Tails of summer

Summer is wrapping up, weather is cooling off a bit, and it's starting to hint at fall. Our garden, however, is still huge, and we are finding beets and onions and potatoes, finishing up peas and lettuce, wondering what to do with ever-bearing chard, and watching corn and pumpkins grow. We have green tomatoes and peppers but not ripe ones yet.







Here are "before" and "after" shots of the garden.










And with fruit season in full swing in Wenatchee, we are drying cherries, canning nectarines, and cooking a lot.



Meanwhile, all the goats are doing well, Ernie and Bert are growing a lot.



Ernie has stopped sticking his head into fence holes and getting it stuck and crying until we pull him out. Bert has stopped falling asleep by himself in the middle of the field and then waking up panicked because he doesn't know where his mama is. We took both babies to the vet to have them neutered and de-horned (we tried a different vet, who does cats/dogs and llamas/goats/sheep... seemed to go okay), so they're all ready to go.

Both baby goats have become big fans of the "let's jump on top of Mike and Nadine's heads while they are sitting down" game. It is pretty cute now, but may lose it's charm as they get bigger... Bert and Ernie are probably the most comfortable with us of all our goats (although Frosty now asks for full-body scratching sessions, pretty amazing considering how skittish she used to be)



But a couple weeks ago, Mike and I decided we should sleep outside in the pen with the goats one night -- it would be just like camping, and we have great stars at our house... and we thought maybe even the more skittish goats (Breezy & Dublin) would get more used to us being around if we were there overnight. So we threw our air mattress over the fence with sheets and pillows and blankets. The goats sniffed it all a bit and then proceeding to ignore it and us for the rest of the night and next morning, until we stood up to take the mattress back inside, at which point they seemed to realize we were still there and came over to say hi. So... plan for friendly-izing the goats, not too successful. But the stars were great.

The babies have taken too to sitting on our laps chewing their cud. Unfortunately, Ed has taken to continually head butting us and pushing and biting the babies' tails whenever they sit on our laps. We tried scolding and pushing him off, and then began to wonder if maybe he was just feeling left out -- so Mike pulled Ed onto his lap for some chill time the other day (which is normally hard b/c he's so big) while I had Ernie and Bert, and he totally stopped pushing us around and biting the kids. Who knew... goat rivalry.

We have even gone away overnight twice, with no troubles (shhh... no jinxing). Once to friends of friends in Tonasket, near the Canadian border for lake swimming and barbeques. And once up past Leavenworth and Lake Wenatchee overnight camping with other friends who had just bought an old VW bus (with kitchen and sleeping loft inside) -- funny.











Other news includes Mike having found a year-round full-time job for a salmon restoration organization -- the kind of thing he's been looking for for quite a while. So that's exciting, and means we'll probably be staying in Wenatchee for a bit more, depending no how things go. Meanwhile, we're off later this week to Minnesota for a wedding and visits to Mike's family/friends, plus a quick stop at the State Fair.

Ah, last but not least, a question for you tech savvy readers. For whatever reason, I can't get videos to post anymore -- they upload fine, but then when you try to play them, it says "an error occurred - please try again later" but never seems to get any better -- any suggestions? I'm building up a backlog of baby goat videos for you... (meanwhile this is the closest I can get in a still picture to baby goats bouncing off of us (note blurry Ernie in the air on his way down falling off Mike's back), here while Mike tries to dig out eggs that chickens had hidden under the gazebo.