Who’s a pretty little girl goat? Who’s got a cute little nosey? Who’s always got a mouthful of hay? Whose hair is growing back so fast? Who loves living with mommy and grandma and Uncle Eddie & Aunt Zowie? It’s Baby Ramona!!! “No, no, no, I’m not a baby anymore, I’m a big goat!”
So here is something nice that was said yesterday at my farewell lunch – nicer than all the boilerplate ‘we’re gonna miss you blah blah blah.’ My boss told me that I had inspired him on a personal level, “with all your hobbies – your raising goats, your knitting, your weaving”. When I took a week off for weaving school, people seemed fascinated – not with the weaving, but the idea that you could take time off and, like, just do something you want to do, not involving traveling somewhere. Honestly, people must really have no lives whatsoever, if they think I’m something to look up to. But he said he’d always dreamed of doing something like going to a woodworking school in Vermont, and that I’m inspiring him. That’s cool.
So I haven’t gone on about this yet, but this past weekend was shearing weekend. And we went out Saturday morning, a beautiful day, all gung ho and set to shear as many goats as we could… and Columbia’s face was COVERED in blood. In the barn we found a POOL of blood. She had suffered a grievous horn injury – and not the first time; in February 2020, her other horn had come off right in Xopher’s hand. And horns bleed a LOT.
Ouch!
I almost felt like I wanted to pass out, but Xopher was relatively nonchalant.
The next day he tells me he wants to saw off what’s left of the horn she just injured. It was really long and curly, and we don’t know exactly what happened to her Saturday morning, but having a really long curly horn is just going to be really prone to getting caught on things, knocked around, and injured.
He assures me that horns are only alive for a few inches, and most of the horn that we see on an adult goat is just like hair or fingernail. But I’m totally squeamish – sawing off an already injured horn. Ich! Ugh! But what can I do? I put the whole thing in his hands. I sat there and did my part to hold her down while he sawed away. First he was using an electric rotor saw but it fell and got busted early on, so he had to resort to a manual hacksaw.
I sat there trying to mentally check out as much as possible. And I thought about this passage:
“Most of us treat the problems we encounter as doubly problematic: first because of whatever specific problem we’re facing; and second because we seem to believe, if only subconsciously, that we shouldn’t have problems at all.”
Really how many times do you tell yourself that? Usually it’s in the context of how much money we have, and how “first world” our problems are. We start ticking off all of our blessings, and literally say to ourselves, “Hell I shouldn’t have any problems at all.” But of course we have problems!
So I sat there thinking about how the problem-free life will never happen – certainly not the goat-owning problem-free life. And here holding a goat down while my husband saws off her injured horn – it’s just one more of those problems, those problems that always have been and always will be.
And reader, that helped.
She’s under there somewhere. Shearing time is soon.
I call her Momo because she’s my little Goat Dumpling.
That’s right, Beatrice! She and her Mom are back to being two peas in a pod, like she never left.
Did you stay home today? Yes, but X had to go to Lowe’s for a part for the heater.
What local business or charity did you support? Gosh, I’m pooped tonight. I bought plenty of Lake Champlain chocolate yesterday.
What’s for dinner? Sausage & Pepper Pasta with Broccoli – my second foray into the NYT “5 Dishes to Cook This Week.” These dishes have been pretty pedestrian. I guess they never promised you “voila” fare. They are just trying to give you five reasonable things to cook in a week.
X is doing a kind of macrame project here. It’s something to hold up the goats’ salt brick. He can be very creative and patient when he’s not pissed or depressed.
Below we see a glimpse of Beatrice with her new boyfriend. I hear shortly after this picture was taken, she wasn’t so innocent-looking and stand-offish.
We visited another angora goat farm today in South Hero. This one looked a lot like Bennie.
Seeing other angora goats is always uncanny! They look just like ours but not quite! Which feels weird.
The subject line “Other Goats” is kind of an inside joke. Like 20 years ago there were attempts at what was then the Fair to have angora goat shows. And this one year, we were the only ones who showed up. So the judge had to award us the ‘prize’ but she indicated that she really thought we should get “other goats.” (She had some kind of accent.) We have laughed at that ever since because she didn’t say “better goats.” Merely “other goats” – ANY “other goats.” Because our goats were pretty pitiful; they weren’t even purebred.
Zowie poses with her no-longer-needed overcoat, and three bags of fleece from her Mom, Aunt Janet, and Cousin Beatrice.
Tytania 