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!