Update

Ok, Atty performed his annual inspection of babies on their first day outside yesterday. We are still way behind but catching up a little. There are seven. Lucy had twins, Wronny had triplets, and Peaches had two exceedingly fat but extremely cute minimanches - one black and one white - with perfect ears. Lucy's adorable little daughter is at the bottom.

Good News - He Got His Old Job Back!

Keeping both ends clean...

The Kids

Well the photographer did not get here yet so I will just tell you that the new kids (all 7) are very cute. Hope that helps.

White-out Baby Blizzard Blows Itself Out

Everybody got here ok. In the end.

3/3/3

What is the point of having a schedule if no one will keep to it?

The farmer is very exasperated. Peaches was supposed to have her kids yesterday. Did she? No.

Wronny is supposed to have her kids tomorrow. Will she? No.

Lucy’s due date is March 7th. Is she going to stick to it? Ha.

All three are kidding today and if all three have triplets the farmer is going to have to buy three lottery tickets at three different stores at three o’clock. Ish.

But what about Hannah Belle, someone wanted to know? We don’t have time to explain, we’re in the middle of a baby blizzard.

Oh Very Young

It takes three things to make springtime. First it takes the frogs in the pond singing. That started two nights ago. It’s funny how they do it: it isn’t one and then another and then after a few days a whole jamboree. Instead it is none, not a peep, and then the next night a hundred frogs singing 'denim blue fading up to the sky.'*

Actually I prefer it the way they do it, I guess they know what is best.

Then it takes flower heads. Our last (we hope) snow is gone and all around we can see little furled flower heads poking up out of the dirt.

Third, and most important, it takes baby goats.

There are four very fat ladies in the barn, and the barometer is dropping. That means one thing, and only one thing.

The candidates: Lucy Goosy is Penrose’s daughter, she will be a first freshener, and from the expression she has been wearing the last few days, she is going to be very surprised at what happens next. Then there is Wronny, fabulous last place Wronny who has never had a buck kid and who holds the world land speed record for delivery. Really, she should get a job at FedEx.

Then there is Winnie, who made the farmer mad by coming back into heat after she was bred so that now we don’t know if she is going to kid tomorrow or in three weeks. Then there is old faithful Peaches the mini-mancha, big as a house and just as mobile.

“But wait,” says the farmer, looking at the chart, “wasn’t there someone else bred in October?” There is a smudge on the chart, as usual, probably caused by a free-range goat under Wendell’s supervision.

The farmer gets out some sat-on scratched-up reading glasses and peers in dismay at the chart, muttering darkly. The farmer looks around at the fat ladies. “Where is Hannah Belle?” the farmer asks no one in particular.

Stay tuned….


*that's what it sounds like they are singing, anyway.

Economic Downturns Hits Home (Washington); Wendell Fired

Almost every day someone gets to be a free-range goat. Usually it is me or a skinny yearling or someone everyone else picks on. The free-range goat gets to go where it wants and eat what it wants (no rosebushes, please) and gets special treats from the farmer.

Wendell gets to supervise the free-range goat, since he is a herding dog in training. Wendell has been a pest his whole life but now he is four he is starting to be less pesty. He doesn’t eat eyeglasses or cellphones any more, for example. You can even put a cellphone down next to him on the couch and he (probably) will not do anything to it.

Two years ago Wendell got his first baby goat to supervise – Sammy. The farmer was very impressed; Wendell kept both ends of Sammy very clean and followed Sammy wherever he went, supervising him.

Last year, Wendell had Filbert. Filbert was a lot harder to supervise but Wendell did a pretty good job. Filbert was a Nigerian, so he was a lot smarter than Sammy, and he could also fit through any kind of opening, so he was much harder to keep track of, but Wendell made a reasonable effort.

So he was promoted to free-range goat supervisor, which is an important but usually very easy job.

Unless you get a Lamancha doeling. The problem with the LaMancha doelings is that they are all bottle babies and all spoiled rotten. They follow you everywhere and have no sense of personal space. I have told them to buzz off frequently, like when I need some alone time to think about Swedish fish or those pretzels with the candy coating. What are they called? Candy-coated pretzels? Do you know the ones I mean? It’s a sort of a whitish coating, kind of lemony tasting?

Anyway, sometimes you have to bite their ears (the LaMancha doelings) to get rid of them. Only they don’t have ears, so what can you do. You’re stuck.

Jessie was the free-range goat today. She is going to kid in April so she is up in the big barn with the big fat milkers, and she is doing okay up there but the farmer coddles her anyway. So she came out and was following the farmer around as the farmer did various chores, including painting the lattice for the arbor. Wendell was supervising her and everything was going well until the farmer had to go inside.

“Watch Jessie for a few minutes, Wendell,” the farmer said, and went to get a phillips head screwdriver.

Before you can say Man of LaMancha Jessie is at the back door knocking to get in. That is bad enough, but when the farmer comes to the door it is apparent that Jessie has been inspecting the painted lattice at much too close a range, which is clearly a failure of supervision.

“Can you explain this, Wendell?” the farmer asks Wendell, who obviously supervised the whole breach of free-range-goat etiquette. The farmer indicates Jessie’s bright green lattice-colored lips, leaving no room for misunderstanding.


Wendell offers no explanation. He is fired from his supervisory position and will go back to keeping baby goats clean, both ends, as soon as they arrive.

I Used to be The Decider

As you may know, Eo is the Ayatollah of the minis. During the winter she rules the down-below pasture. She rules as if she were Grand Empress of all the Russias, not as if she has five disgruntled fat underlings on an acre of wet grass with a tumble-down shack to live in.

Sometimes Eo will boss you for no reason, just to show she can boss you. That is why I avoid her and stay up in the big barn with the milkers where the living is easy and Brandy runs the show. Brandy is the boss of bosses, but nobody minds her because she is fair. Strict, but fair. Also, unlike Eo, she is not an earbiter.

Anyway everything was going fine until we got to the end of February. Then the farmer turfed everybody out of the big barn unless they are going to be kidding soon. Including me, which doesn’t seem fair, since I am Baby Belle and not just an ordinary goat. So I am stuck down here with Eo, the fat underlings, two trample-mad Nubians, and a hodgepodge of other luckless individuals.

What is it with the Nubians? They cannot just walk anywhere. Everywhere they go they have to trample. They trample over to the feeders in the morning, they trample out to eat the free-range grass, they trample along the fence to look at the frogpond.

Anyway the first thing that happened was that Eo was dethroned. No one knows who is in charge now, we all just know it isn’t Eo.

It might be Boo, or possibly even Betsy, although that seems unlikely. It just isn’t Eo.

Eo isn’t taking it well. I imagine she feels kind of like George W. Bush, strolling around Home Depot and telling people, “I used to be President, you know.”

Yeah, right, buddy. Get to the back of the line.

Anyway, Eo has taken to sitting alone and sunning herself and plotting. I can tell from her eyes – just look at the photo – that she is plotting. I don’t know what she is plotting, but she is certainly plotting something.

She has also intimated that she plans to challenge me in future Best Beard contests. I laugh at that. You probably do too.

She may have a beard, but she will NEVER have a magnificent snowy beard.

The Junior Channel

We have two LaMancha bucks here. One is Viceroy the Nice Boy, he is older so he is the boss. He is a nice boy and he does almost everything nicely. The other is Junior. Junior seemed to be kind of boring when he first came here. He never did anything, didn't try to escape, didn't jump over anything, didn't knock anything down, certainly didn't eat any rosebushes.

The only interesting habit he had was he wouldn't walk with the farmer. If the farmer put a hand on his collar he immediately dropped on the ground like a pancake.

"Oh, really?" the farmer said, the first couple of times he did this.

"Oh, really?" is something which if you hear it it is your last chance to avoid reaping the whirlwind. When Hannah Belle hears the farmer say "oh, really?" she immediately stops what she is doing - eating grain from a knocked-over garbage can, usually - and goes to stand by the door to the punishment stall to be let in. She stands in a posture of mock humility and regret - head down and deflated, humble and apologetic.

Really, it's quite convincing. Utterly fake, of course.

Junior isn't dumb and he soon learned that his style of 'walking' would prevent him from ever going to meet any girls. So then he walked tolerably well. Not perfectly but tolerably well. He stopped his pancaking ways and returned to being dull as dishwater.

Until recently. Maybe it's because he's two years old now, but anyway Junior has started developing a personality.

His favorite thing to do is pretend he is scared, kind of like a Haflinger. If he sees the tractor he sometimes, depending on his mood, runs around dizzily, puffing and snorting. He isn't really scared, just pretending to be scared.

His new hobby is to pick up his feed bucket when it is empty and put it on his head upside down so that he can't see. Then he pretends he is scared and runs around in a circle, carefully so as not to bump into anything. Then he takes the bucket off and looks around to check if anything changed while he was invisible.

No. Then he puts the bucket back on and trots around for a few more minutes. Off again. No change in the visible world. Back on again.

When he does it now and people ask if he needs help - "look," they usually say, "that goat has a bucket stuck on his head" - the farmer says no.

He doesn't need help. He is just watching the Junior Channel.

Hello. I am today’s guest goat. My name is Winnie Junior. It is pronounced Winnie JUNIOR. If you are calling me, call out “winnie JUNIOR!” Actually you do not need to call me. If I see you I will run over and attach myself to you. I am one of the velcro goats.

I am the captain of the hiking team because I will follow you anywhere you go except into the shower although on a hot day I might do that too if the shower is cool and refreshing.

I have an assistant. My assistant’s name is Binky. Some day I would like to saw her in half but for now she just follows me around assisting me and I tell her to calm down if she falls in the creek which happens more often than you might imagine.

The creek is like a magnet to Binky. I think her bones are made of willow which makes her get attracted to water but this is just a theory. She is very springy though, just like a good willow switch or a divining rod. Anyway for future reference if you are hiking with Binky do not go by any deep creeks because she is only two feet tall. Also when she falls in if I am not there when she starts screaming just yell, “Calm down, Binky!”

She is my assistant and I do need her so don’t just leave her in the creek. If she gets a brain freeze you might need to find a farmer to carry her out. A logger could probably also do it if there is no farmer nearby. Just someone with boots and common sense.

Thank you for your time.

Snowberries

q. Is there anything prettier than goat berries in the snow?

A. Yes.

Snow Day

We had another snow day. And here are the pictures to prove it.

Captain Who?

There is a new gentleman visiting us. He has beautiful blue hair and a beautiful fringe and a beautiful Superman-style spit curl over his forehead. He also has the beginnings of a magnificent snowy beard. Did I mention he is beautiful?

Hmm. I may need to do some stretches in case I need to jump anything.

TTYL.

The Princess and the Pea

It is possible for someone who is extremely good-looking to have funny-looking relatives. You probably know this from your own experience looking around the dinner table at Thanksgiving at some of the pasty-faced chubby-cheeked flat-haired thin-lipped single-eyebrowed (etc) family members who share (can you believe it?) your DNA. Brad Pitt’s brother for example looks kind of like a gerbil. I have nothing against gerbils, I just wouldn’t want to look like one. And then there is my half-sister Snow Pea.

Snow Pea looks like a footstool with ears. In fact, she looks like someone bought her at Ikea and put her together with one of those allen wrenches you can never find when you need it. A footstool that people would look at and say, “is it supposed to be that low to the ground? Why are there two screws left over?”

She completely lacks what the Goat People call “dairy character.” She is square and very well-padded and her legs are only a couple of inches long. This comes in very handy when scarfing up food dropped by others, which is one of the reasons for Snow Pea’s impressive upholstery.

Snow Pea also has a little bit of a personality deficit. When she first came here with me years ago she was very shy of people and would run away squeaking miserably if anyone tried to pet her. She got over this because of her Achilles heel: she loves to be scratched so much that she soon becomes very attached to anyone – the farmer for example – who will sit down and scratch her shoulders. In fact, it is possible to put her into a hypnotic trance by doing this.

But among us goats, she is down at the bottom of the pecking order and a little bit of an outcast. She doesn’t seem to care; she likes her little niche. And she only has two interests. Food, of course. And her boyfriend Captain January.

If you know anything about Snow Pea you know that years ago she had one set of twins. Well, she had all kinds of problems because she was really too fat to kid, and she ended up having a c-section. Since then she has not been allowed to have any kids, and so when she comes into heat she shows astonishing initiative in her special brand of low-to-the-ground escapery.

The Pea is too short and fat to jump anything, so the farmer was very surprised to find her wagging her tail outside CJ’s honeymoon suite yesterday, since it is two high fences away from her pasture. The farmer put her back where she belonged and then watched from a distance as she burrowed under the fence into the neighbor’s pasture, scuttled along inside the blackberry bushes, crammed back under the neighbor’s wooden fence where Wendell the Pest has worn his little wormhole, and burrowed again under the garden fence adjacent to CJ’s pen.

Not even Hannah Belle has thought of doing this.

Anyway the horse trailer is full of grain so the farmer frogmarched her right into my stall. I am tolerating her, but she has to sit in the corner and not touch my food.

Sit, Snow Pea. Stay.

Saddest Day of the Year

Every year we mark our calendar for the saddest day of the year. It came two days ago. After struggling mightily through several milkless days and exhausting the Christmas Starbucks gift cards, the farmer finally bought a quart of milk at the store.

Cow milk of course. Awful stuff. Just awful. I pity the calf who would even consider drinking it.

That brings us to the kidding countdown: the farmer's special pet Wronny, the world's most perfect milker according to the farmer, even though she has come in last place at every show she has ever been to, unlike my family, which always brings home scads of ribbons, most of them blue, but anyway we can't all be beautiful, will be the first to kid.

The fabulous last place ("I prefer to think of it as fifth place," the farmer insisted this year after the fair, since only four other goats showed up in Wronny's class) Wronny is scheduled to kid on April 3rd. She has never had a buck kid so we are laying odds on that, and even though she has always had twins, I am going to go out on a limb and bet she has triplets.

And speaking of long odds, the farmer has vowed to keep showing Wronny until she doesn't come in last. Then she will retire in a blaze of mediocrity.

So the world will be waiting with bated breath for that wonderful day when Wronny comes in next to last. Personally, I would take the Cubs in four games in the World Series first.

The Fainting Cans

Today there was an unfortunate occurrence.

I do not know who did it although actually I know who did it. The Goat Code prevents me from mentioning who did it. If I knew. Which even if I just said I knew I might have misspoken. I’m sure it was an accident, anyway. Or maybe not. Who can say.

Sometimes things just fall over. Fainting goats for instance. They walk along, then all of a sudden whoopsie daisy, they fall over. Who can explain it.

Anyway as you know there was an earthquake this morning and as this picture clearly shows there is no seismic strapping on the cans.

Luckily for someone who shall remain nameless there was a guest visiting at the time of the unfortunate occurrence. “Oh look,” said the guest, “the grain cans fell over.”

The farmer chuckled, pretending to be good-natured and jolly, since there was a guest.

“So they did,” said the farmer, “ha ha ha.” I noticed at this point my daughter Hannah Belle carefully averting her eyes from everyone and sliding in behind Boo the Winnebago so that only the tip of her tail was visible.

Unfortunately just at that moment Boo intuited with the food-oriented part of her brain, which works several thousand percent better than all the other parts, that the guest might have access to some type of cookies or peanuts, and stampeded herself up to the stall door in a single lightning maneuever.

This left a certain party standing in plain view in the large hole in the daylight vacated by the Boobago.

“Oh, hello, Hannah Belle,” said the farmer, with an ominous smile.

Quake Detector

The farmer was waked up this morning by a very polite little earthquake that rattled the pocket doors in the farmhouse and then went away.

That felt like an earthquake, the farmer thought, but since the dogs weren’t barking, the farmer went back to sleep.

That is one useful thing about dogs, possibly the only useful thing. If there is a big earthquake coming they will start barking and barking about thirty seconds before it hits. They will really bark, like they are going crazy, worse even than if the FedEx truck and the UPS truck came at the same time.

What they are saying is, “RUN OUTSIDE! RUN OUTSIDE!”

During the last big earthquake the farmer was on the phone when the dogs started barking in the most deafening manner imaginable. The farmer put one hand over the phone and yelled at the dogs.

“Be QUIET!” the farmer yelled, but the dogs wouldn’t stop. Then the earthquake hit.

“EARTHQUAKE!” the farmer yelled, pointlessly, since the dogs already knew about it.

The books were jumping off their shelves. The brickwork in the living room toppled with a crash. Outside the window, the whole world was swaying. The horses galloped crazily around their pasture, screaming.

“RUN OUTSIDE!” the farmer yelled, and ran for the door.

Duh, thought the dogs, and ran outside with the farmer.

Mmmm

I got a Starbucks card for Christmas from the farmer's father and today I used up the last bit of it with my final pumpkin scone. I employed my patented 'Shaq' maneuver to box greedy Melly out (it was pretty easy with her bad leg). She didn't get even a crumb.

All in all, very gratifying.

Baby Belle's Helpful Hints

As you know Miss Melly the 3-legged goat has been sharing my “private” stall after her accident. This has given me an opportunity to spend some time with her. In the spirit of helpfulness I would like to make some suggestions which may allow her to improve the serious deficiencies in her personality, hygiene, grooming, and behavior patterns. I have neither the time nor the space to detail all of her flaws, so I will just touch on a few of the most nettlesome.

1. The Beard. As you know I am universally admired for my magnificent snowy beard. Melly’s beard on the other hand is the type of beard which if anyone even noticed it they would say, “oh, are you trying to grow a beard?”

Scraggly is one word that springs to mind. Sad perhaps would be another.

The words which definitely don’t leap to mind are “magnificent” and “snowy.” My suggestion would be that Melly should approach the LaMancha doelings – any one of them would be happy to chew it off entirely. Winnie, Jr., for example just yesterday ate a piece of weather stripping twice the size of Melly’s “beard” in a matter of seconds.

2. Food hogging. Miss Melly is a food hog. When the food comes she acts as if it all for her, when in fact it is my food which I am of course willing to share as soon as I have finished eating everything I want. Not to mention that it is my stall and she is a guest. I would refer her to Miss Manners (waiting for hostess, page 147), who describes with elegant simplicity the sorts of minimal table manners required in contemporary polite society.

3. Ear biting. Melly is an ear biter, an unfortunate habit she acquired after spending too much time with the Toggs and mini-Toggs. Suppose you are eating your dinner in your private home and one of your so-called guests bites your ears in an attempt to get you to conclude your repast so that they may hog your food (see above.) Just imagine that scenario. There is really only one civilized solution to this problem: stop it.

4. The Water Bucket. Every day Melly tips over the water bucket. Why?

5. Heat. As every goat knows, it is only polite to bundle up together at night for heat. If you don’t like your co-sleeper(s), you can go head to tail instead of the friendly method – head to head with one neck draped over the other in the nesting pattern preferred by babies and family members. Melly makes no attempt to do this.

Was she born in a barn? YES, but so was I, and my manners are exquisite. Join me in exhorting her to improve her deplorable behavior. The Bush Years are over, Melly. It is time for a return to decorum.

Trouble Loves Company

My daughter Hannah Belle and Breezy's daughter Miss Melly used to go around getting in trouble together when they were kids. They hopped a lot of fences and stole a lot of grain that didn't belong to them. They just laughed when they got lectures from the farmer.

Because of those two, we had to switch all our new fencing to five foot fencing instead of four foot.

Anyway, Hannah Belle learned her lesson one day: she tried to jump a fence and didn't make it over. Her foot caught on the top wire and she was left swinging upside down about a foot off the ground. Well, that day was one of the luckiest days of her life because she did it right in front of the farmer and the farmer freed her within a minute or two and all that happened was she limped around for a day or two.

And after that she learned her lesson. She doesn't jump wire fences any more. She specializes in wood fences and panel gates, and fat as she is she has perfected a limbo-like maneuver that will get her through just about any five panel gate from any farm store in the country. It is something to see.

It saves a lot of jumping, and it makes sense. Why go over the gate when you can go through? That's what they were designed for, after all.

Anyway, Mel had much the same experience when she was a kid, except she broke her leg on her jumping maneuver. It was a clean break and it healed with no problems, and we thought she too had learned her lesson.

No. Yesterday she pulled the same bone-headed ploy and wound up with a leg caught in the fence. No one knows when it happened, but by the time the farmer got home and found her, she had been there so long that she wasn't even crying any more, just shaking, standing on her two front legs. Luckily she got far enough over that she was able to hold most of her weight on her front legs. One of the back legs was caught about four feet off the ground, with a deep cut around the ankle where the wire wrapped tight.

The farmer cut her out and gave her some medicine and now guess who I have for a roommate in my supposed-to-be-private stall?

A three-legged nitwit. Somebody tell me why this goat is getting fig newtons and room service instead of a lecture? Hello? The Nubians have more sense than this, for pity's sake.