Adventures in Babysitting

Our protector Atty is considered a very fearsome dog by people who do not know him. That is because he is about as big as a Volkswagen.

Here you can see how terribly frightened all the goat kids are of him.

Aggie's Boys

Agnes, aka Aggie Baggy, did very well in her first kidding, except for the timing. The farmer has posted a schedule of acceptable kidding times which is quite lenient. Any time between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. is fine. Aggie apparently did not read this because she didn't have her twin sons until 1:30 a.m. this morning.

And of course being bucks and being part Nubian, they did not quite get going strong until about 2:30.

So that is clearly an infraction, and I would recommend withholding cookies from Aggie for several days so that the next time she will know better. I will eat them so they do not go to waste. Just a suggestion.

The Long Dark Night of the Mini-Nubians

The long dark night of the mini-Nubians is about to begin. Aggie the mini-Nubian, Boo's unexpectedly normal daughter, is in the red zone. Some time soon, very soon we hope, she will deliver the first and last mini-Nubian kids of the year.

Stay tuned...

The Horses In Your Head

I have been upgraded from the shed to the big barn as befits a goat of my stature. This is because I have the sweetest milk and I am now the farmer's personal milker and the farmer will not make a latte unless it is made from Baby Belle milk. (That's me, Baby Belle.)

I do feel sorry for the other goats, but that's the way it goes. The cream rises to the top. See you later, suckers.

On another note Willen the yellow pony is about to begin his driving training again. He has a new cart purchased from the Small Farmer's Journal spring auction and a new harness. This harness is so pretty I almost think I would consider pulling a cart if I were allowed to wear it. Almost, but not quite.

These items were purchased by the farmer's friend down the road who knows how to buy things, especially horse things, and when to buy them and how much to pay for them. That may sound like something anybody can do, but believe me it is not.

In any case the farmer's friend is a horse nut and knows everything about horses. She is over sixty and still breaks all the young horses at her farm. When she comes out into the field all the horses move their butts away from her to show respect.

Horses are like the Mafia. They have all kinds of marks of respect. Moving the butts away when she comes by is one of them. It is to show that they would never consider kicking her. Some of the baby horses think they don't have to move their butts, but they learn different in a big hurry. So if you ever want to see a horse butt ballet you can watch the farmer's friend walk through the horse pasture. And if any of the butts don't move, then you will see a very interesting lesson in horse manners.

When the farmer's friend was a little girl she didn't have any horses and dreamed of them all the time. Her father told her that "if all the horses in your head stampeded, you couldn't see for the dust."

And now she has all the horses she could want. So you see if you just hold on to your dreams they will come true.

So take some advice from me, Baby Belle, and please remember the horses in your head.

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.