Well, the farmer’s precious pet Winnie got very sick. She had milk fever and went down like a stone. She couldn’t walk, because she couldn’t stand up, and the farmer sat around petting her and giving her calcium and Vitamin B and swaddling her in blankets and fetching salal and huckleberry and fresh grass and leaves and all kinds of tempting treats.
I did not get my feet trimmed as had been promised, and Lucy did not get her haircut fixed. Tangy did not do any walking practice – Tangy walks like a swordfish reeled to the surface on a sportfishing tv show, hurling her whole body against the collar and flapping around in mid-air - and the compost pile did not get turned. Domino didn’t get castrated, either, but he didn’t mind.
All because Princess Winnie was sick.
Sometimes I do not understand the workings of the primate mind, because personally I think Winnie is a pain. To me, I say, c’est la vie, if a goat has milk fever and won’t get up to eat, then it doesn’t have much gumption which probably signals weak genes.
I have had milk fever but that is because I had triplets who were very hungry because of their exceptional genetic makeup. Whereas with Winnie, her triplets are perfectly ordinary, and one of them was even a runt, so again we get back to the weak genes, and honestly I don’t understand all the extra effort that could have been better used fixing Lucy’s haircut (looks like it was done with a lawnmower) or castrating Domino the-soon-to-be-wether who really has become a pest with his goatboy ideas.
But this is just one example of how the primate mind works.
Primates can be useful, they have those fingers for picking bugs off you and scratching that part near your withers where you can’t reach, but do not try to figure out what they are thinking. Even if you could do it, you would probably not want to know.
Winnie got better but obviously through no fault of her own weak genes.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Two More
There are two more of them now. LaMancha bottle baby monsters. Jessie's kids.
They don't have names either, Z is a very hard year, and they all look exactly alike except Pinky and that other one, Joemma, who is part Toggenburg even though she has no ears. The rest of them run around in a black blur, some are black and tan, some are black and cream, some are black and brown. They are all boring.
"Aren't they cute?" says the farmer, carrying them around.
Not really, I think. But what can you say.
To be polite, I try to pretend I am charmed by their puckish antics. Goodness! They're adorable! With their earless heads and their little monkey faces! Look at them knocking all the buckets over and dancing across the clean hay with their muddy footprints! What could be cuter!
Who has time to list all the cuter things than an earless-monkey-looking baby goat? Let's just start with a Nigerian Dwarf baby goat, maybe? By like 10,000 percent or so?
That brings us back to Hannah Belle Lecter, my daughter, who has been steadily achieving a more and more blimp-like condition. Each week Lori says, "she must be getting close," but since every year Hannah Belle is bred approximately 17 times (she enjoys breeding, what can I say, it's a free country) we never know exactly when she might kid.
But even I would say, as I see her lumbering across the pasture blotting out the sun with her bulk (not today, today it's raining), even I would say, "she must be getting close."
Mustn't she?
They don't have names either, Z is a very hard year, and they all look exactly alike except Pinky and that other one, Joemma, who is part Toggenburg even though she has no ears. The rest of them run around in a black blur, some are black and tan, some are black and cream, some are black and brown. They are all boring.
"Aren't they cute?" says the farmer, carrying them around.
Not really, I think. But what can you say.
To be polite, I try to pretend I am charmed by their puckish antics. Goodness! They're adorable! With their earless heads and their little monkey faces! Look at them knocking all the buckets over and dancing across the clean hay with their muddy footprints! What could be cuter!
Who has time to list all the cuter things than an earless-monkey-looking baby goat? Let's just start with a Nigerian Dwarf baby goat, maybe? By like 10,000 percent or so?
That brings us back to Hannah Belle Lecter, my daughter, who has been steadily achieving a more and more blimp-like condition. Each week Lori says, "she must be getting close," but since every year Hannah Belle is bred approximately 17 times (she enjoys breeding, what can I say, it's a free country) we never know exactly when she might kid.
But even I would say, as I see her lumbering across the pasture blotting out the sun with her bulk (not today, today it's raining), even I would say, "she must be getting close."
Mustn't she?
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Earth Day
It was Earth Day this week which gave us a good excuse to celebrate the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Go flowers! But excuse me isn't every day Earth Day? Or is there a backup planet we will all be moving to?
If that's the case I hope there won't be so many bottle babies on it.
Especially of the LaMancha doeling persuasion, enough already with the earless terrors. This new one Pinky who is being called Zut Alors (she does look kind of French and believe me that's no compliment) while her real name is decided is perhaps the holiest of the terrors I have had to endure.
She was already pampered to death before she cracked her head open and after that she was practically carried everywhere on a satin cushion. Make a note of these two easy steps if you would like to create your own bottle baby monster.
Now she runs everywhere screaming. She pushes the other bottle babies off the slide. She fastens her jaws to the farmer's hand - or any hand that happens to be carrying a bucket of milk - like a lamprey eel. She t-bones anyone who tries to sit on the farmer's lap.
And then I get reprimanded for gently helping her find her way out of my stall.
"Don't hurt little Pinky now," says the farmer. "She's still recovering."
Oh please. Please.
If that's the case I hope there won't be so many bottle babies on it.
Especially of the LaMancha doeling persuasion, enough already with the earless terrors. This new one Pinky who is being called Zut Alors (she does look kind of French and believe me that's no compliment) while her real name is decided is perhaps the holiest of the terrors I have had to endure.
She was already pampered to death before she cracked her head open and after that she was practically carried everywhere on a satin cushion. Make a note of these two easy steps if you would like to create your own bottle baby monster.
Now she runs everywhere screaming. She pushes the other bottle babies off the slide. She fastens her jaws to the farmer's hand - or any hand that happens to be carrying a bucket of milk - like a lamprey eel. She t-bones anyone who tries to sit on the farmer's lap.
And then I get reprimanded for gently helping her find her way out of my stall.
"Don't hurt little Pinky now," says the farmer. "She's still recovering."
Oh please. Please.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Beautiful Day
It is important to keep track of the most beautiful days of the year, so you can remember them later. Yesterday was one of the top ten most beautiful days of the year. It was like old times - the farmer left all the pesky bottle babies and came and sat on the tank cover with me in the sun and scratched all over my back while I head-butted attention seekers away as necessary. It was a beautiful day, and today will be too.
Today will be a good day for a birthday, and somebody is going to have one: Jessie the so-called beauty queen Lamancha yearling is headed to the kidding stall right now.
It's a beautiful day. Don't let it get away.
Today will be a good day for a birthday, and somebody is going to have one: Jessie the so-called beauty queen Lamancha yearling is headed to the kidding stall right now.
It's a beautiful day. Don't let it get away.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
It Does A Body Good
Little Baby Z looked very bad yesterday morning. She had three shots of medicine: one for tetanus prevention, one to stop other kinds of infection, and one of vitamin B. She was shivering and lethargic and didn’t notice when the farmer moved her inside to the baby nursery.
She didn’t make even a peep, much less offer the kind of Grand Prix tantrum* she and her mother have down to an art form. Instead she just lay and shivered, eyes foggy and blank.
The farmer put a sweater on her. She kept shivering. The farmer put another sweater on top of the first sweater. She looked stylish – pink and white crocheted jacket over a black terrycloth undervest - but quite miserable.
The baby nursery is a little pen on the kitchen floor of the cottage. The pen is about four feet square and about two feet high and bedded with nice fluffy straw. It sits a few feet away from the woodstove so it can be made quite cozy.
The farmer put Baby Z in the baby nursery and left to do chores, checking back perdiodically. On the fourth check, late in the afternoon, the farmer coaxed her into drinking a large bottle of warm milk.
She seemed to wake up a little, and looked around in surprise, wearing the expression of the amnesia patient on a bad tv show – where am I? - before settling back to sleep.
On the fifth bed check, Baby Z was not in the baby pen. She had jumped over the fence and gone to look for her friends, leaving a trail of baby goat pee throughout the cottage and knocking over a stack of magazines used to start fires in the woodstove, then eating – or perhaps just chewing and spitting out - part of a New Yorker** cover.
She was dancing on the coffee table in the living room when finally apprehended.
And that’s why it is so important to drink your milk.
* When they add tantrums to the Olympics, bet on these two for Gold and Silver.
** (Editor’s note: do not use New Yorkers to start fires. It is not the right kind of paper. We know that. We ran out of newspaper inserts.)
She didn’t make even a peep, much less offer the kind of Grand Prix tantrum* she and her mother have down to an art form. Instead she just lay and shivered, eyes foggy and blank.
The farmer put a sweater on her. She kept shivering. The farmer put another sweater on top of the first sweater. She looked stylish – pink and white crocheted jacket over a black terrycloth undervest - but quite miserable.
The baby nursery is a little pen on the kitchen floor of the cottage. The pen is about four feet square and about two feet high and bedded with nice fluffy straw. It sits a few feet away from the woodstove so it can be made quite cozy.
The farmer put Baby Z in the baby nursery and left to do chores, checking back perdiodically. On the fourth check, late in the afternoon, the farmer coaxed her into drinking a large bottle of warm milk.
She seemed to wake up a little, and looked around in surprise, wearing the expression of the amnesia patient on a bad tv show – where am I? - before settling back to sleep.
On the fifth bed check, Baby Z was not in the baby pen. She had jumped over the fence and gone to look for her friends, leaving a trail of baby goat pee throughout the cottage and knocking over a stack of magazines used to start fires in the woodstove, then eating – or perhaps just chewing and spitting out - part of a New Yorker** cover.
She was dancing on the coffee table in the living room when finally apprehended.
And that’s why it is so important to drink your milk.
* When they add tantrums to the Olympics, bet on these two for Gold and Silver.
** (Editor’s note: do not use New Yorkers to start fires. It is not the right kind of paper. We know that. We ran out of newspaper inserts.)
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