Tangential Thoughts on Facebook

Before I begin, let me just say that the goats are well and spoiled, I have fluffy babies who think that I am the best thing since green peaches, and all is generally right in my strange little world.

I want to talk about Facebook for a moment, because I have a love/hate relationship with it. It allows me to connect with people all over the world, it gives me a way to STAY connected to friends who are far away, and I get to keep up with a multitude of lives around me with very little effort on my part.

Which is kind of the problem.

It allows me to become passive in my friendships and still feel that I am "keeping up" with those I care about. It satisfies my need to feel connected to others without actually nurturing that connection. I firmly believe that a "Like" or a comment (or a text message, for that matter) is no excuse for actual, physically present interaction. And yet, day after day, Facebook conditions me to prefer this kind of contact. It's convenient. Easily accessible. Inconspicuous. And I can be horribly nosy if I so choose.

And it is conditioning. It is basic animal behavior modification. (And yes, I am a wonderfully and fearfully made child of God, but my behavior is still often directed, at least partially, by my more primal hindbrain. Humans are animals in many ways.) And I am conditioned to keep logging into Facebook with the constant barrage of positive reinforcement I receive when I do so. Statuses that make me laugh. Pictures that foster my sense of connection - because we are a social species. Other, less educated statuses that make me feel superior. And "likes" for my own statuses and media that have somehow insinuated themselves into my sense of self-worth. It creates an addictive environment, until I have a Facebook app on my phone and want to check it every half-hour.

This has many repercussions. I have a Facebook friend who keeps scores of how many "likes" they get - and who from. I feel obligated to like their photos and statuses, lest I be (God forbid) a "bad friend." It throws a shadow on an otherwise highly valued friendship - I enjoy all of their Facebook posts, for many reasons, the primary one being that I do in fact count this person a dear friend. Yet if I don't log on every day and click that button, it doesn't count somehow.

There are the desktop world-changers - the ones who post a barrage of political statuses, scientific articles, and educational videos in an attempt to "improve" the minds of their captive Facebook audience. Because everyone knows that a status vilifying the president will change the minds of those who support him and fix the problem at hand. Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion. I respect their right to post anything they want - even if I find it offensive. What concerns me is the feeling that, having posted it on Facebook, they have DONE something about it. They haven't. No one is going to read a status about breast cancer and say, "You know, a lot of people have liked this picture of a pink ribbon - I'll bet we can find a cure with it." Please don't let it lull you into a false sense of accomplishment. Get outside. Volunteer. Donate. Teach. Learn.

There are the attention-seekers - those who constantly post things like "I'm nothing special. Why do my friends even like me?" or "Horrible day today. Don't ask." Never have I wanted so badly to hug and smack someone at the same time. Hug, because it is clearly a cry for attention - and smack, because it is blatant and self-indulgent.

And I am deeply concerned with the insidious way Facebook has changed how we measure our own value. I had a Facebook friend - someone I'd never met in person - who wrote a status containing a very basic mathematical error. I, being the snarky and sarcastic but well-meaning person that I am, wrote a comment suggesting that they might want to double-check their math (smiley face). I clearly did not know this person well enough to do so, as I was immediately accused of being "judgmental" and "grammar police" by said person (as well as several of their friends who were quick to add their support and condemn my innocent comment). When I sent the person a private message, not apologizing for the comment but explaining my intent and expressing sincere regret for the offense they'd taken, I received a single-word reply: "UNFRIEND!!" This from a person who asked ME to add them as a friend on Facebook, whose views I didn't agree with but had never questioned or condemned. It was immature and oversensitive and it disturbed me far more than it should have. Why does the attitude of this person I have never truly been a friend of, or to, matter to me at all? After a day or two of unsettled reflection, I really haven't given this person another thought, so clearly our "friendship" wasn't deep enough to warrant my emotional response.

(Cyber-bullying is a huge problem in our culture. Children have taken their own lives because of it. Somehow we need to find a way to reduce the impact of words on a screen. A keyboard and a screen provides a shield - by reducing the personal investment in the outcome and the threat of repercussions. The consequences are reduced, so people speak their mind with (intentional or unintentional) hurt and hate the result.)

And there is much, much more. Do I have the solution? No. Will I share this on Facebook? Probably! Because I am human. I have committed all of the above offenses at one point or another, and I constantly, constantly fight it. I have a "No Facebook on Sundays" rule that I desperately try to enforce, with mixed results - because it is so darn addictive. But having that one day where I force myself to interact with the world in other ways is helping to keep me on an even keel...I think! Try it and see what happens. You might be surprised.

Kilauea!

Houston, we have babies!

Mama Kaho is so proud.

We weren't supposed to have babies. It's a long story. Nevertheless, Kahoolawe had a rather precocious and ADORABLE doe kid on March 9th! Baby Kilauea is doing very well, wreaking havoc, and is frighteningly well-imprinted, making her a general delight to have around. Oh, and she's gorgeous.

Did I mention precocious? She's less than 20 minutes old in this picture.

There is nothing like new-baby-goat smell. And SNUGGLES.

Smug little goat. She seems to have a foot fetish...or at least a penchant for lying on top of mine.

LOOK AT THAT FACE!

"Kili" has since been joined by a set of twin buck kids (Poor Stella tries so hard) and another single doeling, who is elf-eared and bears an uncanny resemblance to her dead grandmother. More on her later. There are several more does who we expect to kid in the next few weeks, and possibly some exciting news later this month, so stay tuned for updates!

"Goat" pictures.

I love taking pictures of the goats. And I'm really good at taking pictures of myself. Mixing the two happens frequently, with a lot of blurry, cute, and occasionally hilarious results.

Remember Echo? This is her older sister, BabyVania. BabyVania may affectionately be referred to as "half-baked."

Cotati disapproves.

Alfie is nearly two and still thinks he's a lap-goat.

Achoo! "Can I climb in your lap too?"

Sweet, sweet Sensation.

Alfie's smug little face!

Lily wants scratches and she wants them NOW.

"If I give you kisses, THEN will you give me scritches?"

Kauai's consternation made me laugh out loud.

"Can I get back in your lap now?"

"Stop copying me!!"

Kisses from quiet, unassuming little Stella.

Egotistical? Me? Never.

Happiness

A few things that make me happy:

Feeling sunshine on my face.

Conversations with good friends, no matter the subject.

Having a good ride on my wonderful, amazing, perfect little horse.

Watching a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old blow dandelions and having them bring the baby and me dandelions so we "can have wishes too!"

Fluffy white clouds after a rainstorm with the sun lighting them up so they look like you could reach out and touch them.

Turning up the radio and singing along while cleaning out the van at work.

Being trusted.

Sitting in the goat pen and having conversations with them. (Hello! How are you? That's MY hair and I'd like to keep it. Your hoof is lovely but I'd like it out of my lap now.)

Building things out of straw bales. (They're blocks for grown-ups!)

Sleeping in with no alarm clock and still waking up way earlier than I used to.

Endorphins!

Coffee and chocolate. Preferably together. With milk.

Fixing things. Even if I broke them first.

Reading my Bible and having it make total sense.

Eating with friends. Being with friends. Talking with friends. Sharing with friends. Friends in general.


Life is good!

On Being Breedist

I struggle with profiling. Not with people. I can meet a lovely person, have a three-hour dinner conversation, feel like we've bonded for life, and walk away not knowing what they were wearing or the color of their hair or eyes. I'll remember what they had for dinner and that their dog loves oranges.

I profile with the goats. Constantly. To be fair, however, a lot of it is learned. I expect LaManchas to be bipolar, super-smart, and occasionally humble me with moments of pure sweetness, and I expect the Saanens to be placid, loving and more or less perfect. (No, I don't have a favorite. Hush.) So what happens when you get an exception? Or when you mix the two?

Take Echo. Echo is a baby Saanen who belongs to my mother. Because she belongs to my mother, and my mother loves her whole family for their irrepressible goofiness and obnoxiousness, I feel no need to educate Echo on the salient points of respectful goat-human interaction. This decision was made in no small part due to the fact that the little smartaleck learned how to duck the hand that comes back to smack her when she jumps on my back. (And then wiggles away as if to laugh at me.) She also has an unsettling resemblance to her late aunt, Zi Zhi, who was also a hellion as a child. So I let her put her hooves on my shoulder and her mouth on my jacket. Or in my jacket. Or under my jacket. The hair's off limits though. Her sister is a bit more subdued, but will still come over for a good finger-chomping session.

There's also Desi. Desi is the humblest, sweetest creature on four brown legs and is a purebred LaMancha. She spent the first two weeks of her life living in my bedroom, though, so she's pretty seriously socialized with people. (I could spend so much time studying imprinting and social behavior. It's so fascinating. And I truly believe it has long-term effects.) Desi is still a Lamancha, though, in that if I go in the pen while they are eating, she'll stroll over to see me, sniff my face, and then go back to eating for a bit. No rush. I'll be around. Just wanted to say hi.

And then there are the SaManchas. (I have a friend who calls them Saanchas. I struggle with it because the double-"A" makes me want to add a syllable even though the root word isn't pronounced that way and by the time I get the word out, I've had a minor aneurysm.) They are a distinctly mixed bag, but most of them tend towards one extreme or the other. Most goats go through a hormonal, bipolar yearling stage - even the Saanens - and most of the SaManchas seem to use this time to get the Lamancha attitude out of their system. Ramoth, Lisbon and Abbey are all half-LaMancha yearlings and all three of them have the "Don't touch me, I'll touch you" attitude going on. They've gotten sweeter as they approach their second birthdays, though, so we'll see. Lily, a 5-year-old, is ALL Lamancha. Her dam was a Lamancha though - as opposed to the others who had Saanen dams and a Lamancha sire - so she learned it early. (And now I wonder if the dam's breed has an effect? Do they pick up on it in utero? Hmm.)

And then there's Chloe. Chloe has the LaMancha energy and the Saanen love rolled up into an adorable fluffy white elf-eared ball of cloven-hooved labrador puppy. She can't get enough of people and is a total ham, happily taking picture after picture with me and occasionally even posing for the camera with a runway-model glare.

She is the reason I want all of my kids to be SaManchas for the rest of my life. And if I ever grow up and start a dairy, they'll all be white and earless.

So yes, I may be breedist. But I have a right to be. And I love them all anyway!

362 days of CDO.

Well I *almost* made it a whole year since my last blog post. I feel so accomplished for having reduced my slaven dependency on the internet over the last year. But considering how bad I was before and how much time I still spend on the computer, I'm not sure how well that worked. You shush.

Life has been life. I spent most of the spring, summer and fall being totally obsessed with my doll of a horse and riding, helping exercise horses, and teaching lessons at a local three-day-eventing barn. It consumed my life almost to the point of excluding all else. Yeah, not so good. Fantastic, but not productive. I am still fighting for balance (and probably always will be) but it feels good to take a step back. Even though I was forced to. But that's okay because I have a new JOB!

Yes. Job. Full-time. Five days a week from 8 to 5. Actually, those were the working hours advertised. Within a week I had started working 7-4 and now since I eat my lunch so quickly it's more like 7-3:30. Except when I work overtime because the place is swamped right now. But I digress. I had an interview on January 10th, was offered the job on the 11th, and started working on Monday the 13th at the UCDavis Mouse Biology Program as an Assistant Animal Technician!

The title is really very glorified. I am a gopher. I have been trained (and am still being trained) to do everything, but my primary function is to be a "supply tech." This means I drive the van three times a day to pick up clean supplies (which are cleaned and sterilized at a campus wash facility and an off-campus lab animal facility, respectively); transport mice back and forth between the two main facilities as well as supplies, feed, etc.; and take dirty supplies back to the wash facility. I also clean and disinfect the van, assemble clean cages within the vivarium, do most of the cleaning and supply prep, and help the other "real" animal techs with husbandry, daily animal checks and so on. And I love it. The initial training period was incredibly frustrating, because I am compelled to be a helpful little elf and my helpful little elf self is utterly useless when I don't know how to do anything. And training is a pain for other people to have to do. They're all great about it. My coworkers are amazing and, as a group, are the best people (and easily the best boss!) I've ever gotten to work with. But when they are switching to a confusing new computer system and a lot of things need to be done NOW, training the newbie is just one more thing to worry about. And so I struggled. But I've gotten on my feet well enough now that I'm feeling much more useful, am able to make decisions and do things independently (like color-coordinating the whiteboard, haHA) and am generally able to keep myself busy and keep my CDO little self very happy. One of the other techs, who has been doing the majority of my cleaning/housekeeping training, also has CDO and we have spent a lot of time bonding over perfectly aligned stacks of cages. (For those of you who don't know, CDO is just like OCD, but spelled alphabetically as it should be.)

The new job does mean getting up early (like 5 am early) and struggling to adjust to a radical time shift, and being exhausted a lot, and somehow I don't mind. I've even occasionally gotten up early enough to run (yay me!) and have succeeded in giving myself shin splints. So no more running at the moment. I continually agonize over the goats and what to do with them but in the meantime they're getting more and better attention than they've gotten in over a year. And they are adorable in every sense of the word, and I love them. My poor horse went from hardcore, seven-days-a-week dressage and jumping to being a stall ornament, but she still gets a handful of grain because she's FLIPPIN' cute so she seems to be happy with the arrangement. If I ever stop being sleep deprived and exhausted I've promised to ride her again.

As a side note: the sleep deprivation has been highly entertaining, especially for a couple of my coworkers. My verbal filter has been sporadic at best - not that I'm using inappropriate language or anything, it's just that my random little thoughts that I usually keep to myself get interjected into the conversation. (Do YOU know why Target is called Target??) In lab meetings my need to be helpful and socially positive has me on the constant verge of hysterical giggles, but so far I've managed to keep them in check. Hopefully more sleep will improve matters. I should probably go work on that. Toodles!

Big-Beautiful-Bouncing-Baby-Boers!

Well, I finally got a bit of a baby fix. I'm still holding out for my dairy goat babies - there is something uniquely charming and squee-worthy about a tiny little earless face, and I still melt for little white ears and pink noses - but in the meantime I have something that is a different kind of UH-dorable. My favorite Boer show doe, Princess, has been waddling around moaning and groaning for weeks, and she finally kidded on February 1st - introducing Charlotte, Tiana, and Big Daddy!

Princess the morning before she kidded, feeling rather rotund

BABIES! Big Daddy in front and little sister Tiana behind him.

Tiana has "running lights!"

The only picture I have of the biggest (and firstborn) baby, Charlotte. She's a big, long, stout, gorgeous girl with a great head - but she was more interested in burying herself in her mama's breakfast!

Baby Tiana was named after the main character in The Princess and the Frog, because she was born with "frog legs." (It was a little cramped in there, and the tendons in her legs are contracted, meaning she can't straighten her knees or pasterns - aka ankles - and tends to scoot around like a little bullfrog.) She'll grow out of it - they're already getting straighter - but in the meantime it's not slowing her down any! She also has one of the prettiest heads I've ever seen on a baby Boer - and I love her little pouty face!

Big Daddy hammin' it up. He loves his scritches.

YAY BABIES!