Dropped off the grid for a bit this weekend. There was a scheduled power outage here for 12 hours last night, so I invited my buddy Tammy up and we stayed at Harry and Chatman’s farm. Here’s a pic of the living room with Walt, Harry, Chatman, Tammy, and about eight of the dogs and a couple of the cats (there were 12 dogs total there last night, and a half dozen indoor cats, as well as the 12 barn cats, three pigs, a dozen hens, three donkeys, Otis the bull, a goat and a couple sheep, and countless others I am forgetting):
They have a fully furnished efficiency+ apartment above the barn (with a picture window looking out onto the farm on one side and another picture window looking down inside the barn so you can see all the animals from your bedroom), and let me tell you, the rooster and the donkeys make quite the ruckus in the morning (not to mention the pigs), and man, I have to tell you, when Chatman came and fed the hens late this morning, they were mightily pissed and let him know it, clucking all over the place defiantly and one hen challenged him and gave off some aggressive “I’m not sure about this guy” calls.
And before anyone asks, none of the animals are ever used for food (‘cept the eggs). They are all rescues, and they don’t even sell the wool from the sheep, they just throw it in the yard for birds nests. And it is so funny watching a half dozen dogs lounging around in the barn with cats sleeping on them while hens walked around talking and eating. It’s like Doctor Doolittle’s wet dream. Oh, and Tammy watched a hen lay an egg and just couldn’t get over watching a hen squeeze one out and then we picked it and the others up and went in and had bacon and eggs. City people.
Oh, and I have been doing the “JUST HOLD DOWN ON THE BUTTON AND ONE OF 100 PICS WILL TURN OUT OK” thing with the iPhone 5s. Here are two new attempts:
It was nice being off the grid without internet and phone even though it was only for under 24 hours. Oh, and you should totally see Rosie on a farm- I think some more clues into her background were divulged today. She has always loved Chatman, but today, she followed Chatman all over the place while he did the morning feedings. Chatman said most dogs won’t go into the pens with him, but Rosie just stuck by him the whole time and totally acted like she had been around livestock her entire life, so there may be a chance she was from a farm before being dumped. She just followed him everywhere and had a good old time, and I actually stopped keeping an eye on her because she was just following the pack and Chatman.
I shouldn’t be surprised- she is a working dog. Russell, my parents former Jack Russell terrorist, was at his best when dad was out in the yard. He would spend all day “helping” him, never leaving his side and always willing to “help.”
Omnes Omnibus
It might just be that she( Rosie) liked the dude.
CaseyL
That sounds like my idea of heaven: surrounded by animals, most of them in the house with me, all members of the family.
(Except for the “getting up super early to feed everyone” part.)
piratedan
good pic of Steve, Thnx for sharing!
Ash Can
I love the look of the room in the first picture. How old is that building? The fireplace, ceiling beams and windows make it look well over 100 years. And what does “above the farm” mean? Second floor of the farm house? Of the barn? A house on the side of the big hill overlooking the fields? Inquiring minds want to know.
jayboat
In photographer-speak, the 100-shot technique you refer to is known as ‘spray and pray’.
Alison
That is an awesome fucking fireplace. I miss having one (though the one we had in the house I grew up wasn’t quite that grand).
A weekend on a farm surrounded by animals sounds pretty nice, so long as I don’t have to clean up after them :P
Cassidy
Yaaay, another cat pic on the internet.
Anyway, click here, listen to the album, you’re welcome. You can browse cat pics while it plays in the background.
Mnemosyne
We ran across one of the movies that we can never pass up when it turns up on cable — Young Frankenstein. I really need to watch it with Gene Wilder’s commentary one of these days.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Young Frankenstein is possibly the greatest movie ever made.
Alison
@Omnes Omnibus: YES. My parents and I can pretty much recite the whole thing among us. So so many great lines.
Mary G
Wow. Beautiful. Glad to hear Rosie enjoyed herself. I assume the blur on the floor is her.
Excellent pictures of Steve.
Suzanne
That room is lovely, and Steve is even lovelier.
Mnemosyne
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s pretty close. The one thing I resent about it is that now people laugh at the hermit scene in Bride of Frankenstein, which is supposed to be sentimental and touching, but now comes across as comic. Oh well.
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison: The first time I saw it, I had gone to the theater with my dad to see American Graffiti. It had ended it’s run at the local theater the night before. Since we had walked over there, we chose to see the movie that was on. OMG, we did not regret it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: If you don’t see the hermit scene in Young Frankenstein as touching, you are a bit of a ghoul.
Alison
@Omnes Omnibus: Excellent happenstance :)
trollhattan
The hell is a “scheduled power outage”? They installing knitted line cozies? The coal people want to remind you who’s boss?
Omnes Omnibus
@Alison: : Yes, it was. The next morning,dad was crying and laughing as he was trying to tell my mom about the movie. Mom never got it the way that dad and I did. Outside of the brilliance of the movie itself, it is something my dad and I share that exists outside of anyone else’s concerns.
Ash Can
OK, I refreshed the page and saw the added detail in the original post. That sounds like a really cool set-up! Nice use of space and windows. I bet the views of outside are gorgeous. And what a nice idea to have a view of the animals too.
That sounds to me like the ideal leisure farm. A haven to all animals, and a beautiful, cozy living space for the humans.
trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus:
Tied with Holy Grail as my favorite comedy. Also my favorite Brooks movie.
“What great knockers.”
“Why, sank you doktor.”
“Did someone make a ‘nummy’ sound just then?”
Yatsuno
It was nine feet high, six feet wide, soft as a downy chick.
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: ” There are some who call me Tim.”
trollhattan
I shot my wife in Reno, just to watch her…rats!
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2022710847_apxhospitalshootingnevada.html
Armed 88-year-olds. Smells like Freedom to me.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
I also love Blazing Saddles and The Producers. Basically, it’s the Brooks/Wilder combination that I love.
trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus:
“Answer me these questions three.”
We probably shouldn’t get started.
JoyfulA
@trollhattan: I had a scheduled power outage 4 hours a day for a week in Philly once. It was explained that a new plant had been built to grind concrete construction waste into reusable concrete. It wasn’t explained what that had to do with the scheduled power outages.
Ash Can
Oh, and PS: Thanks for adding the info, John. :)
piratedan
@trollhattan: let me know when you guys get to Roger the Shrubber, willya?
Omnes Omnibus
@piratedan: Nih!
John Cole
@trollhattan: They took it down for twelve hours to replace a substation about 3 miles down the road. Part of an upgrade. Out here in the boonies where there is no redundant grid (is there anywhere in the US, actually), it happens once a year or so. Power goes out at least once a month around here because of wind and weather, and there really isn’t much that can be done about it until the US buries their power lines. Until then, you run power lines through the woods, and, well, wind and heavy snow and ice are eventually gonna break limbs on trees and knock the power out.
It’s one of the minor inconveniences we deal with to avoid what you consider civilization and we call urban hell.
YellowJournalism
@Mnemosyne: About a week ago, TCM aired Bride of Frankenstein . I started watching around 10 minutes before the hermit scene while my boys played in the living room. They both looked up occasionally until the monster came to the her it’s home, and then my youngest was glued to my side, watching with big eyes and making comments about the monster and his friend. He got very upset when the villagers took away the hermit, but he watched the movie to the very end and asked to watch it again. (He was mad that we couldn’t.)
I watched Young Frankenstein long before I had ever seen the actual Bride, but it didn’t spoil the original for me in tone or affect. I wonder how my young son will react when he finally gets to see the Mel Brooks version of that scene. I probably won’t wait too long to show him, as I was only a little older than him when I first saw it. I swear, though, I’m more protective of what my kids watch than my parents ever were.
Omnes Omnibus
@John Cole: I have never experienced a scheduled power outage in my life. I suspect that you have been bullshitted.
LanceThruster
Working animals are a trip even when the work/helping is in their heads.
trollhattan
@YellowJournalism:
Am trying to decide when to introduce my kid (12) to it. Mostly it’s fine but there are a couple of scenes I may need to fast-forward through.
“He would have an enormous Schwanstucker!”
mclaren
“Lady, the God you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud.” — West Wing, pilot episode.
grishaxxx
Jeez, it’s like the Peaceable Kingdom in there (and, yes, a very beautiful room, too!)! !!!11!!!
I am touched that Harry and Chatman scatter the wool for the birds to use – almost saintly .
When I lived in Cambridge, MA, we had UNscheduled power outages all the time, whenever the fucking ancient brick-lined conduits for water and electricity and whatever met and married. Charming, for sure.
Mnemosyne
@trollhattan:
Nah, don’t fast-forward — pretend you don’t understand those jokes. It will give him/her a secret thrill that they got a joke that Dad didn’t. (Assuming they even get it — I don’t think I got it until I was an older teenager.)
I remember seeing an essay by a comedy writer once about watching a late night talk show with her mother where the host asked the guest if he would let his wife read Lady Chatterly’s Lover (obviously, this was back in the 1950s/early 1960s). The guest’s reply was, “I’d let my wife read it … but not my gardener.”
The writer laughed at the joke and was astonished to see her mother laughing, too, because at age 16, it had never occurred to her that her mother had read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, too. Such is the egocentrism of being a teenager.
kdaug
tl;dr
Cole’s in a barn with a bunch of animals?
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@trollhattan:
That which doesn’t traumatize or kill the kid will be fine, IMO. Odds are that the kid has already picked up on quite a bit- unless, that is, s/he’s being home-schooled.
Alison
@trollhattan: FWIW, I watched movies like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles at a very young age with my family, and most of the jokes I later learned were dirty just went right over my head. I may have laughed because other people laughed, but I didn’t really get what they meant. I was also too shy to ask, which probably helped…
YellowJournalism
@trollhattan: Yeah, I just figure that stuff will go over their heads like it did me the first few times. By 12, though, I knew what that was. Of course, again, I got to watch a lot of stuff before my teens like Dirty Dancing, Pretty Woman, and a lot o Dallas that was way more explicit than YF. My parents weren’t dumbasses who let me see just anything; they usually were right there and willing to answer questions if I had any. (Okay, Mom would answer and Dad would direct us to Mom. Still..)
wasabi gasp
You didn’t tell anyone to fuck off and get bent. Tammy rocks.
wasabi gasp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhDuHYEaHrIGhT
wasabi gasp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwXVmz1ZPQE
wasabi gasp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri_cjB9bD6g
wasabi gasp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OER8kmKHzAY
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan:
Two words.
Frau Blucher.
Totally OT, but I think this would be a very good MLK day to declare, for once and for all, that if MLK were alive today there is no fucking way in all of Hell, Hades, Grethor, the South Bronx, or anywhere in Mississippi that he’d be a Republican.
He would have renounced the entire mess in 1980, at the latest. Gerald Ford was the last Republican President who had the slightest shot at being called “decent” and that pardon of the criminal Nixon renders that marginal, at best.
Villago Delenda Est
@piratedan:
So much of that sequence in Holy Grail is great, but Arthur correcting Bedemir’s pronunciation of “ni” is hysterical.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
One of my grandmothers was well into her 60s before she was comfortable enough with reading English to tackle a book in that tongue. (Not saying she was illiterate – English was like her 6th language. In fact, she was the first girl ever to finish high school in her little town in what was at that time Poland, back ’round the turn of the previous century.)
What was her choice for her long-awaited English language reading? Yup, it was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
WereBear
We had a scheduled outage, for many hours, when we were installing a new substation. My friend and I manned the office for visitors while everyone else basically left town to go somewhere more fun.
Sure enough, two ladies wandered in, asking what was going on. It was my great pleasure to say, “It’s the zombies.”
They eventually cracked up, but the look they gave each other first was priceless.
gnomedad
“Good idea, O Lord!”
“Of course it’s a good idea!”
kc
That sounds lovely. But . . . why would they schedule a power outage? Especially when it must be freezing cold?
kc
@kc:
Never mind the question, shoulda read the comments.
The farm sounds wonderful.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@trollhattan:
We started introducing Mo to somewhat adult movies at that age. I think that year we saw both Tropiic Thunder and Pineapple Express.
WaterGirl
@Yatsuno: Love that you guys have been posting muppet links lately. Believe it or not, I have never watched the muppet show.
But I love love love beaker singing “feelings”, and the song with harry belafonte last week and now this one with john denver.
Mnemosyne
Okay, only just saw this part:
Depending on what kind of sheep they have, they could probably sell a couple of fleeces on Etsy (though you have to get someone who knows what they’re doing to shear the fleece, because otherwise you can wreck it for spinning). People on Etsy are always looking for cool small farms to purchase from. But it may be more of a hassle than it’s worth to them.
Lurker
What a gorgeous room! And that fireplace… I’m jaleous.