Sep
28
It’s a Mess
Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment
I know, I know. It’s a mess around here. Don’t worry, stuff will be getting progressively more organized/awesome as I work on it.
Sep
28
Another Vocab Lesson!
Filed Under vocabulary lessons | 2 Comments
It’s time for another vocabulary lesson, complete with pictures!
Big Blue – Big Blue, also known as “The Beast,” if you’re me, is our truck. It’s an ‘89 Silverado and it truly is a beast. It got Bradley and I safely through a terribly blizzard while we were driving home (home home, not apartment home) from school one time. Another time, it got stuck in our driveway in about 4 inches of snow and my brother-in-law Jake had to push it out with his Jeep. Since I was on my way to a family function, I arrived before Jake and told people about how I’d just had to pull his Jeep out of a snow bank. I’m tricky like that. Unfortunately, The Beast/Big Blue has succumbed to a myriad of problems and is now a big blue lawn ornament.
Those unfamiliar with Big Blue might initially get it confused with…
Big Boy — Big Boy is our big tractor. Our only other tractor is a riding lawn mower, but that’s beside the point. Big Boy doesn’t have a whole lot to do on our little farm, but every once in a while you see it fly past with my grandpa at the wheel.
Dirt Pile — I don’t even know the story of the dirt pile, but it’s pretty self-explanatory. Somehow, there came to be a large pile of dirt. Grass and trees eventually grew over it, but the name never changed. We used to sled down this thing for hours in the winter time. Actually, it was probably only 15 minutes or so, but it felt like hours.
Rock Pile — The rock pile used to be the corn crib. Our property, along with our neighbors’ property, were all part of a large dairy farm. It was split up and we got the chunk with the buildings on it. Somehow the corn crib was reduced to a pile of concrete slabs, affectionately known as the rock pile. I used to climb on this all the time when I was a kid, and the bottom part would fill with water during particularly heavy flooding.
Tire Swing — This is probably the crowning glory of Big Boy. It’s a tire swing, but instead of using a modest tire, my dad and grandpa went all out and attached a huge tractor tire to the tree. There was lots of trial and error regarding rope length, rope stretching, etc. Big Boy hoisted the tire up off the ground, if I remember correctly. Mostly I remember watching the proceedings from the porch and wondering why we couldn’t have a normal tire swing. The answer to this question, I’ve found, is because we don’t have a normal anything.
Sep
25
Back in the good ol’ days before I was technically a professional equine photographer, I really only took pictures of one horse. That horse, as you may have guess, is none other than my 80’s-fabulous Arabian, Masterpiece.
It’s weird that he’s 80’s-fabulous, too, because he was born in ‘94. Whatever. Don’t try to argue with him.
Remember this picture from a couple days ago? Flies! Ew. They plagued us the whole time I was trying to snap a good picture of the beast.
Piecey tried desperately to shake them off. Pictures taken in mid-shake are painfully awkward.
Reason #2 Piecey is 80’s-Fabulous: He has no butt, perfect for wearing tapered leg Jordache jeans that come up to your collar bone.
When shaking didn’t help, he threw himself onto the ground in an effort to squish the flies.
He made sure to roll evenly…
…on both sides.
We came to the agreement that I would take one semi-decent action shot before putting the fly mask back on.
But I tricked him and took some head shots, too.
Then he told me that the flies were grodie to the max and I agreed, so I put his fly mask back on.
Sep
24
I Lifted 80 lbs Yesterday
Filed Under dogs | 2 Comments
“Eighty pounds of what?” I bet you’re saying.
Eighty pounds of pure, undiluted belligerence.
I gave Bradley a bath yesterday. I know it can be hard to believe, especially for those who know him, but he can, at times, be a little…contrary. He didn’t offer any sort of help while I lifted him into the tub, and he certainly didn’t believe me that there was any sort of rule saying that if you don’t jump into the tub, you can’t jump out.
He’d gotten a few fleas on him, thanks to Olio, who is like a succulent angel food cake for fleas. A bath was necessary.
The bath wasn’t his only activity of the day, though.
He sat around and intimidated the puppies from a distance.
Then he walked around looking for a new location at which he could intimidate the puppies.
Then he practiced his song and dance routine, which, of course, is directed at the puppies. It’s called “Upside Down Teeth (Are Still Big Teeth).”
Sep
23
Home Sweet Home
Filed Under aggie stuff, dogs, horses | 1 Comment
Ahhhh, a relaxing day at home. Today was the first day I’ve had without something big hanging over my head for a couple weeks. My speech on equine photography went well yesterday, even though I was the last to talk, which meant the vast majority of people have gone home.
Soon enough I’m back to the grind, as I have quite a few orders from the show I photographed. I need to be working on proofs and getting them to the printer, but today I took it easy.
They’re harvesting the field around our house. This sight made me very excited, until I realized that the combine and trucks were just parked and that their operators were probably at church. I briefly entertained the thought of running over to take closer pictures, but decided against that.
Stella is a dog of action. Unfortunately, that action usually involves a lot of urine.
Mauler is also a dog of action, but he’s a dog of slower, slightly tilted action. Stella is totally encroaching on his action shot, but that’s ok, because I forgot to adjust my ISO, so it’s all washed out, anyway.
I went to visit Piecey, and he gave me this “Hey, how the heck are you? What the heck are you doing? Why the heck aren’t you in the field getting me some corn?” look.
Olio and I took it upon ourselves to find him some corn, and we did just that.
Close by, Mauler had died.
Just kidding.
This is entitled “Lord of the Flies,” and it’s an emotive portrait. I was trying to get him to run around, and he was trying to get me to understand the anguish of having your entire face covered with flies. We compromised.
Sep
21
Bad Decisions
Filed Under aggie stuff, university farm | Leave a Comment
I know I mentioned something about how I’d post pictures and stories from the horse show I photographed. I will, but right now I am drowning in equine photography (what with the 30 minutes talk I’m giving tomorrow/today and on which I have done approximately zero work).
Instead, I’ll tell you a tale of bad decisions, aka Kalin’s Thursday Adventures.
It begins with me desperately trying to finish my statistics homework. I had plenty of time to turn it in, but I had to go out to our university farm and head up a Haunted Corn Maze work expedition, and I didn’t want to be late. After running around the most ridiculously-designed building, I finally found my teacher’s mail box and dropped off my homework before speeding out to the University Farm. I showed up in a sweatshirt, jeans and Crocs and was asked about 5 million times if I was really hot, because it was 80-some degrees outside.
Our main goal of the evening was to remove large bundles of corn stalks from the maze so that we can go in later and till up the ground. This was cumbersome because, well, it’s a maze. There’s no easy way out. The whole reason the ground gets tilled is because it’s so uneven and full of sharp corn stalks, the likes of which can stab through your ugly-but-comfortable rubber shoes and into your foot. Getting a wheelbarrow full of corn stalks out of a complicated maze in 80+ degree weather is no treat, especially when you can’t maneuver it without massive amounts of cursing.
Kelsey had the idea to get a large tarp, pile stalks on it, and carry that out of the maze. We went in search of a tarp, which involved a questionable adventure in the cattle barn, the discovery of a small Pocahontas poncho, a frightening ride in Matt’s truck and the eventual stealing of a large blue tarp from these sheep.
We took it into the maze, after another frightening ride in Matt’s truck, and started piling a whole lot of corn stalks onto it. When I say a whole lot, I mean a whole freakin’ lot. Eventually it got to the point where we thought this giant blue tarp was about as full as it should be, and we gathered the corners and hoisted them onto our shoulders and tromped out of the maze.
Not really. I wish that had happened, but in actuality we followed the path until we knew that we were as close to the edge of the cornfield as we could get. After that point, the path veered off and looped and went under ground and through a swamp and over a rickety rope bridge and all that jazz. At this point I made a critical judgment error and said, “Let’s just go through the corn.”
We had to go across the rows, not down the rows, to get to the outside, which means that the spaces between corn stalks is not all that big. This maneuver is usually okay, because we usually are never carrying gigantic tarps filled with approximately 5000 lbs of corn stalks. We stepped into the corn, flailed around for a moment, and stopped. We were stuck.
“This isn’t working,” said Kelsey.
“WE’RE ALMOST THERE!” I shouted as I leaped into the row of corn in front of me.
The sound of cracking corn stalks nearly drowned out our laughter, not to mention the huffing and puffing caused by barreling through a few yards of corn field with a giant corn-stalk-and-tarp enchilada. When we finally burst out into the open, we looked behind us to see a large swatch of corn that was completely trampled down.
“Isn’t there some saying about the road to hell being paved in good intentions?” I asked (rhetorically).
Sep
20
The Legislative Process
Filed Under dogs, ferrets | Leave a Comment
I didn’t post last night because I was buried in paper work. Most notably, an interesting petition anonymously appeared on my desk. It was in reference to the allegedly unfair distribution of ferret treats in my household. Though generally well-written, one particular bullet under the “Reasons Treat Allotment Should Be Progressive In Relation to Animal Weight” header caught my eye:
“Because she is a tiney[sic] rat and I am a big dog.”
When I asked Bradley if he had anything to do with the petition, his eyes got shifty and he denied it. He also denied forging signatures on the it, though I brought up some pretty valid arguments to back up my accusations.
“Instead of ‘Lil,’ it says ‘That one who came to visit you and made me so mad I peed on your beds.’ It sounds like maybe this was written from your point of view, Bradley,” I said. His eyes got shifty again and he asked me if someone was knocking on the back door, because he was pretty sure he’d heard someone back there and he’d go check it out, but he looked forward to continuing our conversation later. With that, he waddled with a purpose into the kitchen.
The petition got thrown away. Not because it was bad, but because I came home from a sorority ceremony and found an empty bag of ferret treats chewed open on the floor, so it was really a moot point.
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Kalin is twenty-three years old.
Contrary to popular belief, she's not bilingual (though after 4.5 years of Spanish you'd think she'd know more than she does).
She loves Herefords and Tennessee Walkers. . . [READ MORE] -
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