Peas and Carrots

The farmer went away yesterday and today we got a long pointed lecture on the subject of "Taking Advantage."

How would we like it if someone took advantage of us? Would we think that was so all-fired hilarious? Would we?

This is all on account of the farmer making the same mistake over and over. When the farmer goes out of town the farmer tells the guest feeder, just put the feed in the stalls and out in the back paddock and open up the gates and they will all run in and they will go into their separate stalls where the feed is and then all you have to do is close all the gates and then go take a nap, it as as easy as peas and carrots. The main thing is just be sure to stand back out of the way so you don't get run over because they pick up quite a little head of steam when they are running toward their dinner. The steam part is true, I admit that.

Well Lori was the guest feeder yesterday and she had just bought a new car and that used up most of her wits and she was looking a little bit haywire from overexposure to car salesmen by the time she got here, and I have to say when you see someone looking haywire you can't always necessarily stay on the straight and narrow and somehow all of us at the same time decided to go the extra mile. And so instead of going into any of our stalls properly like the farmer had guaranteed some of us ran a diversion stampede toward the feed room and some went part way up the stairs and some went into the stalls and then ran right back out and some galloped toward the alfalfa stack like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and before long Lori had to call for reinforcements and the way she was looking I was frankly surprised that she could still operate a cellphone.

Well it turned out that she was calling the kindly neighbor who has already seen every goat trick in the book so the joke was on us and before long we were all latched inside the stalls - not necessarily our own stalls -- where we had time to reconsider our activities.

And sure enough, the lecture we got this morning was long and sorrowful and filled with withering pauses. The farmer hoped we were happy.

"We are," said Cherry.

"Yes," agreed Abby.

And the farmer hoped we would think about what we had done.

"I'm not going to," said Betty.

"Me neither," agreed Winjay.

"I don't have time for that," said Big Orange. "I think I might be coming in heat."

Unsung No More

Nobody ever hears anything about Sandy. Sandy is Pebbles' twin. She is the unsung twin. Sandy likes the background, that's where she lives her whole life. She is always trying to get into the background. Every now and then she is standing around in the background enjoying her anonymity and all of a sudden everyone surges around behind her for some reason, and then she has to scramble to get out of plain view.

She hates being in plain view, she is one of those goats who when you take a picture Pebbles or Cherry are standing with their nose on the camera lens, and Crumpet's head is trying to poke in from the bottom of the picture, and Moldy is lurching in and out of the frame as she jumps up desperately on her back legs to try to get attention, and Pinky is visible off in the distance galloping toward the camera - she didn't know there was going to be a photo shoot because she wasn't paying attention - and the tip of someone's tail is just disappearing from the side of the picture. The tip of the tail belongs to Sandy. We have pictures of one of Sandy's wattles, of her hock, of her tailtip, as she scurries to get out of focus.

Anyway yesterday something very strange happened, the farmer was doing back scratches and the usual petting hogs were clustered around, Jammies and Jinxy and Moldy and Pinky and etc, and out of the blue, Sandy came waddling up to be scratched. And she wouldn't leave, she did some very expert maneuvering to keep her pole position, and she had her back scratched for probably at least ten minutes.

Pinky was very stumped she did not even know who Sandy is, she didn't recognize her standing in the center of attention and she was so surprised she forgot to do any t-boning.

I know what is going on because I am an expert on the subject but an ordinary goat or an intellectual  Nubian like Pinky would obviously be stumped. It's hormones. Sandy is bred to K, aka Promisedland Chaotic Bliss, and the hormones are poking their way through her shell of anonymity. Pretty soon she will be as friendly as a Girl Scout selling Thin Mints.

It's just a matter of time before she starts screaming for attention in Oregonian tongues.

D

It is a D Year. We have a ways to go, but because of the intellectual bankruptcy problem we need to start getting other people's ideas now so we can fill up the name cabinet before we need it. So this is where you will enter your D names. Only enter good ones we already have a lot of bad ones. Just fyi the work you do in this area will be thankless and in fact if you think of a really good name the intellectual bankruptcy coupled with the selective amnesia will probably result in the farmer taking credit for your idea which has already happened with a lot of my ideas but that's the way it goes.

D Names for the D Year of 2013:

1. Downton

2. Dollop

3. (your name here)

ps - also please do not steal any of the names that you see here that we are stealing from other people. These are our names and we do not want them stolen. It is hard enough stealing them in the first place. Thank you. And also remember we will need some belle names but they have to start with D. please do not enter dbelle the farmer already thought of that. also please be safe out there and avoid meteors.

Marvelous Times

Our farmer is not getting any smarter. Yesterday our farmer was walking around marveling. I don't know if you know any farmers but if you do you have probably seen them marveling. Certain times of year especially they walk around marveling, I guess it is something similar to going in heat.

"Listen to that," they will marvel, "the frogs are already singing down in the pond."

"Oh my goodness, look," they will marvel, "the hummingbirds are back."

Or: "I'll be darned, new catkins on the willow tree."

Usually they marvel over something you noticed about a month ago.

Anyway yesterday our farmer just to show what I am up against was walking around marveling and said to Wendell, "for Pete's sake it is almost February."

Wendell goggled his eyes in amazement, he will marvel about anything if it is presented in the right tone of voice.

"NO!" he goggled. "IT"S IMPOSSIBLE!"

"Where does the time go, Wendell?" the farmer asked.

Wendell goggled in stupefaction, he did not even try to answer.

I will tell you where the time goes, it goes around in a circle and then it comes back. Sometimes it goes down a rabbit hole and stays there for a while. But then it goes around and comes back. if you don't know that what can I say. Haven't you noticed anything.

"Oh, Catkin," said the farmer, suddenly. "That would have been a good C name."

The farmer always thinks of good C names when it is a D year, this is in the nature of farmers I think, like marveling.

Anyway, that's all.

Oh p.s. there has been an uproar about Crumpet's t-shirt so she will get a t-shirt after all. Not right now. Probably when the swallows come back. Unless time goes down a rabbit hole. Then it will be later.

Here's Your Hat, Big Red Cow

Well everyone has lost interest in Crumpet and it seems her acronym is going to have to be changed to either TFMFGOTKP* or NAFAYT* but that is a story for another day and the day is yesterday because it is old news.

What happened is the winter kind of stopped here and it is 50 degrees and they say the sun is going to come out for two days. This has led to a frenzy of spring cleaning and de-dilapidation which means no matter where you stand a farmer comes along in a few minutes and says, "move over," or "stand somewhere else." Or "just look at this place," and shoves you out of the way, no please or thank you.

Wendell has moved up from attempted goat herding to actual cow herding and all his years of annoying yipping and ankle biting are finally paying off. There is a neighbor on the other side of the meadow and for some reason he can't or won't keep his cows in, a herd of big red blocky beef cows with a giant-headed bull, nothing dairy about them which hurts the farmer's eyes, over and over and over again they get out and come over here. They keep trampling the meadow and knocking our fence down  and worst of all - causing the farmer to go tightlipped and beady-eyed - eating our grass, our precious grass without which we would have no Grass Babies or anything else.

This used to cause the farmer seven kinds of consternation but now as soon as they appear we hear the foghorn bellow - "WENDELL!!" - and out comes the world's most dangerous dervish, Wendell the pest, and before you know it those cows are stampeding back the way they came with a bug-eyed boston terrier yipping in ecstasy and running figure eights all around them. It isn't pretty the way he does it. But it works.




footnotes:
TFMFGOTKP* = The fourth most famous goat on the Key Peninsula.
NAFAYT* = Not as famous as you think.