Farm Story Friday

Christmas 1976 (Left to right: Eugene, Wayne, Scott, Eldon, Curious George , Roger, Brian, Keith, Ronald) The Amazing Adventures of Curious George Part 1: “The True Hero” (26 July 2019) Hi Greenwood Kids, I am Curious George. I am blowing my “stuffed animal” cover and infiltrating your father’s blog to bring you an extremely important message of injustice and extreme oversight. Your father’s farm stories, while somewhat amusing, lack any depth of understanding. But even more concerning, they do not recognize the true hero of each of the stories… me (Curious George).  Me (Curious George) convincing Megan to take me to Colorado so I could infiltrate your father’s blog! Do not fear dear children, for I will at length release your father.  I will allow him once again to express his simple and mundane farm stories, but only after my story, the true farm story that heralds the true hero (once again, that is me), is told. It all started on December 2...

Visiting the Neil Armstrong statue at Purdue University with cousins (Thanksgiving 2012). Picking Rocks (19 July 2019) Today’s theme song is Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon” in honor of man’s first moon landing. Tomorrow marks the 50-year anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, that remarkable event on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on the moon to spend a couple hours taking pictures and picking up rocks before returning to the Lunar Module. The next day they returned to join Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo 11 flight crew, in the Command Module. Four days after this rock-picking excursion, 24 July 1969, the three Apollo 11 astronauts went hypersonic for a short time as they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean a few minutes later. Picture of a footprint on the moon. Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon was seen on television around the world. This accomplishment was, ...

Thanks to April for today’s cow picture. Notice that these cows are not swimming... Let’s Go Swimming! (12 July 2019) Today’s story is set to the theme of one of our favorite songs, “Let’s Go Swimming” by Laurie Berkner. Unlike the goldfish in that song, and unlike your mother who spent many of her growing up summers swimming in the river, I was not much of a swimmer in my youth. You might remember that I dreamed of turning the manure pit into a swimming pool when it was first constructed. That didn’t happen, but I would occasionally go “swimming” with my brothers in the pond on our property. My mom never liked us swimming in the pond. It may have been the fact that we didn’t know how to swim, or it may have been the plethora of bacteria that I now realize must have been in that pond. There’s probably a reason that people put chlorine in pools… and don’t let cows poop in them…  Nonetheless, one of our favorite things to do in the pond was to wrap the pond moss aroun...

Lyle sitting on a non-bloated cow. Me flexing my muscles. Just a Little Poke (5 July 2019) Happy Independence Day! Hope you’re all having a great week and building lots of good memories! Today’s story is about knives. Turns out that knives are very useful on farms.  I usually had a knife in my pocket while out doing chores, but I remember that my dad had one special knife for certain emergency situations. As I remember, this knife had an off-white handle and a straight blade of approximately 8 inches long. The knife was kept in the barn for ready use, kind of like a first aid kit, except it was a knife… You may be aware that cows have four stomachs. When they first eat grass, or hay, or whatever, they do not chew their food very well. So the mostly-unchewed food goes to the first stomach and waits. At some point, the cow will stop eating and start doing something called chewing cud. If you’ve ever seen a cow laying down and looking like she is lazily chewing gu...