Letter from Alcatraz

Hello everyone.

Yesterday I started to feel a little overheated in spite of the chilly weather and all of a sudden I got a strange idea.

What about the carbon footprint?

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I know Wrusty knows a lot about it, and also Marquee, and that darling little Captain January, in fact all the bucks know practically everything there is to know about the carbon footprint.

And speaking of those gentlemen I noticed how really wonderful they looked yesterday and I was surprised I hadn't been struck by it before, in fact even last week I remarked to Hannah Belle what a disgusting bunch they were, but I must be needing glasses to say something like that because yesterday I couldn't imagine ever having seen a finer group of individuals assembled anywhere unless of course an Osmond Family photo session were under way.

So I squeezed through my private fence hole in the cabana pasture, and then I squeezed under the Willenized fence in the buck pasture, and then I sashayed - I just felt like sashaying, I don't know why - up to the pen where Marquee was blubbering and pawing and in general discoursing at a very erudite level about the perils of carbon dioxide.

Anyway, long story short, next thing I know I have a lead rope around my neck and I am being frogmarched up to the baby holding cell (Alcatraz) in the barn, where I am now in my second day of incarceration without ever having seen so much as a magistrate.

Well, I guess things could be a little bit worse - I could have been sent to the horse trailer (Guantanamo). But really. What about the due process? What about the jury of my peers?

No justice, NO PEACE!!!

My Possible Sabbatical

It is being decided right now whether I will go on sabbatical. Last year Breezy took the year off and did not have any kids and now she looks like a beach ball with legs, even though she doesn't get special milker's grain or anything extra-yummy because she is a dry doe.

The farmer thinks I should take a year off because I have had kids every year for the last four years, and last year I had triplets which ended up giving me milk fever since the triplets were a tad on the ravenous side, but that didn't really bother me since the farmer became my nanny and I got to loll about while my kids were drinking from their bottles, and got lots of extra food and treats and pampering.

I have to say, looking at the difference between my kids and Breezy's kids, that I think it would be a mistake to give me the year off, and if I do get the year off, I want to make sure that I do not have to try to squeak by on grass hay and a tiny smattering of cob, because that type of death march ration really doesn't suit my personality or my station in life, what with being Goat of the Year and so on among other honors.

And also not to mention it but excuse me, where are the fair ribbons won by the Breezy family?

Penrose's Daily Affirmation

Death and the Spokesgoat

Some things just will not die, like the farmer's old farm truck. The old farm truck is on DNR (do not resuscitate) status, which means that if it dies it dies and no more than $100 can be spent to save it. Goodbye, God bless you, thank you for your decades of thankless service, vaya can dios.

It is several hundred years old, anyway; I believe Lewis and Clark drove it out here from Missouri or wherever they came from. Anyway, you may remember the old farm truck from last spring's tales of Sammy and the F-150s, who lived inside it when they were babies.

Well last weekend within hours of each other the old farm truck (1978) and the new farm truck (1990) both appeared to expire within hours of each other at the most inconvenient possible time, causing the farmer to transport a large, amorous buckling in full rut inside a Honda which was not a matter to be attempted lightly or at all in my opinion but there you are. What can you do.

The farm truck was left to fester in its own juices down at the side of the highway for several days until the farmer felt like dealing with it. At that point it was towed home by a retired ex-marine from Puyallup and that is another story but not for these pages.

Anyway after a great deal of incompetent mechanicking around it appeared that the truck was suffering from a deceased carburetor, which if you go to autoparts.com you will see starts at around $214, not including installation, so funeral arrangements were commenced for the F-150. But not so fast.

Within minutes of the supposed demise of the F-150, a friend of a friend had managed a hookup resulting in a used (but perfect shape!) carburetor for $40.

So the death of the farm truck has yet to be finalized although I myself am not the type of goat who puts a lot of faith in pre-owned carburetors. On the other hand, the F-150 has had a rod knocking since 1998, so its will to live is not inconsiderable.

Anyway, we'll see. In other news, Penrose has been declared the farm's spokesgoat - "for now" - which I don't think is fair. It is only because she is so good at looking into the camera, which can hardly be considered a skill, if you ask me.

Under Every Tree

The Woods are full of them.

After our wettish summer the mushroom hunters are out in force. You see them everywhere, walking with their heads down and their beady little eyes scanning the ground, blind to everything but the fungi.

Most of them are looking for chanterelles, probably because they don't know any better.

But the farmer has been raking in Zeller's Boletus, an undersung mushroom and close cousin to the boletus edulis, the mushroom of a thousand names, including the cep, the cepe, the steinpilz, the Karl Johan, the varganya, the borovik, the penny bun. If you are a foodie, you probably know it by its plural Italian name: porcini.

Around here it is called the king boletus, and not for nothing, because it is pretty much the king of mushrooms. We don't find many king boletus, even in a year like this, because we are at too low of an elevation, but the humble Zeller's - homely as they come with its purple neck, its spongy underside, its dingy cap - is hiding in plain sight just about everywhere.

The farmer doesn't even bother with the flashy overpraised chanterelles any more, they take up too much space in the basket and they aren't as good, in spite of what some of the mushroom book writers have written about lowly Zeller's - "edible but not incredible", etc.

Ha. Keep your fancy chanterelles.

Toggamanchas

Lucy and Leo on the porch, back when they were babies. Lucy and Leo were tiny toggamanchas (now they are big) and they were holy terrors. They went everywhere together, living life in duplicate.

Male Trouble

As far as I can tell the human animal does not think it is an animal. But if it would just accept this fact and use some of its common sense to understand the lessons of the animal world then a lot of its troubles could be remedied.

For example, today Wrusty Nails, Peaches' son who is ordinarily about as charming as a buck can be, went crazy. He went absolutely loco. In his state of non compos mentis, he decided that he could fit his entire large body through a 4 by 4 inch hole. That is the size of the openings in the fencing wire in his pen.

I didn't even mention his head, which is about the size of a basketball.

Anyway, Wrusty was completely berserk.

Why?

I think you know why.

Girls.

Wrusty wanted to go over and talk to some pretty goat girls, or even one of the frumpy ones, about his opinions on the carbon footprint and so on, and he wanted to do it really badly, and he wanted to do it right away, and since he can't jump six feet (unlike my daughter Hannah Belle) he decided that he would just go through the fence.

And here is the really crazy part: he did it.

By sheer boneheadedness and determination he pushed his head into the hole in the fence, and then he kept pushing, and then finally like the Popeye of goats, he burst all the way through, snapping the heavy gauge wire like it was a spider web. The farmer came out just as Wrusty was completing the final mile of his arduous journey, and Wrusty was quickly escorted to the horse trailer for the duration of the ensuing fence repairs, while the goat girls who were in heat lined up along the fence calling to him.

"Wrusty, where are you going? What about the carbon footprint?"

And that is the essence of the male trouble we have around here this time of year. The goat girls go into heat, and it lasts maybe a day or two, and during that time the goat girls are willing to discuss the carbon footprint when at all other times of the year they would run screaming - literally screaming - if Wrusty Nails or any of his shaggy odiferous ilk ever came blubbering around.

But the goat boys, the bucks, go into a state of unbelievably monomaniacal insanity that lasts 24 hours a day and 7 days a week until the last of the goat girls has come out the other side of her heat wave. They stand ever vigilant, ready at a moment's notice, thinking of nothing nothing nothing else. They don't care about pain or about hunger or about rain or cold or wind. They are crazy, and they do absolutely crazy things without a second thought. Without a first thought, really.

But on the other side of the coin, the goat girls can only afford to go crazy for a couple of days at most.

Because no society can function when all the girls are crazy. Nothing would get done. No milk, no functioning hierarchy, no one to raise the kids.

So the girls go crazy in installments, and in between times they come to their senses and keep everything running smoothly. Many times I have asked myself, looking at the father of my children, "what was I thinking?" It's okay, though, because it doesn't last.

But the boys go crazy, and they don't come back.

And they must be monitored very carefully, or else they will invade Austria at the drop of a hat.