dual personalities

This week our local newspaper featured a story about a dairy cow that won ‘top cow’ at the American International Livestock Exposition in Louisville Kentucky back in November. Here is Cowbell Guapo Ricochet, a four year old Jersey:

photo courtesy of the Ogdensburg Journal

Now the thing about this approximately 500 word article that really warmed the cockles of my heart is the fact that Cowbell’s owners, the winners of the competition, live in Illinois. As it turns out, Cowbell was born and raised in my north country village at a farm about a block and a half from where I live. My neighbor dairy farmers sold Cowbell about a year and a half ago, and because they “got a lot of money for her [they] did some improvements on the barn which was good.” You have to love a place where there is so little going on that the paper can devote a longish article to a cow that used to belong to one of the farmers here. Now that’s a claim to fame!

The rest of my life is right in line with the cow story. It’s a little off-beat but tooling along in its own indomitable and quirky way. I’m getting into the swing of the season:

I got the Christmas decorations out and we bought the tree that waits patiently in the garage for our attention; my grades have been submitted (o frabjous day!) and I attended a Craft Fair at the hockey arena (it was cold — they put wooden boards down over the ice). Tomorrow is the annual Christmas pageant and pot-luck lunch at church, though I’m still figuring out what to bake. While I dream wistfully about achieving the effortless holiday perfection of my dual personality (seriously, I really mean that), somehow my blundering attempts at Christmas cheer fit perfectly here. How many of you can say you live within spitting distance of someone who used to own a famous dairy cow? I’m in the right place!