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Sambucus watching the rain from a cozy nest in the Peace Pavilion.

Another rainy night and day. So dark in the house that lamps are needed to see the other end of a room. Since morning chores it's been an indoor day, with my main responsibility being toweling off Moxie and Della every time they come in after brief forays in the saturated underbrush.

The barncams pay for themselves in terms of safety every single day, and on a rainy day (or night) they save me many uncomfortable trips just to check on the herd. Plus there's the entertainment value. After moving the cameras around from the laptop to check on every goat, usually from an overhead angle, it's always fun to suddenly have a face pop up right at lens-level.

Violet on her bench of choice.

Sorry to keep on and on about the rain.

It's the element underlying everything else here at the moment.

~~~~~

Hazel Catkin

 

Well this is a hard one. On Monday I had to have the vet come out.

The sad result: Hazel Catkin is gone.

She had just turned 6 on March 17th.

The baby of the herd.

Only Bud is younger, by one week.

When Bud was born, big sister Hazel was so sweet to him.

Here's Hazel and mama Azalea on Day 10:

the traditional day for tackling Goat Mountain.

A teenager in Autumn 2021, showing mama her fancy dance moves.

Winter 2023.

As she grew up, Hazel looked more and more like her mama.

As Azalea's last kid, and a single birth, and a doe who was never bred, Hazel has been strongly bonded to Azalea for every moment of her life.

The whole herd is now in disarray and will continue to be for some time.

But it's a pure loss for Azalea.

This will always be one of my favorite photographs:

Hazel, three days old.

Hazel Catkin, I don't know why your time here was so short, 

but I'm glad you always made the most of it.

~~~~~

update

Future rafters and roof sheathing on Aug 12th:

Same stack today:

(By the way, this is what $420-worth of roughcut pine looks like.)

I was hoping my next post - that is, this one - would include pictures of a barn with a roof. Unfortunately, we've had many, many rainy days and AM has injured his back - not while working here, I'm relieved to say - so there's been zero progress on the barn repair.

AM is not the kind of person who needs to be called and nudged. He's the kind of person who likes to get stuck right into a job at the earliest opportunity. So if I don't see him on a wonderful day of Not Raining, I know he's either still having a tough time with his back - which I very much hope is not the case - or else he's feeling better but trying to catch up on the backlog of work that piled because of his injury.

Either way, there's nothing I can do but wait. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, we all know better than to waste the precious days when the sun is shining.

(l-r) Sambucus, Campion, and Violet, in front of one of three 2nd-hand calf hutches purchased as emergency shelters on 6 April)

The forecast here is for a rainless weekend, so I expect to spend most of it outside. I hope your weekend is just as sunny or rainy as you need it to be.

~~~~~

no one was hurt

Well, this has happened: 

the neighbor's tree came down across my barn.

There must have been an almighty crash, but the wind was roaring every time I woke up in the night, so I doubt I'd have heard it even if I'd been looking right at the barn when the tree came down. Based on the last time I checked the barncams, I think it was between 3 and 6 AM.

At least seven goats were in the barn at the time, either in the original stalls opening on the north side or in the Peace Pavilion on the south side. There may have as many as 10 goats sharing, because in unsettled weather the goats who claim the little duplex shelter on the Upper West Side will sometimes come up and bunk with the barn group.

The west half of the barn is a shambles. Everything that had been stored in the loft area is in a tangle on the floor. The roof is in pieces, part of it is completely gone. Doors are hanging, or snapped off. I won't even try to get into this part of the barn until a second person is here, just in case something else should snap or crumble or collapse.

At first glance I'd hoped the east end of the barn (on the left in the picture below) might be safe enough to continue using temporarily, but it is not. Rafters are snapped, jagged ends hanging. The sooner everything is out of there, the better. Right now the hens are still in the last stall on the east, with access to their pen, because there is simply nowhere else to contain them today.

The Peace Pavilion (on the left in the picture above) initially looked like it fared better. Upon closer inspection, I think the structural integrity is compromised. It looks better because it was better built. Some of the materials may be salvageable.

The insurance adjustor is coming tomorrow morning. My agent informed me that MY insurance will have to cover this, even though the tree demonstrably fell from my neighbor's property. I asked the agent to repeat this, because I thought I must have misunderstood. I'll have to hear it from the adjustor as well.

Do you remember when I had this barn built? It was the 6th of May, 2014. I told LeShodu it was a present for her 10th birthday, which was May 7th, 2014. I wrote about the construction day here. As time went on and I added dividers and benches, making the barn as functional as possible, I wrote about each improvement and experiment. As goats were born and raised and combed in this barn, I wrote about them. You have probably vicariously spent more time in this barn than in any other, unless you actually have one of your own. I can't imagine how many hours I've spent, day in and day out. And of course, when I finally added the long-awaited Peace Pavilion only a couple of years ago, it became one of my most satisfying projects ever.

Oh dear.

I'm not going to get sentimental about this. In fact, just wondering how on earth to deal with dismantling what's left of the barn is giving me such a sharp pain between my eyebrows, that sentimentality won't have a chance to get a foot in the door.

And I just keep repeating to myself...

"no one was hurt."

~~~~~

notes from the goats

Betula is doing well. 

He's staying in the barn paddock with Violet and Sambucus for company until I feel confident the broken horn will not start bleeding again. So far, that has happened twice. Most recently yesterday. Meanwhile he's eating very well, resting well, and generally acting comfortable.

In other goat news, cashmere shedding is definitely underway. 

Almost as soon as combing began there was a hiatus of a few days due to suddenly very cold, very wet, very windy weather. But now it's just cold and muddy, so we can expect weeks of combing. I'll try to comb at least one goat on any day that is not raining. There's no point in trying to harvest damp cashmere.

Did I mention weather?

In the past week we've had snow, rain, freezing rain, and a world coated in ice. Then the ice started melting from every twig of every tree, and now we have mud. And that's all I'm going to say about weather.

I'm continuing to fine-tune the system for distributing chaffhaye to the goats every morning and evening.

At this point I don't have to tie every goat, every time, in order to get every goat fed, huzzah. Just some of them, most of the time. And I'm still doing individual pans, morning and evening.

If I could shift them over to free-choice feeding, it would be a lot less labor for me. I couldn't try it right at the introduction of the chaffhaye, because there would have been a few very assertive - and chunky - goats and many very hungry goats. But now that they all know there will be pans for everyone I'm experimenting by doing both: giving them each their pan of grub, and then putting out additional feed in big bins, and keeping an eye on behavior.

So yesterday I asked my Occasional Helper to leave a couple of extra 50-pound bags of chaffhaye in one of the shelters for my convenience, next to a bin in which I opened a third 50-pound bag for self-serve.

Here's what the extra bags looked like by last night:

In case my description wasn't clear: there was a bin containing a wide-open 50-pound bag of chaffhaye literally 8 inches from these "backup" bags.

The forklift operator had made small holes in these two  bags, so maybe that was considered an invitation? Or a challenge? I don't know. But once these bags are open, they must be fed out quickly. For the next couple of days I'll have to carry empty feed pans down to this shelter and fill them from these wastefully punctured bags, and then carry those full pans all over the paddocks to distribute. 

So far, this experimental free-choice supplementation has not been what one could call "a time-saver."

Oh well, everyone is eating, that's the important thing. Here we have three generations - Lily of the Valley, Tsuga, and Fern - demonstrating synchronized chewing:

And I'll close this Note from Goat World with my birch boy, Betula,

resting his chin and soaking up some vitamin D:

~~~~~

blue-sky day

 

It rained all last night and this morning, with a forecast of "continuing" and a warning about high winds. But yesterday was a blue-sky day, and so warm that I was able to do something I've been wanting to do for weeks:

gather up the feed pans and give them a scrub.

Very satisfying result.

And because it was so warm and sunny and the forecast was for this 24-hour rain we are currently in the middle of, I dragged the chaise out and spent an hour or so just enjoying the day. The deep blue sky, the tiny downy woodpecker bold enough to visit the suet feeder even while Moxie and I were lounging only a few feet away. Such a perfectly pleasant day - a warm clear day with no biting insects - is a rarity in my neck of the woods. Very much a "seize the day" event.

So I did the Daily Markmaking, with this water-soluble graphite sketch:

This sketchbook snap is from a cell phone. It's an experiment, because I suspect my actual camera is signalling it's pending retirement with various mysterious behaviors. I know many cell cams take excellent snaps, but my phone is very basic, the images are not high res, and I'm not sure about their blog-ability. Please feel free to comment/advise.

And to bring us back to today, here is a barncam snap taken a few minutes ago: Violet and Sambucus in the barn, waiting out the rain.

Very wise, goats.

You know Room Service will always come to you.

~~~~~

so far so good

Afternoon sun on the Upper West Side.

We've been having some lovely, sunny weather this week. Still quite cold, mostly teens and 20s F, but not windy. Very pleasant weather to be out in.

Moxie surveying her domain.

Bluebird hoping the starlings left some mealworms.

Tsuga in the sun.

Fernie at my fingertips.

The brighter sky in February has been very welcome, especially following the series of snowstorms in late January:

Now the forecast is a few days of warmer weather - in the 30s or even higher - which could melt more of the remaining snow in the driveway. This would be helpful because I'd like to get the next delivery of chaffhaye to the top of the driveway, at least. Each pallet holds 30 densely-packed 50-pound bags. They are large, slippery blocks and I do not find them easy to handle. If the pallets have to be left at the bottom of the driveway this time, every individual bag will eventually have to be brought up with either a sled or a wheelbarrow. The driveway is a hill. I've brought countless items up the driveway over many years, and I can tell you: 90 bags of chaffhaye would be No Joke. So here's hoping for good timing, a clear-ish driveway, and an experienced forklift operator.

Meanwhile, I hope you are having blue skies in your neck(s) of the woods!

~~~~~

postcard from the paddocks

Well, we've been having some weather lately.

It's okay.

We don't mind.

We are tough.

Besides, we can go inside anytime we want to!

And in the shelters, we have plenty of food!

But sometimes we'd rather have a picnic in a snowstorm:

It's just Winter.

We've seen it before.

We've dressed for it.

And even if we don't see it for a few days...

we know the sun will come back again!

~~~~~