Meet Emma, our new (one-horned) Jersey cow.

We bought her last week from a friend of ours, the same friend who is loaning us the milker. This is her second pregnancy (the first time, she raised her birth calf, plus one more) and she’s due mid-May. Our friend says she has a sweet and gentle temperament, and she’s A2-A2 — some people say the milk of an A2-A2 is easier to digest, so I’m curious to see if my husband does better with her milk. (He still uses store-bought lactose-free milk on his cereal and takes a lactose pill whenever he eats dairy.)

When my daughter and husband drove in with Emma, Daisy went absolutely berserk.

Frantic with excitement, she bellowed and ran back and forth, slipping and falling and frothing at the mouth. She even tried to stick her head through the gate. (Can you imagine if she’d gotten stuck?!)

She was so aggressive and desperate that we started to worry she might try to jump over the fence, or else trample Emma when we let her into the field. 

She didn’t, though. Butterscotch and Daisy both chased Emma around for a bit, but things soon settled. Daisy’s even a little scared of Emma now — when Emma’s eating, Daisy hangs back, which is hilarious considering how Daisy towers over Emma.

So, what’s our plan, you ask? 

Well….we’re not exactly sure, but the general outline goes like so: We’ll milk Daisy until we’re established with Emma’s milk and once that’s going okay, we’ll probably sell Daisy. In the next couple months, we’ll breed Butterscotch — we’re buying her from our daughter — in hopes of a spring delivery, and then we’ll flip back and forth between the two cows, selling off their calves as we go.

One possible new development: we are considering separating Emma and her calf, switching to twice-a-day milkings, and bottle feeding the calf its portion of milk. Since mama cows hold back the cream for their calves, we’re more likely to get a lot more cream if we separate them, and I would love to start making our own butter and sour cream.

So. That’s the big picture plan, but it’s kinda loose. We know things can go sideways at any point. We might decide it’s too much, or we only want one cow, or no cow. Who knows. 

Having a family milk cow started out as an experiment, but it turns out it’s not as overwhelming or complicated as we feared. And it’s good for us! Even though my husband is adamant he’s not a farmer, I’ve noticed that getting outside every morning and completing a one-off task makes him more focused — the structure and routine seems to ground him — and for me, our mornings together in the kitchen have been one of the best things about having a cow. While he strains the milk and washes up, I make his breakfast and lunch, stir the sourdough, brine the cheese, whatever. Working together, we feel more like a team: I’m taking care of him, and he’s taking care of me. It’s nice.

There is one big problem, though: our family is dwindling. While we love everything about having a cow — the routine, the self-sufficiency, the steady supply of fresh milk, the cheesemaking — finding a balance between supply and demand is challenging. Now that I’ve experimented pretty heavily with cheesemaking, I’m ready to pull back a bit (a cheese per week sounds about right) so we’ve got to figure out a way to pace ourselves. 

Maybe we should get a couple piggies?

This same time, years previous: sunshine cakes, do you fight with your spouse?, the coronavirus diaries: week six, feeding my family, gado gado, beginner’s bread, right now, wrangling sheep, crispy almonds, fun and fiasco: chapter two, deviled eggs, on fire.

We’re passionate about our popcorn! Cooked in (lots of) coconut oil, drizzled with (lots of) butter, and seasoned two different ways, it’s our Sunday night supper of choice.

(This particular night, we got a fun little piece of good news, whoop!)

***

This is my method for using up the food that we put up.

We’re more likely to eat it if we see it!

Have a good weekend, friends! I hope yours includes a huge bowl of buttery popcorn.

Writing is something that I both hate and crave. The process of getting words on paper is mind-bending and tedious, and the edits are never ending. Sitting on my butt for hours on end is physically painful, and keeping my attention so narrowly focused (at least for me) is just one small step removed from hell. And yet writing is how I process my life. It’s how I think. I often don’t know what I think until I’ve written out my thoughts and edited them into submission. That done, I feel good — better. Like I’ve accomplished something. 

So to get myself to write and then stick with it, I’ve created a system. Each day I set a goal for how much time I’m going write. It could be two hours, or five, or maybe three and a half. I prioritize my writing time over other projects, but I try to also be fair with myself. I’m not a machine.

Once at my desk, I shut down all my computer tabs (Gmail, Facebook, Instagram), spread out the pages I’m working on, open Scrivener, set my phone timer for 30 minutes, and get to work. When the timer goes off, I make a tally mark on a scrap of paper and break to pee, eat breakfast, make a cup of tea, skim an article, put another load of laundry in the machine, talk to the kids, check email, whatever. 

As much as I’d like to dillydally, I know I need x-amount of tally marks before I can quit for the day and messing around is only going to prolong the agony. So, trying not to think too hard, I quickly shut everything down again (Ha! I tricked myself into listening!) and get to work. Once I reach the day’s tally mark goal, I write the total number of writing hours on the family calendar and at the end of the week I add them up. If I come up short, I may make myself write an extra hour or two on the weekends. 

The other day when I was describing my writing method to a friend, she told me that she does this all the time, except in her case she uses it, not with writing, but when she’s cleaning a room or paying bills or whatever. Having a finite end-time, particularly with tasks that can drag on, makes starting easier.

“There’s a name for this timer method,” she said. “Pom-something. I think it’s a kind of tomato.” 

And then a few days later I was talking about my writing method again, this time with my sister-in-law, and she said she does the same thing, except she uses an app (there’s an app!) instead of a phone timer. Once a week, she and her co-workers gather virtually to write, and every 25 minutes she takes a 5-minute break. “It’s the Pomodoro Method,” she said.

And then I looked it up. “Pomodoro” is Italian for tomato and it’s called the Pomodoro method after the Pomodoro kitchen timer which is made in the shape of a tomato.

This same time, years previous: the coronavirus diaries: week 57, the coronavirus diaries: week 5, the quotidian (4.3.19), missing Alice, millet muffins, oatmeal raisin cookies, yellow cake, cardamom orange buns.