You say ammonia, I say pneumonia

(I can do this. I can do this. I can SO do this.)

Once again, I'm cleaning the barn. It's not so packed full this time, but what is there is very wet and nasty and -literally- reeks of ammonia. My eyes were watering, and I've been having to take Advil congestion to be able to breathe at night...that's how bad it is. I'm so glad to have it out, though, because if it's bad for me, it's ten times worse for the goats whose noses are only two feet from the source. Ammonia causes lung inflammation, which leads to pneumonia. Having already dealt out one round of antibiotics when half of the babies got pneumonia after the sudden change from SUMMER to WINTER, I don't want to have to do it again. Not only is it detrimental to them to have pneumonia in the first place, the antibiotic costs money, and the lovely power-punch NuFlor may do wonders for pneumonia, but it also hurts like no other when you give them the shot. Their reactions are somewhere in the vicinity of it's-the-end-of-the-world, flinging their entire body onto the ground and writhing in agony before limping off into the mud making pitiful noises. All of this intended to garner sympathy from the shot giver - me - who now feels terrible.

So you can see why I want the pens clean. There's also a much simpler reason - it looks and smells nicer. It is so satisfying to see all of the goats blissing in their fluffy clean straw...

THIS is the life!

It's so relaxing to watch them when they're full, and clean, and happy. And entertaining, when they're down on their chests, rumps in the air and tails wagging, scooting through the straw to scratch their bellies. It's also entertaining, albeit frustrating, when you have a clever LaMancha baby who has figured out how to dump water buckets so she can wear them on her head:

Hello? Hello?

What a genius Sitka is. Too bad she doesn't do it with the empty water buckets...sigh. Speaking of bucket heads, we have calves! Two of them. For those of you who didn't know, I have a Guernsey cow - Sadie. She is the best cow in the world, even if she does think she's a goat. Anyway, she was bred to an Angus bull and had her first calf, Guerngus, on November 17th:

Sadie!

Who are you again? You look somewhat familiar...

He's rather a pain. Sadie has the maternal sensibilities of a clothespin, so Mr. Gus gets fed from a bucket and lives with his newfound friend Radar, a Red Holstein who arrived a week later courtesy of the dairy. (Look! Another reflection photo! I love it.)

Radar - named for his odd habit of sticking his tail up in the air whenever he's out and about.

Ironically, Radar looks a lot more like Sadie than Gus does. Both of them are slightly stupid. Not a lot, just slightly. They like to clean each others' faces after they drink their milk...by sucking on the other calf's nose.

I EATS YOU!

It's hilarious and weird at the same time. How can he breathe like that? I guess they don't ever do it long enough to cause a problem, but it's still weird.

And with that, I am off to milk my wonderful cow and feed some obnoxious babies. Including goat babies. Who will be introduced at a later date...

Well this is embarassing

This time it took me two months to update. Ye gods. It's been so long, in fact, that I had forgotten my password and had to reset it. Fail? I think yes.

So what's happening now? Not much. We finished the feeders and moved the goats in....a long time ago. They (and I) are enjoying the new feeders immensely. We designed them to be filled from the back (outside the pen), so I no longer have to go "swimming" through anxious white bodies to get the hay in the feeder, and because they have to stick their heads into the feeder to eat, they no longer drop loads of hay on the ground. (As soon as the food touches the ground, it's DIRTY and obviously no longer edible.) This, along with the feeder's solid bottom, means that they waste almost no hay and have food in front of them all the time. Even the anorexic Sensation is starting to put on weight! Some of them are getting a bit jiggly, but they're also supposed to be pregnant, so for now it's all good.

Speaking of which! I am slightly frustrated by the number of repeat breedings I've had to make this year. Almost a third of the does re-cycled at least once - two of them, Zi Zhi and Havana, have yet to settle despite having shown three and five strong standing heats. I would threaten them with the taco truck, but they know me too well. Sigh. Affair settled on the first breeding like a good girl, a breeding that I was extremely excited about and would have produced February kids, only to lose her pregnancy at 80 days. Double SIGH. All three of these does didn't kid this past year - Zi Zhi never settled (making this her second strike) and Havana aborted. Affair had 2010 off due to the trauma she lived through the previous year, which included being run over by a cow, a spinal cord injury, and re-learning to walk four months after being fully - albeit temporarily - paralyzed due to seizures from her injury. Hopefully they get the memo.

So. I have lots more to write about (including a baby cow!), but I am going to save it for next time in an attempt to get myself back on the blogwagon. Ciao!

Spring (well, Fall) Cleaning (and getting dirty again)

First of all, I have to apologize...what I intended as a semi-weekly thing has become a semi-monthly thing. Sorry. I'm trying!

We've been cleaning the barn. This is a good thing, a very good thing, but in the meantime the goats are all locked out until their indoor pens get reassembled. (See, we take EVERYTHING out, scrape it clean with a tractor, then put it all back in again.) The end result is something like this:

Look at all that SPACE! That's one of the bucks peeking in the first door.

Of course, all the waste we've pulled out of the barn has to go somewhere...

I realize this is hard to see, but this pile - which is only from the last week and a half of cleaning - is easily fifty feet long. And it's grown considerably since I took this photo. Holy crap!

That's a loooot of goat poop. Thank God it makes good compost.

In addition, less than 24 hours after the goats were locked out we had one of those freak summer rainstorms. In retrospect, I wonder why I was so surprised - why should it rain when they're all safely under cover? Pssht.



On an unrelated note, I have bred 14 does in the past 12 days. I'm really hoping they all settle. Often a doe's first heat of breeding season is a "pseudo heat" - basically, all her hormones are running and she acts interested in the buck, but instead of getting pregnant, or coming back into heat in 21 days, she says "just kidding" and is in heat (for real) six days later. This can be slightly frustrating, especially when you have enough goats to have more than one in heat at a time. With 45 does (yes, I finally counted!) coming into heat every 21 days, on average I should have two in heat every day. Of course, what really happens is that not so much as an ear twitches all weekend, and six goats come into heat the day you have jury duty. About half of the does aren't supposed to get bred right now - there are a few who have dates arranged with boys living elsewhere, some young does who are still a bit too young to breed, and a few retirees and charity cases who won't get bred at all - but I am still getting stinky way too quickly. And nine times out of ten, the ones that ARE in definite, easy-to-see heat are of the not-to-be-bred-yet persuasion. At least the boys are happy. It's also a bit frustrating right now because the goats wag their tails to get rid of flies, and with the barn freshly cleaned the fly population is bothering the heck out of the goats. Every day the fly numbers go down, but in the meantime I keep getting "false alarms" from goats who just happened to be flicking flies by the buck pen and aren't actually in heat. Gah.

The goats are still locked out of the barn because we're working on building new feeders for them (!). Dad and I designed them from the ground up, and the first one is almost done and looking pretty freaking awesome. I haven't taken photos yet, but I will. (cough*teaser*cough...!)

Driving (and Decisions)

I am going to make signs.

I'll take a bunch of cardboard and popsicle sticks and glue them into neat little handheld signs, then write on them - both normally, and in reverse so that they can be read in a mirror. I will then write things like "The stick on the left - USE IT," "He could run you over and not even feel it, just let him in," "NO ONE is going slower than you - move over!" and "This is not NASCAR!" and keep them in the car for the next time I have to drive on I-80. I don't think I've ever disliked a drive so much. I haven't ever flipped someone off before, either. Okay, I still haven't, but I've never been so tempted in my life.

See, being a dairy goat judge is awesome. You get to look at a bunch of goats, talk about them all - essentially venting your opinion, albeit politely, to a captive audience - and then get paid. It works for me. But, they don't usually come to you, which means a lot of travel time. The closest show I've judged has been an hour and a half away. Today's venue, the Nevada State Fair in Reno, was a tidy 3 hours over some really rough, monotonous freeway, mostly populated by truckers and violent psychopaths. I've never been crazy about driving anyway.

Now, last week I judged in Fortuna - a five-hour drive - and loved it. It was up I-5 to Highway 20, into the hills and all the way around Clear Lake, then up 101 through the entire spanse of Redwood Country to an adorable little town 4 miles from the ocean. Perhaps because I had resigned myself to driving forEVER and getting there at all was a good deal, perhaps because I am utterly fascinated by California's Giant Redwoods, perhaps because Jesse and I were the only ones home while my parents got Rachel safely installed at the University of Hawaii, perhaps because I had a pile of my favorite CD's and a hotel room waiting for me. I'm not sure what made it so much better than today's drive, but I'd go to Fortuna again in a heartbeat...Reno, not so much. Next week I'm going to Idaho, but I get to fly there, so it wins by default.

Okay, I'm off of my soap box now. Back to goats. Breeding season is essentially upon us, and while the boys are on the opposite side of the property from the girls, I'm starting to see some wagging tails and catch the occasional whiff of Eau du Buck - I can't really describe it, but I guarantee that once you smell it you'll never forget it. It's not that bad, really -  I've grown to appreciate it, since smelly bucks are active bucks, and active bucks = babies next spring. It's just not something you ask for in Bath & Body Works.

The only real problem with breeding season is decision making. Which buck should I breed to which doe(s)? Is it worth driving two hours each way to breed to a different buck? Are this year's kids big enough to breed for an earlier kidding, or do they need more time to grow? Mostly the first question.

I start out with a neat list, like this: Breeding List 2010. This is the current version on the website. It's simple. Neat. Concise. Then, I start trying to figure out how many does I have to breed to each buck, re-thinking some of my choices, rearranging does here and there, and I end up with this:

Beautiful, isn't it? I may have it framed. And with the number of goats who will come into heat when I don't have time to drive them to the first buck of choice, goats coming into heat when the buck I wanted to breed them to is being leased to someone else, goats who think the buck I've chosen for them simply WILL NOT DO, etc etc, I may actually get half of these right. Oh, and let's not forget the goats that are left later in the season, when I say "I don't care anymore" and throw them in with whatever buck is closest. And, as often as not, get better kids than the carefully-planned breeding I'd originally intended.

I haven't set anything in stone yet, by virtue of the fact that I haven't actually bred anyone yet. I don't want to have masses of kids in the dead of winter, so I'm holding off for now - any goats bred in August will kid in January. I'm also trying to figure out my school schedule, so that I can insert a two-week break from kidding to focus on studying and finals at the end of Winter Quarter in March. (Ha. Yeah. Right.) But still, it's a start.

Getting the basics

Let's see if I can do this. I have a lot of potential subject material to use, so I'll probably be posting "retroactively" quite a bit. For now, I just want to figure out these bloody buttons. (Just a heads-up, I use non-American figures of speech and other idiosyncrasies quite a bit. It's almost as much fun as sarcasm.)

First of all, the website. Sarah's Own. It's a work in progress - I did at least get it cleaned up so that the only goats on there are goats I do actually still own, and I've updated the breeding list for this fall. It's full of "TBD's" and "subject to change"s, but it's there. (Don't let anyone tell you websites are simple/fast/easy. I love having one but it is incredibly tedious and time consuming to keep it current. Not to mention making sure all the little paragraphs line up and the links work right and the pages get saved when I edit them. Forget brainteasers for exercising your mind - get a website. You'll never feel lazy again.)

Second of all, and most importantly - photos!

"What? Photos?1?"

Okay, yes, I'm uploading these totally randomly, but this is one of my favorites. I don't know what startled this little fellow at the time, but his expression in priceless. This is Scooter, one of the kids born this spring. He was born two weeks early and had some Premie-baby issues - he couldn't walk for three days, but instead scooted around on his belly, hence his name. As you can see, he did master the complex task of coordinating his own four feet, and he has since gone on to a loving pet home.

Here's another, more recent cute baby photo:

"Wait for me, wait for me! Me first, me first!"

This always reminds me of the Disney film The Aristocats - those of you who have seen it will recognize the caption. The little one in the back is Tisane (TISS-uh-nee), with her buddy Bobo on the right and her brother Tito leading the charge. These three are now part of a mob of babies whose current favorite pastime is playing "Knock over the human" and trying to eat my hair.

And finally, another of my favorite photos:

"Who are you?"

This is Moose, a Holstein bull calf. Having all these dairy goats is lovely, but once the babies are weaned I am suddenly inundated with gallons of milk every day. Not just two or three - think 14 or 15. Gallons. Every DAY. Dumping that much milk, when there are children starving in Africa, is downright depressing. We make cheese and things, but even that barely makes a dent in the supply. And wouldn't you know it, goat milk is great for raising calves! So, we buy a couple of bull calves every summer - they happily absorb (pun intended) the excess milk for as long as we have it, then they go out and graze with Dad's huge herd of goats & sheep for a year before going into our freezer the following summer. Moose is soon to be Mooseburgers, but this photo of him noticing his reflection is still pretty priceless. (Someday I'll post a thoughtful discussion on eating my own animals, I promise, but that's a pretty heady topic to try to fit into a bullet-point paragraph, so it'll have to wait for another day.)

I think that's enough, for now. I'll have to come up with some sort of original topic for tomorrow, drat. (And because it seems to be a trend for this post, I'm ending with another parenthetical anecdote. Muahaha.)

Ciao!

Here goes nothing

I've given in. I refuse to get a twitter (I also refuse to capitalize "twitter," since I don't consider it a proper noun) and there are too many ideas running around in my head begging to be let out. If I posted that many statuses on Facebook, I would probably fall victim to a good ol' fashioned lynch mob. Complete with pitchforks. And truth be told, it's almost 2 AM and I can't sleep again, so I'm hoping having an outlet for some of these thoughts will help with the whole insomnia thing.

So. Blogging. Here we go.

I suppose I ought to explain the gabble up there in the address bar. "Gabhar Mire" is Gaelic for "goat crazy." Which, if you know me, is kind of a given. There is nothing sane about my life passion. It does, however, keep me sane (oddly enough), especially after a day of listening to hidebound theoretical professors teach in a theoretical classroom packed with 400 other students, three of which I might actually know. There is something profoundly rewarding about coming home to a bunch of faces who have been waiting ALL DAY to see you and think you are the best thing since sweet cob. Even if they're goat faces. It keeps my inner egotistical maniac in check.

The title also gives a nod to the Irish blood in me. There isn't much of it (although my great-grandmother was a blooded, off-the-boat O'Brien) but I look it. And I'm absurdly proud of that fact. Tourists in Ireland were asking me for directions.

Well, I guess this is a start. I'm sure I'll come up with something entertaining to post tomorrow. (I mean, today. Bogeys.) Maybe once I figure out how to add photos to blog posts, I'll start introducing my "girls." And boys - can't forget the boys. But for now...good night. (Good morning? Oh well.)