Dairy

So... the semester is in full swing.  Mike is in school, I am in classes, and both kids are in daycare five days a week.  It is officially busy... probably too busy, with too much away-from-kids time for all of our tastes, but it'll work for the moment.  My job is still interesting (and slightly less time consumingly overloady than last year, but only slightly), and Mike is enjoying being back in school, and Eytan and Liel seem to be doing well in their school too.  We're doing more driving than last year, being further from things, but enjoying being in more of a "rural" ish setting.


Amaranth from the student garden drying on the fence

I feel like the biggest happenings these days are in the goat and dairy sectors.  Goats are good... we ran into a little bit of a hiccup at the place they were staying, namely the fenced area they were in was set up for sheep and not for goats.  So they kept escaping and running over to the neighbor's house... The guy who was watching them tried adding posts to tighten his fence, but after too many escapes he barricaded them into the little shelter you can see in the last post and waited for us to find a new foster home for them.

So now the goats are living 20 minutes away in the opposite direction, in an old chicken coop and fenced area with a family with three kids... friends of friends of friends... but it looks like they (the goats, not the family) will be able to come live with us once we move from the garage apartment where we are now into the house around the block that we'll be renting come November.

And my dairy class has been pretty neat too.  We spend every other week in the classroom and the opposite week in the field.  Our first field trip was to a cow dairy, for milking cows... At this dairy they milked at 5am and 4pm.  We couldn't all coordinate our schedules to get there in the afternoon, so we decided to go for early milking... and then we realized it was a two hour drive from Pittsburgh.  So it was a 2:15am wake-up and a 40 minute drive for a 3:15am meet-up with the students to drive the rest of the way in the rain.  Needless to say, we were all kind of tired.  But by 9am we had gotten a whole lot done :)





Our second field trip was to a goat dairy with a fancy vacuum milking system a long cry from our little bucket and milking stand up Olalla Canyon... so it was pretty fun to see...









And we had a visitor into class another day teach us to make Iranian village yogurt stored in a sheepskin.

And yes yes, we do read books and articles and write papers and have class discussions and all that too.  But it's been nice to have a class that integrates academic and practical so nicely.

That's probably most of the news from here... I guess we're all running through some daycare-derived colds, but on the mend.  And Mike and I are running a race tomorrow, so we'll have to update you on that next time.  But for now I'll leave you with a picture that daycare sent home of Eytan (Liel's teachers had a really fun video of her laughing, but I don't have it for you... next time?).