Looking For Trouble

Tux, Top Hat, and Turkish Delight, Mel's trouble-seeking triplets (aka the three little priests), are almost but not quite too fat to squeeze under the down-below pasture gate. Here they pop out the other side of the wardrobe into Narnia, where they will march toward the barn to see if the door to the grain room has been left open.

Onward, fellow triplets! If we cannot find any trouble, we will make it from scratch!

Nameless in (or near) Seattle

It happens every year and this year it is the sad case of Betsy's big orange daughter. I don't particularly care for a big orange goat but everyone else says how pretty she is.

Betsy is half Nubian and half LaMancha, and she was bred to a beautiful LaMancha buck up the road. She had two very pretty daughters, a little black one and a big orange one, as I already mentioned. So the two daughters are three quarters LaMancha.

The big orange one (B.O.) has a LaMancha body, for the most part, but a Nubian brain, which I think is sad. She will likely be taken advantage of by telemarketers in the future; I foresee her wiring her life savings to Nigeria in response to a spam email about a large estate and the need for a much esteemed American goat partner. But oh well, we can't all be Mensa caprines.

Anyway, B.O. has had a string of names but none of them stuck. First she was called Clementine (for that cute little orange that comes from California). This is an okay name, but it did not take. Then she was called Cointreau (for the orange liqueur), but a goat like B.O. with a fancy French name was just not the ticket. Then she was called Mandarin Orange, which is an awful name and besides that it doesn't fit on the papers.

However, while she was called Mandarin Orange, her little black sister who was also not sticking to any of her names acquired the name Xie Xie, which is Mandarin for "thank you," (pronounced Shea Shea, like the Stadium). And that name has stuck, unlike Mandarin Orange. So Shea is now called Shea, instead of "the little black one," which seems like an improvement, albeit probably a modest one.

Anyway, back to B.O. Next she was called Red Ryder, after some kind of comic strip no living creature recalls. Then, in an acknowledgement of defeat, she was simply called Red, or Big Red, which isn't any more dignified than B.O.

So please help, before it is too late. She cannot go to the fair without a name. It's too disgraceful. And considering the size of her brain, it is going to take a long time for her to learn her name, whatever it is, so the sooner the better.

To review: she is big, she is orange, she is pretty, she is the daughter of Betsy (aka Stacy's Starlight). She needs a dignified name. If there is an X in it somewhere (this is an X year) so much the better, but to tell the truth we really don't care about that any more.

Perfectly Obvious Rules for Farm Living

Here are a few perhaps somewhat useful farm rules, regulations, ideas, notions, suggestions, and aphorisms, most in the category of perfectly obvious. These are things that we learned, or proved, or recognized, or attempted to implement, or perhaps even actually implemented over the last year.

1. Pay Attention
2. Be Careful
3. Fix It Yourself
4. Pinkeye is very contagious
5. A Leader Leads
6. Harmony is better than tyranny
7. Tyranny is better than chaos
8. If a horse steps on your foot, it is always your fault (see #1 and #2 above)
9. Goats do not give good haircuts
10. The hay will not walk into the barn
11. Remember why you are doing that
12. This is today. (or, as Mike Ditka says, "the past is for cowards.")

April the First

Herron Hill's April the First collapsed and died last night. We cannot even really say what she meant to us.

She was April the First, April the Last, April the Only.

She was the first baby goat born on the farm. She was the first goat with the farm herdname. Her picture was on all of our cards and on our web site. She was a true April Fool, the sweetest most ornery goat in the world, smart as a whip and crazy as a bedbug.

She was born in the farmer's arms on April 1, 2001, at 9 o'clock on a beautiful spring night. She died in the farmer's arms at 9 o'clock last night, May 6, 2007.

We know we will have to say goodbye to her soon. But right now we can't.

The Milkhouse Design Competition

If you can actually see it, please look closely at the photo at left. This is an artist's rendering of the milkhouse remodel to the barn. We are remodeling our barn to put the milkhouse in our shed wing. As you may have surmised, this artist's rendering wasn't rendered by an artist, which makes it quite a bit less artistic. And the milkhouse itself wasn't designed by a designer.

But don't worry, that's where you come in.

Please submit your design ideas and suggestions to flesh out this barebones drawing. Where should the doors go? How many should there be? Windows? Refrigerators, vats, shelves, etc?

Remember these constraints: the space is 10 x 40, and must be divided into three rooms. There must be a milk parlor (10 x 10)- the space where the goats are actually milked - and there must be a milkhouse (10 x 10)- a separate space for storing and cooling the milk. The milkhouse, as much as possible, should be a dead end rather than an area people pass through on the way to somewhere else, so as to minimize opportunities for contamination.

There must also be a cheese room (10 x 20), even though it might not be finished right away.

The cheese room must be big enough to make cheese. i.e., there must be room for a vat, a large refrigerator, a cheese press, a make table and draining table, mold storage etc. And of course there must be a door for the cheesemaker to slam when she quits in disgust.

Goat flow must be one-way (goats cannot go out the same door they came in; if you met our friend Boo the Nubian you would know why) and the very limited floor space must be laid out in such a way as to minimize insanity.

Ok, that's all, send your designs in. You can do it.

The Last Babies of the Season, Part Three

Well, the farmer is going out of town for a few days and Lori is going to run the farm. This means I will get a lot of cookies, because Lori is not such a cookie tightwad as the farmer is. Sometimes I wonder: what is the farmer saving those cookies for? Is there an impending worldwide cookie shortage? Why not just give me the cookies, then go and buy more, instead of "saving" them? Saving them for what? They aren't getting any fresher.

Lori isn't like that. Lori's policy is "cookies today, who knows what tomorrow brings." So that is very good. Also, Lori doesn't buy the cheap convenience store cookies like the farmer does, she buys genuine Nutter Butters and things like that. Maybe because she eats them too, even though they are supposed to be goat cookies.

Anyway, there has been yet another update in the ongoing "last baby of the season" saga. After Mabel dropped her surprise doeling, the farmer went back and looked at the breeding books and noticed a few question marks that had not been previously noted.

The breeding book either says "good one," as was the case of my productive meeting in the breeding stall with Captain January, or it says "no good," as was the case with Mabel's meeting, where she tried her best to kill the Captain, or it says "???"

??? means a) the romantic results were inconclusive, or, more likely, b) the farmer got distracted by something and didn't see what happened. By saving cookies, or taking cookie inventory, or something like that.

So anyway, way down at the bottom of the book was a little note that said, Aggie + CJ = ????

Aggie is Agnes the mini-Nubian, CJ of course is Captain January. ??? I already explained. Well, the ??? part has been resolved. It was a good one. Aggie will make her bid for the last baby of the season title in May. Whether or not she actually has the last babies of the season, she will have the first mini-Nubians of the season.

We are excited to see Aggie's babies, because she is very sweet and pretty. In fact, she is a movie star. She was in a movie titled "We Go Way Back," playing herself, when she was only a few days old. If you can get it at your local movie store, skip to near the end. Then you can see pictures of Aggie and her sister Maggie and the farm in the background.

Or you can watch the whole movie, but you might be bored - the goats are only in for a minute at the end.

"Fat" Girl Mystery Solved, or the Eagle has Landed Part 2

Well, as you know, the farmer packed up all the kidding supplies last Tuesday, prepared to enjoy a new stress-free life of anytime napping and round-the-clock indolence. This was because all the kidders on the chart had kidded.

So on Saturday night the farmer was planning to go to the movies for the first time in a long time. The chores were done early, including the milking, and everyone was fed. The Fat Girls down in the Fat Girl pasture - dry yearlings and unbred does - were doing their usual complaining, because they had just been switched from alfalfa to grass hay, owing to there now being nice spring grass and the fat girls getting even fatter. A chorus of disapproval had gone up when the grass hay arrived, and the fat girls were doing everything but banging tin cups on the bars of the hay feeder. But they were eating greedily, of course, in spite of their monumental outrage and the fact that they hated and could not possibly stomach grass hay.

In the Fat Girl pasture were my daughter Hannah Belle, Breezy the chief complainer, little knucklehead Bertie the world's largest dry yearling, Willa a nice little mini-Togg, Billie a tough girl, and April's mini-mancha daughter Mabel who carries on her mother's tradition of being crazy as a bedbug (the opposite of her twin Peaches, who is normal as pie).

Of these six tubsters, three had been bred - or sort of bred - and did not settle: Hannah Belle, Breezy, and Mabel. Hannah Belle and Breezy had been bred several times but kept coming back into heat. Mabel, who had always been long and lean, had turned inexplicably into rather a chubby girl, which was surprising because this didn't run in the family. Anyway, she was shopping in the Plus Size rack, so she was assigned to the Fat Girl pasture.

Mabel had been sort of bred: she was put in the breeding stall with little Captain January, who immediately began showering her with teenage goat-boy attentions. This did not put Mabel in a romantic frame of mind. On the contrary, she whirled around like a quarter horse and began attempting to kill the Captain.

The little goat Romeo, by no means a lionheart, was fleeing in circles for his life, screaming at the top of his lungs and occasionally catching a head butt in the ribs when he did not make the corners fast enough. Mabel was whisked out of the stall.

"All right," said the farmer, to Mabel, who was pop-eyed with rage, "we will breed you next year when the Captain is bigger."

Mabel was in the stall with the Captain for perhaps 30 seconds, 27 of which she spent in a homicidal rage.

The other 3, as it turns out, were put to good use.

When it was just time to leave for the movie, an unmistakable bellowing begin to issue from the Fat Girl pasture. The farmer raced down. Breezy had her head planted in the feeder. Hannah Belle the same. From under the cabana came more unmistakable bellowing. The farmer rushed in, just in time to grab a little pink and white bundle.

Yes, you guessed it, Mabel's little daughter. The last - maybe? possibly? - baby of the season.

Good grief.