Thread: random stuff

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Originally Posted by rspears

I'd never heard of City Data so I googled them -

Hoss, you must be REALLY, REALLY bored!!

Sometimes you just gotta laugh!

got a little anxious scare the other day .. coming home from work i notice smoke in the distance .. in the general area where i call home ..turned on my road and the fire was obviously on my street .. did i forget to turn off the little heater in the bathroom or something .. i speed up a bit .. turns out it was a neighbors house just down the street a bit .. the older owners had both passed away recently and the grandson ( new owner ) had the house burned down by the local fire department .. he is tearing down everything they ever achieved in their 80 plus years of living .. clearing the land to no doubt sell it for a huge payday .. that happens so much around here .. as with the dairy farm a few posts back ..

Now there's something I haven't seen in decades. Burning a house by the F.D. , to much pollution being released is the fear, esp'y if the house had lead paint, it'll be all over the neighbors houses now.

my home is surrounded by about 60 trees of various kinds ..i have a neighbor who complains every time i burn a few piles of leaves .. i remind him that i can burn my leaves every day for the next 10000 years and not raise as much smoke as a california wildfire does in one minute .. yes ,, the shingle roof on the old house made for a lot of black toxic smoke .. some of it blew my way ...

So Hoss, when the grandson sells what type of place do you expect will replace this house that he had burned? Since you mentioned turning down "your street", and the neighbor whining about smoke from leaves burning it sounds like you're in a neighborhood development with small acreage plots as opposed to big farms with lots of acres for crops and/or grazing. Do you see folks coming in, buying property, knocking down the structures and then building McMansions around there?

i have never delved in real estate so i dont know what works best for a potential buyer .. there has been both situations you speak of happen within the last 30 years around me .. a 30 acre parcel adjacent and behind me was bought by my current neighbor on the right .. he already very wealthy from building and selling high dollar houses all over the place .. he put a double wide mobile home on 10 acres and sold the other 20 for double what he gave for all of it ,, some people can turn a dime into a dollar in a minute .. not me .. the new owner built a half million dollar house in the middle of his property and fenced it all off for privacy .. on down the road a bit 20 years ago a 100 acre farm was sold with a half mile of road frontage and broken up into small lots and dozens of 100 grand to maybe 150 grand houses built and snapped up immediately .. this property where the house was burned is not laid out very well . there is only about 300 feet of road frontage for a dozen acres of land so i imagine it will sit well with someone who wants to build big and be left alone ..

so geeses and gooses fly south for the winter does that mean sea gulls must fly north ? .. mite be a climate change thing but iv`e never seen these beast in north bama before ,, i guess they are gulls .. this one is chowing down on a BK whopper someone left in the parking lot .. maybe they follow the tennessee river upstream or something ,, a little bit bigger than a crow .. neat looking ..

Yep. That's a seagull alright; the same as we get here in NZ.
In the winter months they do tend to fly inland, and they will scavenge anything.
They do congregate in flocks, but when food is scarce they more often fly solo but within sight of each other.
When one sights a dead animal or a paddock that has been recently cultivated he drops. His neighbour sees him drop and heads for where he dropped. His neighbour sees him drop, the fourth one follows suit and so on ad infinitum, and in ten minutes you've got literally hundreds of them.
Gulls are primarily meat eaters, so they've never bothered me.
But we've also got Paradise ducks who are grazing birds. They will decimate a recently planted pasture in a day, by not only eating the blades of grass but pulling the new seedlings out by the roots.
And I've seen hundreds of those bloody things all in one paddock too.

Originally Posted by HOSS429

ahh yes .. i remember it well ... as i ride around i come across places that bring back good and bad memories from long ago . for the next several posts i will relate some of them as well as the scenery that awakens them .. 50 or more years ago there was a dairy farm on this property and as various vehicles and farm implements fell in disrepair they would be parked on this back lot in with the milk cows to rot away .. not the milk cows rotting but the vehicles ..as you drove around this curve in the road you could look at the back corner of the pasture and see numerous cars and trucks and a few steel wheeled tractors from the 20s thru the 50s .. i was a fledgling hot rodder at the time so i had not much interest in them except to notice them on the way by .. then one day everything was gone ,, the old homestead and dairy barn was torn down and a big new house built .. but i still have a picture in my mind ..

Your picture and story hit home with me today. I recently drove by one of the farms my grand father worked on. The guy that bought their farm hired my grandpa to work for him after the sale. I drive by the farm often but never go down the road and get close by. It is crazy how things can be the same for years and then all of a sudden the while landscape or scenery changes. They finally scrapped the old White and MF tractors my grandpa plowed and fed the cows with. What a sad day.

Seeing how we're talking about old school farming. My mom's father grew up in Wisconsin and his dad had a cheese factory. The stories he had about delivering milk before school in an old Model T truck with wood wheels wrapped with chains sure makes you appreciate what we have today. These young ones today would flat out die if they had to live back then. This grandpa passed away last year. I always felt he had it rough but knew my dad's mother had it rough as well. I actually feel she had it worse. She grew up in North Carolina and her dad was a farmer. They were still farming with horse and plow and hoes operated by them. They were always very poor and had a really rough time through the depression etc. I've worked fields like that, horse drawn and hand sewn, but only 5 acres for 2 seasons when I was in high school. To have to do that every year for your food/money is a darn hard way to live. Once again, I sure do appreciate how things are today but they didn't have to deal with a lot of the BS we have now. I'd like to video my 89 year old grandmother to have something my kids can watch some day. I wish I would have done that with my mom's dad. The story just isn't the same coming from the next person and it's history like this that needs instilled in young people today IMO.

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if i did`nt see ... i would`nt believe it !!! ...no not a UFO or a Sasquatch but things as equally odd to me as those ...last year . even though i live in the rattlesnake infested south i had never seen a live one .. cruising thru the end of the Appalachian mountains here in north bama i spotted a large one crossing the road in front of me one time . i wowed up and got out to get a close up look at it ... later i swear i saw a black bear at a local stream i visit regularly .. no one else has seen one outside of the mountains in new market .. i know for a fact i saw an eagle as i got a picture of it but it is locked away in photobucket ..and i saw a black man riding a horse one day ..i had never seen that .. well starting off this year i have a new never seen list started .. i just saw a three legged deer ..iv`e seen cats and dogs with limbs successfully amputated but never what would be considered a wild critter .. it was right out in the open standing next to a house with a fawn .. i turned around and went back to get a picture and it stayed in place for a second but ran off because other traffic was nearing .. how does a three legged deer happen or survive .. i think it must be taken care by how it let me get close to it .. it was a crowded neighborhood ..

Rattlesnakes, diamond backs, were plentiful at Camp Pendleton when I was there in the early to mid 60's. There was a guy, Cajun, in one of the outfits that used to hunt them a night when we in the bush. I don't ever remember him not coming in with a least one and as he would enter the area he would shake the rattles which would cause certain folks to hastily exit.
He'd cut off the rattles and skin them and cook them over an open fire, not bad tasting but a tad greasy.

I'm enjoying reading your posts and your reminiscing. I bought my farm off a William (Bill) Balsom. Bill bought the farm by buying into a partnership with his older brother, and had eventually bought his brother out.
His older brother had done the same thing, by buying into a partnership with their oldest brother and he too had eventually bought the oldest brother out.
The oldest brother had bought the farm from the Wright brothers, they too were in a partnership, and were still in partnership when they sold up just after WWII.
Winefride (Winnie,) Wright, the only child of both Wright brothers, married Colin Malcom.
Not long after I'd bought the farm I asked Mrs Malcom (nicely,) if she could put to paper her memories of the place.
She was terribly pleased that I was interested enough in the history of the place to take the trouble to find out more about it.
She came up trumps.
She wrote about the struggles of two English immigrants coming to a block of solid bush halfway up the side of a mountain, who had no knowledge of farming of any description, and were the first people to settle and work on this virgin block.
She really did a great job, describing the wild bush fires of the 30's, unco-operative horses, the actual clearing and draining of the place...I was both pleased and impressed.
I'd also approached the Balsoms to do the same.
They managed to write half a page as against Winnie's 'book'.

Then I realised I'd better do the same myself.
So I did.
I now have the written history of what was my farm going back over 100 years.

Don't really know what to do with it now.
Today's kids couldn't care less.

JB, that is very cool. I'm sure if you spoke with a local paper, if there are any left in your area, they would probably love to publish it. Or, you could have it printed on metal and affix it to the oldest structure on the property. IMO someone will appreciate it and probably more than you realize in the future. Once those people are gone to tell the stories they lived, if they aren't documented, they're just gone.

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Winnie's story ran to nine pages.
Mine ran to twenty-one.
She wasn't the one out there wielding the axe or the saw or digging the post holes.
Whereas I was.

The Balsoms did virtually nothing to improve the place during their tenure. The two older ones came out five or six years after we'd bought it, and I commented about how what fences there were on the place when I bought it were in a dilapidated state, and the oldest one (Can't think of his Christian name at the moment,) said "Well of course they fell down; the posts rotted."
Hello? That's where you get a spade out and replace it. It's called 'maintenance'.

Yep, our local newspapers (all three of them,) are still extant. And perhaps I should approach them to see if they're interested in publishing. I just hadn't thought of them before.

I mean...do people really want to read about the story of one particular farm?

In my neck of the woods that story would make a great sunday feature. Lots of folks still care about what things happened in the past on a place local to them. You won't ever know if you don't ask. I'd say go for it!!