How to feed an orphan kitten by hand

07 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in Crich and the farms, How we're coming along, Uncategorized

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feeding a young kitten, how to feed an orphan kitten

We found the kitten in wet grass late Friday afternoon, with its umbilical cord attached and its eyes still shut.

We named her Shadow, in honor of our black cat who died several months ago, and have been feeding her by hand since then, every three hours, through day and night.

It’s not an easy process, because a big, hairless person wielding a plastic nipple filled with a mix of water and a white powder almost certainly feels nothing like her furry mother providing her own nice warm milk.

Why are you shoving this horrible thing into my mouth?

Shadow often turns her head away from the nipple, so some cunning is required.

I squeeze a little drop of milk out of the nipple somewhere in the direction of her always-turning, often shut, mouth, and hope she is inspired to try for more. If she opens her mouth to mew, I gently put the nipple into her mouth. Sometimes she sucks, mostly she doesn’t, so I do this thing where I try to squirt small amounts of milk into her mouth which she might or might not swallow. She always ends up with a lot of milk around her mouth.

But by keeping at it, we’re getting about 5 mils of milk down her every three hours, and she seems to be doing okay.

My 13yo has perfected the technique. Click on this link to see her feeding little Shadow:

Feeding our young kitten by hand

A close call and a school “lockdown.”

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

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My 7^th grade daughter’s school was on lock-down today due to a “police incident.”

Since the school shootings and the Boston Marathon bombing, schoolchildren in Boston routinely have “lock-down drills,” in which they are told to lock the doors, turn out the lights, and get under their desks, but this time it was real.

Half a mile away from my daughter’s school, one man shot another man, and then drove to a street right outside her school, and threw–or forced–two men, bleeding from stab wounds, out of his car.

I was one of the first people to know about it. How did I know so quickly? Easy.

In the five minutes between the first incident when he fled the police after shooting his first victim and the second incident when two bleeding men jumped or were tossed onto the street–he came extremely close to crashing head-on into my car.

It was a typical Wednesday morning, and I was tooling up Harvard Street. I’d done some work, gone to the gym and Whole Foods, and was now going to pick up my mother from her memoir group at 12.

And then a car came hurtling towards me. On the wrong side of the road. My side of the road. Coming right at me.

I slammed on the brakes and blasted my horn. The driver didn’t slow in the slightest. At the last minute, he swerved back into his own lane and passed my car with only inches to spare.

I pulled over and called the police. I didn’t want him to hit and kill any pedestrians, or God help us, the many preschool children walking around town, holding onto a rope.

I got the police dispatcher, and told her what I’d seen. She put me on hold for about five minutes, then she said that the guy I was describing “might be involved in an incident further down Harvard Street.”

I asked if he’d hit a pedestrian, and she said no, so I breathed a sigh of relief. While I been talking to the police dispatcher, four police vehicles had passed me at high rates of speed, going in the direction of the man.

I picked up my mother at 12, and drove home, shaking. Near my house, Harvard Street was blocked off by seven marked and unmarked police vehicles, and an ambulance.There was already a news helicopter in the air overhead.

I finally made my way through the diverted traffic, arrived home, and walked back to the police blockade. The car was not here. The man had fled from a crime scene for the second time.

I described the car—white, with New York license plates—and the driver–mid-20s, light brown skin, maybe Hispanic. I looked out onto the street and saw a red cap, black jacket or sweater, and a white shirt with blood on it.

Close-up of the clothes strewn on the street.

I went home, and soon after, I received a phone call and an email from the interim School Chancellor who said/wrote:

“Due to police activity in the vicinity of [my child’s and one other]Schools, students at these two schools are being kept inside for the remainder of the day. All students and staff are safe and police are present at both schools. This is a precautionary measure while the police are conducting an investigation.”

I sent my daughter a text, telling her that the bad guy was “long gone,” and she texted back, “Ok. It was so scary everyone is freaking out. I was worried about you guys are you safe????”

I assured her that we were.

Outside the school at the regular pick-up time, my best friend, I, many other parents, a police officer, the principal, the two assistant principals, and the guidance counselor stood and talked about what we knew, which wasn’t much beyond the fact that the three victims had been taken to hospital and that the man had fled. My daughter told me that most of the girls had been sobbing in the locker room, and that they had had to crouch under their desks. I felt so bad for all of them.

I sure didn’t expect anything like this to happen in my very safe town in Massachusetts. Life here is good–very good. Violence and school lock-downs are just not supposed to happen here.

But today they did.

US vs UK: British humo(ur)

02 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by Virginia Smith in Crich and the farms, How we're coming along, Humor/humour, US vs UK

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There’s a lot of joking around in England, between people who know each other, and among strangers. Just about every interaction I have in a shop ends with a joke.

Back in the US, I often joke with people waiting with me at the “T” (Boston’s train station, like the Underground in London or the subway in New York City), in stores, or on street corners as we wait for a light to change, but I find that I’m sometimes met with blank stares. This happens in England, of course, especially if the person you’re talking to is cranky, but more often an interaction ends with a joke.

This morning I was in a little shop in my parents’ village, and I made a mention of the headline in that day’s Daily Mail to the man at the till/register. The headline concerned the fact that members of the House of Lords get paid 300 pounds a day for their travel expenses, no matter where they live. Out of the 161 members of the Lords who live in London, 124 have claimed the daily allowance this year, including one who lives 200 feet away from Parliament.

Courtesy, The Daily Mail.

I turned to the shop clerk and said, “Can you believe that? 300 pounds to walk 200 feet?” Without losing a beat he said, “I’ll do it for fifty.”

The crazy nettle lady plants wildflowers

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Virginia Smith in Crich and the farms, How we're coming along, US vs UK

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Bluebell wood

The crazy nettle lady, also known as moi, is moving along with my plan to plant wildflower and bluebells seeds where nettles once grew on the lane on my uncle’s farm.

As I said in an earlier post, I hate nettles. Not only because of their nasty stings, but because they smother the indigenous wildflowers that are so important to a wide variety of insects, bees, and other wildlife. Nothing can grow in patches of nettles.

Last summer I pulled up 6,500 nettles along the lane and yes, I counted every one. This summer I’ve pulled up at least the same number, for a total of at least 13,000 nettles.

That’s a lot of nettles, especially if you include scratching around in the dirt to pull up their sinuous, diabolical, malevolent roots. (Did I already say that I hate nettles, especially the fact that if you leave one bit of root in the dirt, the nettles will resurrect themselves?)

Horrible nettle roots.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating, but I think I’ve pulled up 1/3 of the total number of nettles on the lane, and at least 50% of the goose grass, also known as cleaver. As my mother says, Any remaining nettles quake when they see me coming.

The time has come to plant wildflowers.

I chose two patches: one in full sun for an array of wildflowers; the other in shade for the gorgeous English bluebells.

First, the sunny patch.

The wall had tumbled down, hence the need for the post and barbed wire, so my first job was to move the stones to the side, clear out the nettles and roots, and put the post back in. I added several inches of the good rich dirt I got when digging the tops off molehills (more on this later).

I then opened up a so-called “Bee Mat,” which is a fabric with wildflowers embedded in it.

The bee mat of wildflowers favoured by bees and other insects.

The so-called “bee mat” of wildflowers favoured by bees and other insects.

It has these wildflowers in it:

The wildflowers.

I placed the mat on the molehill dirt which is very black and rich . . .

and then covered it with 5-10 centimeters of more dirt from the molehills (however much that is–I need it said in inches, please!).

Then I moved on to my bluebell wood.

Shady area for bluebells.

There are a lot of bluebells in the wood one field away from the lane, so I collected several hundred seeds and scattered them about in the shady spot on the lane.

Stay tuned to this space next summer, and I’ll let you know how my plans for wildflowers turned out!

Mountains out of molehills

27 Monday Jul 2015

Posted by Virginia Smith in Crich and the farms, How we're coming along

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molehills, moles

Today my uncle Frank and I are going to tackle the molehills in one of his top fields next to the moor.

Moles can wreak havoc with farmers’ fields, not to mention churchyards, cricket pitches, and other places where land needs to be flat.

Frank is about to start silaging (basically, cutting long grass, putting it in a dry place, and covering it with sheets of plastic). He will use it to feed cattle over the winter. If the tops of the molehills aren’t removed, they will be sucked up with the silage and contaminate it. Even cattle don’t like to eat dirt.

There are easier ways to deal with this using machinery, but Frank doesn’t have that particular capability with the machines he has, so here we are in a field that was drenched by last night’s torrential rain, taking the tops off the molehills by hand.

The tools of our trade: a shovel, a short hoe, and a wheelbarrow.

The best time to deal with molehills is when the grass is short and the activity of the moles is easy to observe, like this:

But with all the other demands of farming, it’s not always possible to find the time to deal with molehills earlier in the year. Now in late July, the grass has grown tall and completely obscures the molehills.

Courtesy, Nottinghamshire Wildlife Org.

Frank and I are basically walking around the field as blind as moles, because we can’t see the molehills under the long grass. But then we’ll feel a slight rise under our boots, and we’ll part the grass and often find what we’re looking for.

And most likely we discover a whole series of molehills, all of which need their tops taking off.

Using the hoe, we scoop the rich black dirt onto a shovel, then put it into a wheelbarrow which we then wheel to the edge of the field to dump it out, or put it in bags to use elsewhere.Notice the small hole below that moles use to get oxygen into their molehills.

It’s such rich, black dirt that I commandeer three bags for my project planting wildflowers. The dirt isn’t appropriate for use in gardens, because it’s filled with grass seeds, but it’s perfect for me because I want to have native plants, including grasses, growing in my area set aside for wildflowers. The rest of the dirt Frank uses to fill in large ruts in a field made by tractors during the wintertime.

This is one of the many things I love about farming; almost everything can be put to use, even molehills!

US vs UK: England, in photographs

18 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Virginia Smith in How we're coming along

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photographs of England

A few photos of England that I took during the past several weeks:

Trees along the River Cam in Cambridge

Flowers, flowers everywhere.

An inland beach under a lowering sky.

A cheerful attitude.

View through a church door.

The granary on my uncle’s farm.

Lovely countryside on my cousin’s farm.

The Crazy Nettle Lady

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by Virginia Smith in Crich and the farms, How we're coming along, Humor/humour

≈ 13 Comments

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English countryside, nettles

Recently a man and woman came down to the farmhouse to tell my cousin’s wife that a woman was on the farm lane pulling up nettles. They’d seen her up there for the past several days. The tone in their voices was, “Who is this crazy nettle lady?”

That would be, er, me.

I hate nettles. With a passion.

Not only are they a blight upon the landscape, but anyone who has been stung by a nettle will avoid the experience in the future. It is like being stuck by hundreds of hypodermic needles at the same time. Here’s a look at an arm that has been stung:

That arm is mine. Despite wearing rubber gloves halfway up my forearms, I got stung. Nettles are vicious, unless nicely tucked up out of the way where no one will be hurt. Even cattle avoid them.

But the worst part of nettles is that where they grow, nothing else can, because they completely take over with their awful sting-y selves and their miles and miles of roots.

When I was a child, there was hardly a single nettle on the lane and on the farm because my grandfather pulled up every one he saw. Now, without his singlemindedness, nettles have a field day (bad joke).

Here’s a look at some nettles near a stone shed:

And without nettles:

Better, yes?

Last summer, I rid the lane of over 6,500 nettles (and yes, I did count). I found it very relaxing and satisfying. I don’t know of anyone else who shares my ~~obsession~~ passion, though please be in touch if you do!

Here’s one of the piles of nettles I amassed, with a six-year-old next to them to give a sense of scale.To give nettles their due, they are useful to a number of butterflies and moths, and have medicinal value, and so are fine in moderation. But when they take over, they squeeze out all the wildflowers, and they must be eradicated.

I hope to help the lane return to its former diversity so that it’s not mostly nettles, goose grass (also called sticky weed) and bracken. Where I clear out the nettles, I’ll be scattering seeds for more local wildflowers which will provide an ecosystem for more bees and insects.

I think I’ll be at it for years.

Snow’d Rage: “Space-savers” and the Boston Blizzard of 2015

02 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along, Humor/humour

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We’re still digging out in Boston after 100 inches of snow, and it’s not always pretty.

The paths are, well, impassable (here’s my dog in a maze-like tunnel that a neighbor carved out to the street). . .

. . . and the snow has turned to ice. Two-way streets have become (at most) one-lane, cars have remained under snow since the blizzard first hit on January 29th, and there’s nowhere to park.

Tempers are increasingly short. So I’ve coined a new term: “snow’d rage,” which is what happens when your road rage is snow-related.

Perhaps the worst snow’d rage happens when you’ve been circling for an hour through the streets of Boston looking for a parking spot and you find only piles of snow-covered cars that haven’t moved since the start of the blizzard:

Or when you find a perfectly good, shoveled out spot that has a space-saver in the middle of it.

What is a “space-saver”? I hear you ask.

A space-saver is something that I’ve only seen in Boston. You use it to “claim” a parking spot that you’ve shoveled out on the street so that no one else can park there.

A “space-saver” takes many forms: it can be a lawn chair, step stool, box of Pampers, plank of wood, ironing board, vacuum cleaner, carpet, laundry basket, open umbrella, a recycling bin or a garbage can. Anything and everything that says: “This spot is mine because I dug it out, and if you dare even think about parking in it, your tires will be slashed before you can say “space saver.”

Here are some space-savers. The more typical:

A casual grouping of lawn chairs:

Traffic cones:

And the more unusual:

A mannequin:

Courtesy, AP photo by Elise Amendola

A box of diapers and cat litter:

And my favorite, a large Pooh:

And then, of course, there are those who took revenge on the spot-stealers:

The former mayor, Thomas Menino, tried to restore some semblance of order by allowing people to reserve their parking spaces for 48 hours after the start of the blizzard, but after that, he’d have the garbage trucks ply the streets, throwing all the space-savers into the truck.

That hasn’t happened with this blizzard. Space savers have been out since it started.

The new mayor, Marty Walsh, ordered the garbage trucks to be out in force starting yesterday, collecting all the space-savers. But until then, watch out. Move them at your peril. And, as we’ve heard, people are simply moving in new space-savers. Plus, there’s more snow on the way.

Boston Marathon a year later: wicked sad, and a triumph

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along

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anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Marathon 2014

Memorial for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing: Martin Richard, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, and Sean Collier.

A woman near the finish line who had been at that same spot last year when the bombs went off was asked this afternoon how she was feeling, and she said, “Wicked sad, but I had to be here.”

Apparently a lot of people felt that way, because there were a million people along the 26.2 miles of the 2014 Boston Marathon, there in tribute to the four people killed, and the 260 people who were badly injured. The Richard family lost the most: their son Martin, aged 8, died; his younger sister Jane lost her leg, both parents were wounded, and his older brother Henry, though not injured physically, witnessed all the devastation and loss.

There were a lot of t-shirts in blue and yellow that said, “Boston Strong,” and even some with a quote from Mr. Rogers, a beloved minister who had a children’s program on PBS. The quote said: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'” And at last year’s Boston Marathon, there were a lot of people helping after the bombs went off.

At the race today, security was very tight: there were three times as many police officers as before, a number of whom were undercover, with some on rooftops and over 100 surveillance cameras. Last night we were told by the news stations that helicopters were flying along the route, checking radiation levels in case a dirty bomb went off during the Marathon, which was very chilling to think about. This is the first view I had as I neared the route at mile 24:

Security for the 2014 Boston Marathon, two miles from the Finish Line.

But despite first impressions, things at mile 24 were not as tight as we feared; we were able to walk up to the barricades without being “wanded,” which was being done on Boylston Street near the finish line. People had been told not to bring any backpacks, and I didn’t see a single one. New barricades had been positioned at the far side of Beacon Street, where last year there had been none. But I have to say that they were not forbidding; they were almost decorative and it would have been easy to slip through them if necessary.

The new barricades.

The towns all along the route have planted daffodils, one of the official colors of the Marathon, and they were a lovely sight.

Daffodils along the route.

The wheelchair runners were first, followed by the women’s frontrunners, and then the men’s frontrunners. In all, there were 36,000 runners, 9,000 more than last year, in order to give additional people the chance to run and finish the race, in case they had not able to complete the course last year.

The women’s frontrunners at mile 24, going so fast I could barely photograph them!

I decided to go to the finish line to see where the race ended, and the bombs had gone off last year. Luckily, the “T” ran along Beacon Street for part of the way, so I could view the race from my seat. The first thing I saw when I came aboveground from the T was this truck sporting the word “Hazardous” which probably had something to do with biohazards that they were checking for last night.

Even a lifeguard chair was brought to help with surveillance though, as it says, “No lifeguards on duty.”

The streets near the finish line were barricaded off and you needed a special pass just to get near the runners.

Half a block from the FInish Line.

I wasn’t able to see any of the runners from my position in a large crowd behind the security barricades, so I had the brainwave of going into Lord and Taylor’s, which has huge windows overlooking the race.

View from Lord and Taylor. At the left, the Forum Restaurant, where the second bomb went off.

Later, as I went toward the Public Garden and a T station that was open (the two closest to the finish line were closed for the day), I saw floods of runners who had just finished the race, wearing silver capes.

Runners with their post-race “capes.”

Rapturous greeting at the left under the Meeting Spot for people with last names beginning with "T."

Rapturous greeting at the left under the Meeting Spot “T.”

An exhausted marathoner.

When they had finished the race, the runners were guided towards the open space provided by the Public Garden, the start of Boston’s “Emerald Necklace,” and a beautiful, peaceful place.

Runners and their families and friends in the Public Garden, post-race.

Public Garden: horses to the right; swan boat to the left.

The 2014 Boston Marathon was a hard day, particularly for those who had lost loved ones or been injured themselves, but it was a great step towards paying tribute to those who suffered so grievously, and taking back the race for ourselves–the runners and the people of Boston to whom it rightly belongs.

Boston Marathon Bombing, a year later

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, How we're coming along, US vs UK

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Boston Marathon bombing, Boston Marathon Memorial

Courtesy, Charlie Krupa/AP

It’s been a very somber day here in Boston. The sky was unrelievedly grey, rain pelted down almost unceasingly, and church bells throughout the city tolled at 2:49 p.m., for the two bombs that went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon exactly a year ago, killing three people and maiming 260 people, some of whom lost limbs, and many of whom will live with life-long injuries and continuing trauma. A police officer was later killed by the two terrorists, whose names I hope never again to have to hear.