Our Man Flint

The last baby of the season has been born and his name is Flint. Lori says his name is Flint, Michigan, but that is ridiculous. We just call him Flynnie. He has very pretty buckskin coloring and bright blue eyes.

He is Eo's son.

For some reason Eo has turned neurotic and been doting on him in a most unseemly manner, possibly because she has never had a single kid before. I think she thinks she had another one but misplaced it somewhere so is taking extra special care of the one that's left.

Or maybe she is just a nut job. That could easily be the case.

I always tell my kids, go, walk around, cross the street if you like, live and learn. But that's just me.

Anyway, it has been practically impossible to get the official farm photographer (Lori) to take a picture of Flynnie, because she is obsessed with the hummingbirds.

"Look," she tells everyone, "look, I took another picture of the hummingbird." And then she makes them look at the picture, the ten thousandth picture that looks exactly like all the other pictures. But anyway during a short break in the endless hummingbird photo shoot she finally agreed to take a picture of Flynnie.

Enjoying the Hols

While I was on the subject of Goats-of-the-World, I forgot to mention that I got a lovely postcard from my cousin, who is on a bicycle tour of East Africa. Anyway, here it is.

Hello Again Hello

Well, I do not like to make low-class comments about the way some goats look, but I have to say that if the goats in this so-called beauty competition showed their faces at the Puyallup Fair, they would not be getting any ribbons. Not even in the Nubian class.

Oh well, maybe they are really good milkers or something. I sort of doubt it, though, even though I read on the web site that the winning goat sold for $40,000.

The baby barn here is looking pretty lonely these days; Widget and Buddy left this weekend, and there are only five babies left, and that includes Hap and Jolly, who have already adapted to life in the big baby barn. So we will all be glad when Eo has the last babies of the season ... today? tomorrow? next Friday?

Something like that.

This weekend we had almost springlike weather, which is nice since it has been November for about the last seven months, except in November, which was like January. But then of course today it started back raining.

Hello again, November! We missed you when you were gone for two days!

The Incredible Shrinking Boo

Boo has developed a guaranteed Nubian reducing system and diet which will shrink even the most rotund long-eared-bear-of-little-brain to a manageable size. Or almost manageable. It is simple, too. In case you are a Nubian yourself, I have broken it into easy-to-follow steps. It is called:

The Boobian Diet:

1. Eat as much as you can. Eat anything that isn't moving. Or if it is just moving slightly, at least give it a taste test. If something LOOKS like food, grab it and run from the crowd - you can always spit it out later if it isn't food. If you hear the crackle of the cookie box being unwrapped, give a desperate bellow and close your eyes and just run to the head of the line, bowling all the pipsqueaks out of the way. It is perfectly fine to stampede across little tots if cookies are involved. It teaches them a valuable lesson.

2. Have at least two kids. Three or four would be better.

3. (This is the most important step). Milk eleven pounds of milk every day.

That's It! Watch the pounds melt away!

Cheese Straws

Recipe # 7 from Baby Belle's* Dairy Princess Cookbook.


ingredients:

half pound winter tomme. or some kind of nice cheese, don't use horrible cheese.
1 stick nice butter (see above).
1 cup flour.
some nice sea salt, maybe a teaspoon or so.
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.
1/4 cup fresh goat milk. don't use milk that isn't fresh. give that milk to Wendell (see below), remember he is outside scratching at the door.

Step one. Put Wendell outside. Make sure the door is latched.

Step two. Gather together your ingredients. Take one of your winter tommes** that you made with Nubian or LaMancha milk (save the Nigerian and mini milk for important dessert recipes.) Cut off about half a pound of it. Grate it.

Add other ingredients except milk and mix well, preferably you have a nice food processor and can quickly get it into a coarse meal consistency. Then add the milk and mix until you get a bread dough consistency. (If you don't have a food processor, add the milk along with the other ingredients and mix everything until you get a nice bready dough ball.)

Flour your cutting board and hands and roll the ball out. Cut off golf ball sized pieces and roll the pieces between your palms to make strings about 10 inch long and the diameter of a pencil.

Bake in preheated oven at 350 for 15-18 minutes or until they get delicious-looking. Cool for 15 minutes. Serve to your admirers.

Let Wendell back in, if desired, and give him some old milk to drink. Do not let him see the cheese straws.


*that's me.
**Recipe # 8 in the Baby Belle* Dairy Princess Cookbook.

Possibly

Here is a little bit of possibly useful information for today. You must remember, first of all, that only that which is possible can happen.

And secondly, you must remember that anything is possible.

Anyway, Betsy had her babies on Friday and they are two bucklings. One was wedged in terribly but Betsy agreed to cooperate and the farmer was able to extract him even though no one else was around to hold Betsy still. She stood very calmly - except for the screaming - while the farmer fished a leg around so that he could be pulled out. He was rather gigantic, coming head first with no feet out and his big shoulders jammed in tight.

The naming duties have been handed over to Lori since the farmer has declared intellectual bankruptcy when it comes to kid names this season. Everyone agrees that the two names Buddy and Binky (Xie Xie's kids) are possibly the worst ever. Of course, they have stuck.

Anyway, Betsy's boys are named Hap and Jolly. They seem to like milk a lot and are growing like weeds.

Little Tangy the tangerine/piranha is going to be called Moonshine Yarrow on the papers (no thanks to the farmer). You always know where she is by following the voice that's squawking, to no avail, "STOP BITING ME!"

She chews everything with her razor sharp little teeth, and delights in tormenting little Buddy and Binky. She's an awful monster but the farmer just laughs and says, "isn't that cute?" when she comes screaming out for the milk bucket like a Patriot missile.

Meanwhile the Peaches family continues to weasel its way into the Adorable Antics Hall of Fame, going everywhere and sleeping in a triplets-and-mommy pile of spots and blue eyes. Julius and Hermy are now known as "The Janitors," because instead of sweeping the farmer lets them out every evening and they eat all the spilled grain that has fallen from the feeders as the big fat ill-mannered milkers gobble their dinners on the milkstand.

"Let the janitors out," the farmer says, and the two little butterballs come scurrying into the barn aisle. Augie isn't allowed because she is too squirrelly.

The milk scale has broken, thank Buddha, and that has put a temporary end to the tiresome weighing of the milk, but it appears that Scouty is a whisker ahead of Winnie in the Dairy Sweepstakes.

And last night Lori, moved by the seeming end of the seemingly endless Democratic Primary, gave a rousing speech to all the goats in the down-below pasture, promising that we would always have our blackberry-eating jobs and they would never be outsourced to India, that no goat would be left behind, and that there would always be cob for everybody*, and that everybody* would have the right to reproductive freedom. And she thanked us for being hardworking* goats and supporting her across all breeds, and she bowed with fake humility and went trundling back to the barn with the feed cart.

Whatever.

*not Snow Pea, obviously

Curiouser and Curiouser, or The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen

Winnie was dethroned from her top milker position the day before yesterday by the unlikeliest contender, Boo. And today Boo was dethroned from her brief, triumphant reign as top milker by the next unlikeliest contender, Scouty.

Scouty continues to climb back up the milk chart, against all odds. You see Scouty kidded a set of the greediest quadruplets you have ever seen back in February. She was hemorrhaging milk from every orifice to feed these little monsters, and each one of them was plumper than the last. They all had big milk goiters, and they were all fat as ticks.

The farmer guesses that she was milking about 16 pounds a day, which is roughly two gallons, and that's a lot of milk. She lost about twenty pounds the first month, in spite of the fact that she ate almost constantly.

Anyway, something very unfortunate happened: the greedy little quadruplets drank so much that they injured Scouty's teats. After that she wouldn't let them nurse any more, her teats were so sore, and the farmer had to milk out just enough to take the pressure off and keep her comfortable. So for a week she was milked by hand several times a day, but only the bare minimum, and the farmer had to massage bag balm into her udder three or four times a day. And miraculously - thank you, Dr. Naylor - she healed in about a week.

But by then her production had dropped way down. And shortly after that, all her quadruplets went to their new homes, and she dropped into a groove of milking 8 or 9 pounds a day. Which isn't bad by any means, it's just not going to get you to the World Series of milk.

But Scouty is feeling fine now on the lush spring grass, and slowly slowly she comes creeping up the milk chart: 9 pounds, then 9.5, 9.7, 9.9. And today she got back up over 11 with a very respectable 11.2, beating Winnie by almost half a pound.

So the Queen is Dead. Long live the Queen. The Nubian Queen. Who knew.

Breaking News: Dark Horse Wins Cookie

Well, now that all the big milkers are on milk test the farmer has gotten a little obsessive and weighs all the milk twice a day every day - not just on test day - and then congratulates the top milker, which is a little monotonous, because it means every day that the farmer says, "Congratulations, Winnie, once again you are the top milker."

The only variety will be: "Congratulations, Winnie, today you milked 14 pounds." Or, "Congratulations, Winnie, today you milked 13 pounds," or "Congratulations, Winnie, today you milked twelve pounds."

Then Winnie the ayatollah gets an extra cookie and goes flouncing back out among the general population and t-bones anyone who happens to be standing there, unless it is Brandy or Wronny both of whom she is deathly afraid of, just to show that she is the top milker and expects to be treated like the Queen of Sheba.

This has been going on for weeks in a tediously repetitive fashion except for the week where Wronny pulled neck and neck with Winnie but then dropped back at the finish line ending up four tenths of a pound behind.

But now we have gotten to the point where Winnie has already been milking for several months, and she finally dropped under eleven pounds a couple of times, especially during the week when we had the most awful stemmy alfalfa that she wouldn't eat, although she was still the leader. It had gotten to be quite a bore, no one was even one iota interested in it, especially not Boo, who has never milked worth a darn in spite of being the biggest goat here if not the brightest.

Anyway the farmer harbored only low hopes for Boo, especially since she had twins this year when we all thought she would have quadruplets. But the line Boo comes from is known to be slow maturing - if in fact they ever do mature - and yesterday the most astonishing thing happened.

Boo only kidded about a month ago and even though she only milked about five pounds when she first freshened, since then she has been creeping up up up the milk chart. And yesterday when the congratulatory cookies were handed out, Winnie had to stand there with her mouth open and a look of horror, because the farmer came to the gate and said, "Congratulations, Boo, you are the top milker today with 10.7 pounds, here is your cookie."

Boo heard all this like everybody else, but only understood two words: "Boo" and "Cookie."

But sometimes two words is all you need to understand.