Winter wrap up

The last few posts have been about South America, which means that we are quite due for an Olalla homestead update. So, goats, chickens, winter, and related thoughts:

Goats
Last I updated you on the animals, we were planning to milk Frosty for real. Upon return from South America, we set that plan into motion... sort of. Mike had built a milking stanchion, i.e. a stand that Frosty could jump up on and stick her head through an opening to eat grain -- and we would then narrow that opening so she could no longer pull her head out, sit down next to her, and put a bucket underneath her udder to milk.



If you recall, our first attempts at milking had failed mostly because the kids were still nursing. Once we separated Ed from mama, milk production increased significantly, but we were on our way out of town so we put them all back together to spare our goat-sitters the need to milk.

Once back in town, then, we re-separated the goats into two pens: Frosty with Gigi and Cle, and Ed with Dublin and Breezy (in the hope of baby pygerians, i.e. pygmy-nigerian dwarf crosses (no news yet, mostly because we're not sure whether or not Ed is fertile yet and because the pygmies are both so barrel shaped to begin with and not insanely loud like Frosty is when in heat that we can't tell if they're pregnant at all -- but we'll see I guess)).



The one down side of our new pen system is that Ed and the pygmies don't have a permanent shelter... but we've compensated for that like this



and we haven't made a gate yet, so you enter and exit like this.



Milking Frosty worked in that we could get a small cup of milk out from her twice a day. It didn't work so well in that she has never been particularly interested in doing what we'd like her to do. So while she loved jumping up onto the stanchion and eating grain, she would also kick, step into the milk bucket, and eventually even took to sitting down on the stanchion contortionist style (i.e. despite having her head up in the grain area) so that we couldn't get our hands underneath to milk, or at least had to support her entire weight on our hands while milking in order to make it work.

This all made it difficult, but we figured that if we were to have any luck at all milking, we needed to be more stubborn than she was. So for a while, Mike and I would milk together -- one holding her legs to minimize kicking and bucket-stepping and/or to hold her up in the air should she decide to sit down, and one to milk (I obviously have no pictures of this -- sorry!). Eventually, she got used to the process enough that we could milk with one person instead of two, and goat milk was really nice to drink and/or put in coffee, and we did make a jar of goat kefir (liquid yogurt drink) once for smoothies.


milk in the bottom of the bucket

But eventually, milk production started going down, and when we were down to a couple of shot glass of milk per day (yes, we did pour it into shot glasses), we decided that the amount wasn't really worth being home twice a day at consistent intervals without ever going away for the weekend. So we dried Frosty out and went back to our more itinerant lifestyle. Turned out in the end that production may have dropped simply because she started going into heat again, but nevertheless, training both Frosty and ourselves on the basics in case of future dairy adventures was probably enough of a success for round one.


Chickens
Our new chickens are big, probably almost full grown by now. We've added some new laying boxes, and now that it has gotten warmer, started training them to go outside during the day. This involves opening the barn gate and chasing them all into the yard in the morning, and then letting them back in in the evening. We think that soon they will like going outside (like the older chickens, who spent last summer outside, do already) and then they will let themselves in and out of the barn (by flying over the gate) and call it good.


artsy chicken

And we are now getting about 17 eggs a day, so most of the young chickens are now laying. And while most of them are using the laying boxes, some haven't quite yet figured it out, and so we are once again searching for eggs behind barn doors, inside the goat kennel/carrier, and in the goat hay feeder bag (just once, but still -- how did a chicken get an egg inside there?? -- see hay bag style below)



With the increase in egg numbers, I found myself accidentally crushing the eggs collecting in my overall pockets while bending over to herd the chickens, and so we got ourselves a little egg holder contraption with a handle that holds 3 dozen eggs. We spent last week in northern California visiting my older bro and meeting up with the rest of the fam for passover (which was lovely), during which time our neighbors watched the animals and collected the ever-growing number of eggs, and so now that we are back, it's time to start using the big egg collector and marketing and selling. The email to potential customers who have expressed interest goes out tomorrow :)


Then and now
My younger bro was here to goat-sit in January and then spent a couple of weeks here with us. While here, he downloaded a few photos he had taken during his visit last year, as well as some from this visit. It reminded me that, even though we're still very much feeling our way through this goat chicken venture, we've come a long way from two goats on leashes in the city last year.


goats on leashes


Frosty as a young'un


Ed as a baby, size relative to Cle


Ed as not such a baby anymore (he's in the middle between Breezy & Dublin)


no leashes when you have fences

In a different (but cuter) sort of then and now, here's an old picture provided by friends in Portland we visited in January -- it's me and my older bro and my mama, just for fun.




Spring
A couple of weeks ago, the sun came out. It had been hidden for much of the winter. Even though this is a really sunny area, the winter tends to be marked by a cloudy inversion sitting on top of our valley. If you go up in elevation to the ski hills, you usually find the sun, but in Wenatchee, it's pretty gray. Our house is at 2500 feet, so some days we would leave our sunny house and drive down into the clouds into town.


not quite the most perfect-est view of the cloud layer, but you get the idea

But much of the time the cloud layer was sitting above our house and we were in gray too. So, the sun has been a big treat. The weather here in general is so nice -- four nice seasons, lots of sun, good snow -- but if I could ask for unreasonable perfection, I would request the gray cloudy days to be better distributed around the year.


Work odds and ends
Not too much of an update about my real job, but maybe one about potential future jobs... I took a certification exam in February to interpret (Spanish) in courtrooms, and passed the multiple choice part, but not the written translation part. So no go for now. I also helped a group write a grant application to start a youth/WIC (food stamps)/health/training gardening program, which might in theory have provided some form of future part-time employment, but we just found out the grant was not funded. So two strikes out.

I did, however, successfully talk to my boss about reducing my hours to 80% starting in July, which would provide either more goat/chicken/garden time at home, or potentially a little time to help a potential new enterprise in Leavenworth growing pumpkins and grains on one lady's land with a neighboring farmer's equipment and expertise. We'll see if that comes through or not. But it's all a step in hopefully the right direction for work/life/indoor/outdoor balance.

It also turns out that I may have a book coming out this fall, published and all, with a cover and title designed by people who do that kind of stuff professionally. Essentially it'd be a revised version of my dissertation, which I never intended to try and publish, but in this case it just happened to be right place/right time for a poli sci series by the publisher, so they found me. I haven't really liked working on the book, it's kind of stressful, but it's also kind of cool in an unintended put it on your bookshelf sort of way. So I'll keep you posted.

It reminds me, though, yet again, that I enjoy work more when it somehow feels more basic. It might be part of why I like living in (or visiting) Peru, because the connection to basic needs feels clearer than in the U.S. I am of course grateful that here it's clearer here where food and social safety net and all that are coming from, but I miss spending more of my time on the direct things.

I spend most of my time doing work that I'm not particularly connected to, serving groups of people who I'm not sure really benefit from what I do, or writing books and articles that go on a shelf -- and then squeeze in time on the side to grow things that could actually feed me if I had more time to spend on them. I know I know, farming doesn't provide health insurance, and there are certainly things about my day job that I like, and there are things about growing food that I might not like if I did it full-time, and a connection with "basics" is nice when it makes you feel connected but not as nice when it makes you vulnerable to every whim of nature and this and that, but still, going in the direction of better balance in the work realm is still on the radar.


Pictures to close
First, here are pictures of an indoor soccer match we went to this winter, with the high school mariachi band playing at half time. Fun :)





Second, since the next photos and updates you will get will most certainly have to do with spring, here are a few winter pictures, one of snow blowing, one at our house, one at the bottom of our road, to tide you over til then (they're perhaps unrepresentatively sunny, as i guess, i take more pictures on sunny days than cloudy ones...) :)







Okay, and last but not least, a super cool picture of windmills on the way back from Portland that my bro Yoni took



Oh, and last last, one more cute wedding picture that my friend Grace sent