


I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;

I'm 51 -- I left the farm the minute I graduated from high school, and
haven't looked back. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Ruby
--
Ruby Vee

Focusing on the negative only gives it more power -- Chinese fortune cookie

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 01:07:51 +0000, Larry wrote:

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

My wife's people (Maori's) in New Zealand

Wow...lucky guy! Maori women are a truly beautiful set of genes...(c;

Larry
Correction Larry,
Gene carriers - remember your Dawkins or do you wish chapter and
verse. I'd have to look it up.

If you like Dawkins (personally I think he is a pompous English prigg
- but he may act differently to Americans. In Australia he was rather
patronisingly superior to the colonials but it could also have been
nervousness), you should like Gerard Diamond. The first book of his I
read was "The Third Chimpanzee". Perhaps it is because my formal
education was in Zoology that I find him interesting but I admit to
being disappointed that he made no mention that North Americans have
only descended from the trees more recently than the population in the
Antipodes. I was hoping to find a scientific rationale for the
American failure to appreciate really good coffee - straight black and
strong (Hello Vic Smith)

Seriously though, he provides some thought provoking concepts that I
know you will enjoy. From memory, he talks about conditioning for mate
selection - pink painted mother rat's nipples causing the male
offspring to prefer mating with females with similar painted nipples
and a hoist of other thought provoking concepts. I know that you will
enjoy it. If you cannot find a copy let me know and I shall send you
one as a small payment for your valuable help.I have kept my copy and
have bought copies for other people as I don't want to lend mine.

cheers
Peter

I have kept my copy and have bought copies for other people as I don't
want to lend mine.