News and Blog

Aaron & Tom shear lambs on the third day of shearing. 

For a week, Dominique and I had been getting the barn and sheep ready for  shearing,  but Wednesday into Thursday it snowed over 2 feet.  The sheep were outside in the storm; Friday night we put all 205 ewes into the barn to dry off, feeding them inside with more snow forecast. But come Monday they were still too wet to shear—what to do—fortunately it had not snowed over the weekend and had been partly sunny.

The rams, who were outside, were drier than the ewes.  We could shear them skirting off the parts of the fleece which were still wet; but the rams were  a 1/4 mile away, near the lower barns.  With Poem we trailed them up  to the shearing barn in ruts I'd made in the snow with the tractor tires (sheep can't move well in snow) after fenceing the ewes outside to dry in the sun and wind. 

When I told Aaron that he'd have to begin with the rams, he good-naturedly groaned.  Shearers don't like shearing rams, especially to start, as they are big (usually outweighing the shearer) and  are sometimes uncooperative.  Getting a late start due to the sheep shuffle, Aaron sheared 49 big rams on day 1 and 120 ewes, who were now dry, on day 2.  Tom came in from Towanda on day 3 to help him finish the ewes and to shear the remaining 145 lambs.

The usual & good roustabouts were there: Chris & Dominique skirted the fleeces; this year Ryan and Jeremy, a stout young lad from the nearby Bruderhof community, manhandled the sheep to the shearers and kept the shearing boards clean. 

If you need a good sheep shearer, see my Links page to contact Aaron Loux.  Shearing is a team effort; this was a job well done, thanks to all. 

We sheared 398 sheep on March 1, 2 & 3.

He goes by DeKooning

Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Prêt-à-Porter, and Gosford Park, was in the U.S. Army Air Force and piloted B-24s in fifty bombing missions in the Pacific theater during World War II.

"I don't think anybody remembers the truth or the facts. You remember impressions."

In Adobe Lightroom, I darkroomed this photo as shot.  The exposure was decreased using graduated filters to bring more definition to the rams' faces and to contrast them with the blue  sky, which was adjusted for hue (I love chicory bloom blue), saturation and luminance, to increase the illusion of a third dimension on the two dimensional plane, seeing as we do, through perspectival discoveries of Quattrocento painting. 

Yet both versions of the photograph have little to do with what I saw in the viewfinder when I released the shutter. 

Reality, which in many cases is language dependant (opposed  to seeing your mother which is not), is chameleon-like with no fixed repository of meaning.  Specifically, does reality reside in your eyes, in the Nikon D700, in Lightroom, in my eyes, or in medieval eyes who had not yet seen painting by Sandro Botticelli?  All locales have their say here.  Perhaps a  (see)saw from Williams Carlos Williams can help us, “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it..."  (see for say)

What I saw from behind the camera was none of the above; what I saw was a picture taken by someone else.  One that I'd seen years ago where the ram's head was above the photographer's while standing.  I had longed for the  majestic feeling of that  photograph and now I might finally get something similar to it—circumstances were permitting—I framed the rams with the  Nikkor 24-70mm zoom at 42mm; then shooting Aperture Priority at f/7.1, the camera adjusted itself to 1/250 sec at ISO 2000 and I got 6 exposures (all slightly out of focus, unfortunately) in 2 seconds before the rams changed position in the low, flat light of  the afternoon.  Jean Luc Godard often expressed to Raoul Coutard, his long-time cinematographer, what angle he wanted by referencing another filmmaker's shot, "comme Hitchcock à fait dans Rear Window..."

The rams look over my left shoulder at Poem who is sitting 20 paces behind me.  And you can bet she's looking back at them waiting for the word.

Hello Laurie, Anne-Katrin, Caroline, Jacqueline, Galen et al

Thank you for being brave hearts and contributing captions to the BEK photo; other readers have told me they will make hats for Haiti but coming up with a caption was hard for them to do, even for me.   And yes, it's really about Haiti.

Please email me your postal addresses and I'll gladly send you the promised yarn; we'll put your knittings up for sale in the stand as you finish them.  Tell me of your favorite charities too.  My father worked for the Red Cross.

CNN has been covering Haiti while the other networks seem to slowly ignore the continuing pain as time goes on.  TV correspondents in Haiti have been concerned about their viewers switching to the Winter Olympics now underway; and  warning that international aid and medical personal will be called home before the crisis is over.  Our help will arrive when it's needed most: when the world has moved on to other interests.  What else can we do.

Thanks,

Eugene

PS: caption or not, if you want to knit a hat for Haiti, or know someone who does, email me your postal address and I'll happily send you a skein of yarn.

When I saw this shot in Lightroom, I realized these two rams (walking side by side, heads down) look like they'd been drawn by Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK) for a cartoon in The New Yorker. 

Then I had to come up with a caption and I'm not very good at that so maybe you can help me.

Hats for Haiti

Get a free skein of worsted yarn to knit or crochet at hat when you suggest a caption to the photo above. We'll sell the hats you make at the stand and send all the money to a  worthy charity in Haiti in the name of the knitters, the buyers and the sheep.  

The work of rebuilding Haiti has just begun; they need our help now.

Click the "Add a comment" link below to leave your caption; I'll  contact you and  provide you with a skein of yarn for free.

§

It's 10 AM, Wednesday.  It just started to snow.  It's  relatively warm, just below freezing; this is a wet, Spring snow with 6 more inches expected.  The wind picks up as the day wears on; most of the snow should blow away on the flat where the flock is quartered for the winter. 

The sheep have 3'' of fleece.  They are warm and their wool protects them from the wind.  We will shear the flock on March 1, 2 & 3, two weeks before lambing begins.

I belong to SHEEP-L, a discussion list.  Unfortunately, over the years, the sheep discussions there have become impoverished; many early members have left for other sheep forums where subscribers don't carp over sheep. I skim the list email daily and post every couple of months when something strikes a funny bone.  So struck on Sunday, I posted in jest likening Australia's 2 main exports—lamb and coal—from the POV of an imagined New York customer.  Ron, a list member living in Sweden who'd read what I'd written, posted to the group and asked me,

"Are all your customers air heads?"

You insulting bastard, I thought, you're not  even amusing.  I replied with a trope of classical rhetoric;  where, by my agreeing with him, he includes himself in his own damnation,

"Yes, many of them Ron, particularly those who take themselves seriously."

He whimpered before going quiet.  Rhetorical blows like this win dharma combat in alt.zen.  What? You don't know that newsgroup in the 90's, then you know little of the wonder of invective and how wit sharpens it to enlighten the perceptive.

Then John, an Australian list member knowing I have sheep upstate and a farm stand in Manhattan, posted about how horrible New York was, but he added that the city had been cleaned up since he was there last.  "Cleaned up?"  Now that really got my hackles up having lived here for decades and having watched it change, mostly for the worse.

John wrote:

> My first visit to NY was in the 60's I decided to take a walk and left my hotel...(subscribe to SHEEP-L & search the archives to read his tale of woe.)

I replied:

Your story touched me John, you sounded like a lamb lost in the streets of Gotham.
 
But then you did experience New York as it distinctly and uniquely was; now after Guliani and gentrification,  it's become a Disneylandish mall.

In the 60's there was a reason to go to New York City: the people were different, the language was fresh,  the shops sold things you could only buy there;  now New York has a sallow corporate homogeneity to it with a  Best Buy, a Home Depot, a Starbucks, a Gap on every corner.  The  city was the last bastion of  mental health permitting all people, even marginal lunatics, to roam freely.  Now this incidental deliriousness has been replaced by something larger, something more frightening, something global, something more dangerous: There is a common craziness here that those afflicted call normalcy; for example, it manifests itself in a radical desire to be someone else like Michael Jackson's plastic surgery or minimally to be different from who you are, e.g. thinner, etc.  

Part of this plague of self disatisfaction comes from, and exhibits, a lack of hetrosis.   It is a desire to be different, but different by being the same but better.  It is fashion, ever changing, ever needing and we are the homongenized, those who think we have chosen markets but in reality we have been assigned to them by our desires which were given to us in a process of elimination by others.  It's how the mind works.  A word in the dictionary tells you what it is by telling you what it is not. Words discriminate.  Or looking at it another way, you are what you are not.  You cannot desire what you already have, and so on.  Another's celebrity or treasure comes from us, from out attention; don't you love to look at celebrities on the covers of Star, Us & the Enquirer when you're in line at Shop Rite to buy food.  This is  voyeuristic social nutrition; that we feed on them, is them feeding on us.

Manhattan was once the capital of heterogeneity, but no longer; it had to go underground; it is the gleam in a revolutionary poet's eye and I am talking about love here.

Look closely John, you'll see that those people you mentioned on the streets of New York talking to themselves about the end of the world are more right than you thought back then (in fact you realize how incredibly prescient they've become); at a minimum, your world has been replaced by a younger person's world, but these New York street talkers were seeing the bigger picture, that is easily confused with your minimal and personal view of  old age and change, they were  talking about social and financial collapse.  And where are we now, John? 

Are not we Americans (and our institutions) somewhat more imploded than we used to be.  Are our children to become bigamists marrying Chinese  doctors and Indian physicists thinking of their matrimonial bonds as hedge funds.  I wonder how long before emmigration begins here. Will this be the moon that turns globalization like the tide.  But what an ugly sea it will be: the only way jobs can come back is when wages are lower here than in Indonesia or Haiti.  We've handed our children more than debt haven't we.  That tremor wasn't an earthquake, it was Karl Marx chuckling in his grave.

I like having my sheep an hour from the city and going into Manhattan one day a week, not as a banker, but as a farmer.  How lucky I am to be there and not be there at once.

I'm selfish. The main reason I write is because it feels good and I like to write a good sentence, and I like to run words together freshly.  There is an element of crashing danger to writing too as not everything is good or fresh.

But there are other reasons and the response of a customer  this evening brings one forward.  She writes, "I do love your yarn; it's super soft and I like reading about your farm and knowing exactly where my yarn originated."

Thank you,  I feel good reading that.  I do want people to know where the yarn came from; I do want them to know how my sheep were raised; I do want them to know how I dyed the yarn. Our  yarn and sheep project is small and personal, like your knitting, but it talks proudly and loudly about itself.

Every month I get email offers from big yarn exporters in China; they will sell me cashmere, alpaca, llama, mohair, pure merino and blends with bamboo, bison and yak and many other exotic fibers all at prices that are less than what it would cost me to grow those fibers.

The merino yarns are as perfect as the knot in a CEO's silk tie, as shiny as the CFO's patent leather high heels; the wool is from sheep in Australia; it is scoured in China, it is carbonized there (bathed in acid and heated) to burn out all vegetable matter; it is dyed and spun in hi-speed factories that are larger than football fields; it is treated with chemicals to enhance its washability and to reclaim the softness lost in processing.  It is labeled and packaged anywhere but where it was made, and it is sold worldwide  in yarn stores and supermarkets inexpensively.  And you have to depend on me to tell you this because the vendors won't mention it.  Their yarn is large, anonymous, seemingly ashamed (unable to read but able to count) and wants to keep quiet in a small, green world.

Writing is really editing (unending) and as Paul Valery implied, writing is never finished, only abandoned.  So let me abandon (and  hopefully turn my back on) the latest edits on my Yarn Store page as it has something to do with the subject above:

"Local, natural and soft.  Since 1765—first in Saxony, then in Australia and in New England—Saxon Merino sheep have been bred to produce the finest wool in the world.  In the early 1990's Catskill Merino imported five rams from three of the most renowned fine wool studs in Australia to begin once again the tradition of breeding Saxon Merinos in New York*.

In early March we shear the flock.  The  shorn wool is spun into yarn by Green Mountain a small spinnery in Vermont.  We hand-dye the yarn in small lots on the farm.  Our yarn is as natural as our sheep; it has not been synthetically treated to increase its softness or washability.

*Sheep by sheep, we reverse globalization to bring shepherding and fine Saxon wool back to our shores.  But the sheep have more to do with their coming home than the shepherd does; for an explanation of this,  please see Michael Pollan's thesis about agency in the introduction to The Botany of Desire.