We figured that from Saturday to Monday we could probably leave the goats alone with extra food (including a couple of big tupperware bins of hay that goats have been known to break into when hungry), and asked our friend Marya to just come up and check in on them on Sunday just in case. Drove (4 1/2 hours) and spent the afternoon walking around the Port Townshend/Sequim area.
Drove the next morning another 2 1/2 or 3 hours to the western side of the peninsula to the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park. We found a cute campsite, set up camp, and set off for a hike.
The trees were really big, as I suppose is befitting of a rainforest :)
This one's a little blurry but gives you scale.
Partway through the hike, my phone rang, which was weird, because I didn't think I had signal. It was Marya -- she had just expected to get my voicemail to say the goats were doing great. Since I picked up, she told me in person. "But oh," she said, "I don't know if it's a problem but all the goats are in the same pen."
Oh-oh. We've talked before about the problems with keeping Ed in the same pen as Gigi and Frosty (genetically weird babies, and mostly, not wanting Gigi to get pregnant before she is big enough to survive kid-birth), so the news was worrisome.
Marya had already left our place to drive down the canyon with her two little kids and make dinner, and kindly kindly kindly drove back up there to figure out who was who, get Ed and Cle into a pen by themselves, and barricade the gate through which Frosty and Gigi had broken in. We had had these gates up and in place for a week or two before leaving and had no problems with them, but the goats, of course, took advantage of us being gone to test them. Either just mischievousness, or maybe hungry-ness (they didn't end up breaking into the tupperwares as planned), but whatever it was, Marya got them back to where they belonged (which gets big kudos on top of kudos, as Ed is no longer that easy to move, licking chewing jumping head-butting stubborn hyper energetic (but still cute) buck that he is).
Not knowing exactly how they had broken through, and whether or not they'd be able to do it again, Mike & I decided go back home and fix fences rather than chance another unsupervised break-in. So we hiked back early
and packed up our nice campsite, and left Hoh around 5pm, arriving sometime between midnight and 1am. The goats had in fact stayed in their pens this time, and we spent the next day fixing and reinforcing the chicken wire sections between the wooden slats of the gate, through which they had squeezed. We figure that chances are Gigi and Frosty are fine (i.e. not pregnant), but I guess we'll find out for sure down the line.
And it brought home the idea that we've perhaps been pushing it a bit too much, in terms of maintaining an itinerant lifestyle alongside our goat lifestyle. So, new guideline -- only leave the goats alone overnight for one night (two days) at a time -- if it's three days or more, get goat-sitters... and try not to do it too too often, in the interest of preserving the goodwill of all our friends and neighbors for goat-sitting for the long haul :)
Ah well. Foiled on spontaneous 3-day vacation attempts.
Fences and fences
It's been a cool and rainy spring, which is unusual for Wenatchee, but has kept everything green and growing... lovely, but dilemma-provoking. Our goats are in the fenced half of our yard, and they keep the grass mowed (quite well) in there. But the rest of the yard we have to mow ourselves. Which is fine, except that the goats are hungrier than just what the fenced yard area provides and so we have to supplement with hay. And yet just outside the fence there is all sorts of grass that they would love to eat and we would love not to have to mow.
Permanent fencing is expensive and takes a while to put up (as we found last summer), so mike & i started thinking about temporary fencing. We bought some orange construction fencing and figured that, while it wouldn't really hold the goats in, they'd be so excited by the nice new grass that they wouldn't want to break through it. And if we only did it while we were home, then we wouldn't have to worry about them straying far if we were wrong.
So we strung up the construction fence
and put the four girls into the new temporary pen. They loved it -- munch munch munch yum yum yum. For about 15 minutes... And then Gigi (the curious escape-artist secret-passageway-to-trouble finder and master (but cute) chewer of everything) got bored and started climbing onto and under and over, and finally broke through, the fence. So much for incentive to stay in. But they had done a little mowing, which we appreciated.
Trying to get them back into their normal pen, we ended up with Breezy and Dublin (who, admittedly had never been on leashes before and hate being close to us) freaking out and hyperventilating (well, anthropomorphized hyperventilating at least). Dublin in particular yelled bloody murder and acted like she was going to have a heart attack. Once back in the normal pen, she hid from us for at least a couple of days. (Note, however, the first use of leashes with Frosty and Cle, http://one-goat-two.blogspot.com/2008/11/goatscapades.html, so there's hope yet.)
The next day we re-tied the construction fence up and tried the boys. They didn't last more than 2 minutes before getting too curious for the fence's holding capacity.
We'll have to try real temporary fencing (easy assemble/disassemble, possible electrification, for rotating goats around pastures) next time. Other possibilities include leash training (but that requires a lot of management time), somehow blocking the entrances to our neighbors' yards and letting the goats run free (while hoping they don't eat our garlic or raspberries or run up onto the road), or tethered harnesses of some sort (tethered collars, though, seem to cause too much tangling and choking).
Meanwhile, we've been mowing the lawn ourselves and dumping the clippings inside for the goats to eat, so at least they go to good use. I guess they have have figured out how to get us to do the rotational grazing work for them. Smarties.
Ah well. Foiled on rotationally grazing the goats with temporary construction fence.
In other news
We're almost done planting our garden. Tilled...
(and then it snowed (early May))
...and raked and planted with lettuces and beets and leeks and carrots and onions and pumpkins and beans and corn... still pending are tomatoes and peppers and eggplants... meanwhile, garlic (planted in the fall) came up; raspberries, strawberries, asparagus are in the ground; and fruit trees flowered!
Pretty exciting, considering that last year we never really got much of a garden in. Just the fact that stuff is in the ground and not dead yet feels like an accomplishment :)
We've also been having some little dinner parties lately, now that the weather has gotten warmer -- BBQs, movie nights, a pizza making party, and dinner with our old neighbors
Meanwhile, things at work are okay too. I'm actually writing this in the air and in airports on the way back from a conference in Bloomington, Indiana (Ag, Food, & Human Values). It was a pretty nice conference, one I've been to a few times now -- interdisciplinary, interesting, nice people (and this time I got to see a good friend from grad school to boot).
Aside from travels, work has been a bit busy, but mostly because I'm publishing my dissertation as a book. As it turns out, a publishing company found me for a series of academic-y political science books. So I've been working on revisions on and off over the past year or so, but the last month has been more of a push to finish final drafts and proofs and send it off to print. Not really something I ever particularly thought I would do or sought out, but it's definitely kind of cool...
The one difficulty of course is that because books are by definition long (ish), by the time you read to the end you've forgotten the beginning, making editing hard. Anyway, I have spent a bunch of time lately hitting tight deadlines and... it's kind of like a marathon -- long and dizzying, especially when there happens to be really noisy roof construction going on at work above you. Made me notice too that at least half of what I think of the text (or probably of whatever I'm reading) has as much to do with how fast I'm trying to read and which side of the bed I woke up on as it does with how well-written it actually is or isn't.
It also challenges an interesting balance point in that no matter how many times you go through the text (and there's only so many times you can do that), you always find things to improve. Makes sense, in that nothing's ever perfect, but it also makes it tempting to skip reading it over that last time or times because you'll never find all the things wrong with it anyway (or, sometimes even worse, you'll find them but will be at a stage where you can no longer fix them)... and you don't really want to do that either. Anyway, the book should be out this summer... It's a little academic-y and kind of pricey (target market is academic libraries), but I'll keep you posted :)
Last, an unrelated work note. Last winter, a big (really big, 1400 workers at peak season) fruit orchard north of Wenatchee got a call from U.S. Immigration Services saying "we know that a lot of your workers don't have legal papers to work in the U.S., so we're not raiding you right now, but take this to heart" And so this orchard fired a large large portion of their (mostly Mexican) workforce. And being the largest employer in town, everyone started to worry -- there wouldn't be enough jobs to absorb the fired workforce, they'd move away, school enrollment would drop in half, it wouldn't fix immigration issues anyway, and the local economy would suffer.
In the end, people did find other jobs or moved to other parts of the state... and the orchard, well, the orchard flew in several hundred workers from the island of Jamaica to pick fruit this year. There's a U.S. guest worker program whereby, if you can't find enough American workers for your company, you can get visas (as long as you promise to pay transport and living expenses and certain minimum wages) to get temporary workers from elsewhere...
Step by isolated step it kind of makes sense, and it's obviously complicated, but when you stand back and note that half a town's population of reasonably long-term immigrants was fired and replaced from one minute to the next with planeloads of new immigrants just seems, well, weird and circular.
Meanwhile, leaving you with a couple of pictures of Dublin the guard-goat caretaker of young chickens (recently moved from the bathtub to be integrated with their older chicken compatriots). Til next time :)
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