morning chores for lily and violet

Note: I am still working on a borrowed laptop and cannot upload images or access the thousands of images stored on my broken laptop. But I found some draft posts stored in blogger, and a few have images already in place, so I'm posting this one composed in December 2013. Greetings from Memory Lane.

~~~~~

 

We all have our little tasks to do in the morning.

Today it was raining lightly, so breakfast was served in the little goat barn for the younger does.

"Please don't make us eat in the rain. Rain makes us sad."

Lily of the Valley assesses the overall quality of the hay by doing the crucial face-test, while Violet takes the single-stem approach for a finely-tuned analysis:

I guess it passed the test!

There's something about listening to animals eat.  It's just pleasant, I don't know why.

And if one is used to the steady and rhythmic

munch.

munch.

munch.

of horses, the sound of goats, with their equally steady but more rapid

munch,munch,munch,munch,munch

is very smile-producing.

Really, goats in general are very smile-producing, as many of your comments have indicated.

I am so happy you are enjoying the goats  :)

But hark!  Violet suddenly stops munching, and is all alertness.

It is the morning school bus, which picks up a gaggle of young children at the corner, about 400 feet downslope from the goat barn.

One of Violet's tasks is to supervise the loading and departure of the bus every day.

(Except weekends, of course.  Everyone deserves time off.)

Here they come.

There they go.

My work here is done.

Got any peanuts in that pocket?

~~~~~

many words few snaps

 

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'                                              

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Writing a blog post after a gap is tricky, because I've got to start somewhere. Every couple of days in July and August (until my laptop died and doing anything online became a faint memory) I started to compose a post, then thought I'd "better wait" until something: an interesting discovery, an item checked off the task list, a happy event. If not a Beginning, I wanted at least a Middle and an Ending. And I was determined not to write about the relentlessly unpleasant weather, because it was already getting far too much airplay in my head every single day.

Yet here I finally am, on a borrowed laptop, writing about weather, because...it's raining today, and it rained yesterday, real rain, hours of rain, for the first time in many weeks. Huzzah!

I am choosing to look at this rainy weekend as an Ending to a very long, too-hot, too-dry, too-humid Middle. So I am writing. Trying to write. Is anyone reading? If so, please wave in the comments. It's been a lonely Middle.

In retrospect, there was a lot of repair work undertaken in July and August, much of it physical, some of it planned. Time spent with the eye surgeon, the dentist, the veterinarian. There were basically two kinds of challenges: expected and unexpected. Here's one example:

Expected challenge: cataract surgery in July. I did as much prep as I could, because I knew there would be several weeks of post-surgical limitations such as never leaning down and never lifting anything over 15 pounds.

Unexpected challenge: not having my Occasional Helper here at all during the cataract recovery period to do any of the necessary leaning and lifting. (Actually, he's been unavailable through much of the Spring and Summer, for various unforeseen reasons.) In desperation - and having a strong inclination to keep my goats alive - I called friends who sent their own Helper over one afternoon to shift feed sacks for me. Bonus: now I've met someone else I can hire - when available between his other jobs - as a backup to the Occasional Helper. So there's a Happy Ending of sorts.

Violet waiting for someone - anyone - to move feed sacks. 

A few days before the eye surgery my neighbor AM came with his tractor for the next step in a project that's been in the works for over a year: a new Very Raised Bed built along the landing at the top of the driveway. Starting way back with the barn salvage in April 2024, a lot of work had gone into the new bed, constructing the lower layers of timber, brush, and shavings. But the top layer was to be the decomposing hay and manure that I've been curating for several years under one of the goats' roundtops. The decision to rebuild the barn meant that this roundtop could be dismantled, and AM and his tractor could scrape up load after load of that enriched material and carry it over to the landing. That was a mucky, sweaty, dirty job, but the day before my surgery I was out watering and planting that new raised bed. Late for planting? Yep. Planted anyway. Winter squash and sunflowers. And since planting=leaning, it had to be finished before the surgery. This has been a dreadful year for gardening, and if there was even a chance of seeing something green and growing, I was not going to let it pass for lack of effort. This was the kind of Ending that is also a Beginning.

squash blossom just before the rain yesterday

How is everything in your neck of the woods?

I hope your July and August have been lovely.

~~~~~

dispatch from the trenches

 

~~~~~

mornings

 

The best time to take photographs these days is 5:30 in the morning. This is also the best time to hang up the bird feeders, refresh the water troughs, trim a set of hooves, cart a hay bale out to the paddocks for distribution, and switch gates so that all the goats have a fair crack at the hay for a couple of hours, without fisticuffs. 

I confess I don't always have a tremendous amount of get up and go at that time of day, but knowing full well how much more uncomfortable it will be a couple of hours later, I generally get out there and do it.

Not everyday though. That's why today the picture above was taken closer to 9:00 AM, after a late start on chores, with sweat dripping off the ends of my hair and bouncing off my eyelashes. I felt a bit more like this day lily:

Still colorful though, right?

Stay cool, friends.

~~~~~

special delivery

I get a lot of deliveries. Without a vehicle, it's the only reliable way to Get Stuff Here. Some of the drivers will bring packages to the top of the driveway, which I very much appreciate. But I don't blame the drivers who choose to leave packages at the bottom of the driveway, and that's why there's a little plastic lawn chair visible from the road. In the Winter, I leave a sled down there.

Walking down the driveway to pick up a package, I spotted this:

I believe it's a foxglove, which I don't recall ever seeing here before.

Exciting stuff! 

Especially since it's in a place where the animals are not, so I don't have to try to transplant it to avoid accidental poisoning.

And so interesting:

This morning I also walked up the road a hundred feet or so, to check on a little patch of columbines in front of my Upper West Side paddock. Some years I've seen two or three colors of columbine there, but this year I saw only one color - a lovely purple. Today there are just three blossoms remaining, Here's one:

I hope you've got some flowers blooming wherever you are.

~~~~~