Animalitos

I guess I'm sort of a monthly blog post-er. Good to know, I suppose.

This month has been pretty packed. Mike & I moved into our new place, managed (with tons of help) to get it painted (yes, there is one wall of one room that is that bright orange color)...



...and fenced and full of cardboard boxes (here's a picture from a little ways down the road)...:



...and also went to NY for a wedding of friends and also a little pre-wedding party for us too at my folks' place (lots of old friends in the garden on a pretty day, it was lovely).

There are also all sorts of animalito updates, starting, of course, with the goats.

Frosty and Cle have changed a bit the last few months. Where Frosty used to be the dominant goat, Cle seems now to have taken her place. And not that she (Frosty) was all that kind to Cle in her dominance, but Cle has gotten even a bit less kind and more annoying with his. He's always been more hyper than she, but now he's also more aggressive, pushing her off the top of wherever she's sitting, and just generally being a bit of a pain. Not that she doesn't push back, but it's just different than it used to be. They're less attached at the hip, a little more independent (well, it's all relative) and kind of combative.

The other funny thing is that all of a sudden everything we had in the old house -- leashes, lawn, goats -- now looks so small against the backdrop of our current (versus former) yard. There's no way that two dwarf goats on their own can keep up with their jobs as lawnmowers anymore. Luckily, the previous resident of the house left us a push mower, and Frosty is looking pretty pregnant (check out the udder!)



so we might be getting some extra goat help this fall (and we also found two pygmy goats on craigslist in need of homes who may join the herd as well this week -- p.s. I wrote this a little while ago, so we do in fact have two more goats now -- updates and photos pending).

Anyway, the major goal at the new place so far has been getting a fence up. There already is a horse fence, but that's just big wood slats that would not keep the goats anywhere near inside it. So Mike has been lining this fence with smaller-holed wire fencing. It's almost done, and so the goats almost have free reign of that part of the yard (which is actually really exciting and fun to see, and I think it'll help mitigate hyper Cle too -- p.s. true, Cle is much less annoying and way cooler in the bigger space), and meanwhile it's given us the opportunity to try out some different goat pen configurations.

At first we just had the goats in their normal kennel and we'd take them out on leashes when we were around. Then we tried tying the leashes to posts when we were around, which used to work at the old house. But with these bigger spaces, somehow it just didn't go as well. I think the goats, even though they don't really like us getting too too close (well, at least Frosty doesn't), didn't want us to get too far away either in this new unfamiliar place. Every time we were out of sight, Frosty would just start bleating and bleating. Whenever we came back over, she'd be fine.



So one day Mike figured out that if he attached their leashes to our push mechanical reel mower they would mostly stay in place but if they got really excited, they could pull it around the yard behind them. Think goat-style ball and chain. (And note fence-in-progress too below).





That way they could stay near-ish to us as we worked on the fence or the moving boxes, but couldn't run outside the bounds of where they were supposed to be. That worked great until all that pulling snapped the two leashes and started wedging the wooden handle off the mower, at which point we started just tying their leashes together to make them one anothers' ball and chains.

The other problem with the lawnmower system came out one day when, untying them from the mower to put them back in the kennel, Cle, in his infinite hyper-ness, just pulled the leash out of my hand and took off running, dragging the leash behind him. As Mike and I started after him (he's way faster than us), we saw him coming around the side of the house, leaping off the porch with leash in tow. A quick dive tackle got him back under control, but it reminded me of the dive tackle chase adventures from when we first got them last fall. (apparently we haven't done our duty well enough training them it seems -- the pygmies who we've adopted are rumored to understand "here goats" and come when called... although we haven't really seen it work yet -- it seems that that kind of training works better the more goats you have, and the more of a herd mentality you can develop).

Anyway, we've meanwhile added some chickens as well -- 6 (meat) chicks, 6 young layers (may start laying in the fall), and 3 inherited "jungle" (i.e. kind of wild) chickens (who started pecking at our layers when put in the same space, so we've just let them out to wander the yard and feed themselves instead). The meat chicks are living in our bathtub in a cardboard box with a heat lamp, until they grow enough feathers to be out in the barn.





The layers are in the barn until they grow enough feathers and get big enough to be outside and defend themselves against the jungle chickens (okay, this photo is actually a preview of them being a bit bigger and exploring outdoors, more to come).



The first few days with us, one of the barn chickens got lost under a pallet on the dirt floor, but after a rescue (which she probably didn't need, chickens are pretty self-sufficient even if not so smart), they're all back in the game.

In other bird news, we have a nest of wild baby and mama birds inside the electrical box right outside our house, which probably will need some disrupting once the babies leave the nest, as I can't imagine it's that good for the electrical box. And in non-bird news, we saw a (bull?) snake in the grass -- well actually, while laying fence, we had a fence coil that had been spread out and then slipped and rolled itself back up, catching the snake (that was 10 feet from us but we hadn't seen it) up in it and throwing it across the yard. It was a bit of a scare for all of us, snake included I'm sure.

And in non-bird, non-snake news, we were driving back up to the house one evening after dark and saw a young deer in the road who didn't quite understand how to get out of the way of a car. So as we slowed down, the deer tried to run away, but did so by running ahead of us on the road so that we just had to drive slowly behind, following it. Eventually he found a side road and figured out how to get onto a different path and we could make it the rest of the way home at more than 5 miles per hour.

So I guess our lives have gotten a bit farmier in the last few weeks. Mornings and evenings checking on animals and chasing wayward goats inbetween. I like it, though. A bit overwhelming in terms of getting things all settled, but I like coming home in the evening and getting to spend a couple hours outside putting up chicken wire (well, I didn't like the chicken wire itself that much, but I liked needing to be outside) or rototilling a garden space (well, just a little bit so far -- the rototiller is still a work in progress (ooh, and we got a snowblower for winter too)). Will keep you posted.





I think that's it for animal news, surely as we unpack more there will be more house pictures and updates... Meanwhile, a question for you readers: is there too much goat news on this blog or are we liking the balance? Weigh in and be entered in a raffle drawing (well, maybe).

Meanwhile, here are a couple of pictures from bike-riding the loop trail by the Columbia river in Wenatchee.





Hope all is well and be back soon.
N :)

Transitions and thinkings

Note: I've been hoping to write shorter posts more often, but it just hasn't happened yet. So here's another long-ish catch-up update!

It's been a busy month. Mike and I are moving as of a week from today into Olalla Canyon 20 miles outside of Wenatchee. It's been beautiful up there (at 2500 feet), although so far our activities in the area have consisted of driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, painting the house, driving down, driving up, dropping off fencing to be put up later, driving down, and more recently, boxing up stuff, driving up, unloading stuff, and driving down. You probably get the point.

The garden we're planning for this summer there is on hold for another few weeks until we get better settled, although I'm hoping to buy some chicks (i.e. baby chickens) at the feed store tomorrow to raise in our bathtub until they get big enough to let loose... Meanwhile we're very lucky and grateful to have had friends come and paint with us (and bring BBQ grills along for making dinner), lend us pickup trucks, and help with all sorts of odds and ends. So, soon our photos will come from a new spot! Stay tuned, but here are a few previews of the hillside, the barn, and the side of the house:







Meanwhile, I have been wanting for a while now to catch you up on work stuff. So I've taken a break from packing this afternoon to do some blog writing, as likely we'll stay busy with house stuff for another few weeks and beyond. Plus Mike is in Alaska until tomorrow, at the long-awaited World Beard Championships, so I'm taking advantage of the quieter house (see video in Anchorage paper http://community.adn.com/mini_apps/vmix/player.php?ID=4239155). (For those of you who don't know Mike, I would direct you to look for the guy with the big beard, but in this case that doesn't really help, now does it?)

So here goes:

Work

Washington State University, where I work, is in the midst of budget cuts. As part of this, there is a proposal to cut my department (Community & Rural Sociology) and lay off all the faculty and staff. This may get modified in the next week or so, but as of now there's some, well, uncertainty about the future. My job is still good through December since I am actually paid not by my department but rather by the Tree Fruit Research Center where I am based. After December it will all depend on whether or not the project I am on finds more funding. Our hoped-for funding did not come through, but there are still other potential options. I had also hoped to jump projects after current funding ran out, but the "jump to" project would have been under the direction of a faculty member from my department currently slated to be laid off. So we'll see.

In any case, this seems to be a good transitiony moment to think (and write) about job stuff, prospects, likes and dislikes, and thoughts for how to proceed from here. So below is a random picture, from the road on the way back from our new house towards town, to represent "transitiony-ness":



See? Transitiony-ness encapsulated :)

Outreach and social science
Anyway, at the moment, I like my job okay. Last month I didn't like it too much -- too much office time, and a lack of pressing deadlines to motivate. Now I am back out of the office more and get to remember that I do actually like seeing things and talking to people, although now of course deadlines for written office-based products are looming close too.

I like that my job asks me to create relationships with environmental groups and farm workers on the part of an institution that has generally done a good job networking with the apple industry but not these other broader stakeholders. It's cool that people are starting to recognize the importance of working not just with people who apply pesticides, but also those concerned about pesticide exposure and pesticide safety as well (as they too are constituents of a public insititution and should have as much access to that institution as the tree fruit industry does).

The tricky part, though, is that the people I work for (and the apple industry more broadly) are not really used to working with these other groups. So I will often come back with ideas or feedback from meeting with groups and be told, "Well, that's nice, but we can't actually do that." So an interest in outreach but lack of follow through. And it's not that industry or WSU has to be responsive to every (or even most) requests, but it is true that "working with new groups" doesn't mean just telling them what a good job we're doing (which I think was implicitly, although probably not consciously, the original idea) -- instead it means actually compromising and negotiating and doing all that harder stuff that makes you, at least initially, more vulnerable.

So it can be frustrating to be given the go-ahead to do outreach but not actually be able to do any of it in a way that I think will be effective. That said, I did just succeed in getting our project to fund 2 health fairs (education on pesticide safety as well as diabetes prevention and other health concerns) at migrant farm worker camps this summer, so that's a definite step in the right direction. Maybe I just need to be more patient, as these sorts of changes take a while (but that is hard when your time frame is a 2-year, now maybe 1 1/2 year post-doc).

Similar issues come up with being a "social scientist" in a natural scientist haven. The entomologists (bug researchers) think it's a good idea to find out why farmers haven't adopted certain pest control practices, so they have me work on surveys, but expect the answers we get back to fit into a puzzle that will let them continue doing what they've been doing as they've been doing it. They're not quite ready to learn from these surveys that getting farmers to farm more sustainably means that not just farmers, but researchers too have to negotiate and change and adapt what they are doing.

Instead, the researchers (subconsciously, it's not really an articulated thing) want me to go out and solve the challenge of getting farmers to adopt new pest control methods and come back and tell them it's fixed so they can continue to research and recommend new methods of pest control. It's not that they're not doing a good job or don't have good intentions -- they really do, but just a little more openness, taking into account the way that humans act and not just the ways that bugs act, could make it work better.

So, again, while there's an interest in expanding the way things are done, there is resistance to changing things too much in the service of that expansion, which really makes both the expansion, and also my job, hard.

One funny example is that researchers get frustrated that apple growers don't accept and adopt their well-researched and well-proven pesticide recommendations. After all, these recommendations have been scientifically vetted. But in order to increase survey response rates to figure out why these growers have not jumped on the bandwagon, when I suggest putting $1 in each survey envelope (which is basically the only known, i.e. scientifically-vetted, way to increase survey response rates), the response is a, "no, that won't really work here."

And whereas it's okay to resist "scientifically demonstrated" recommendations because they may or may not fit a particular situation, or even because you just don't believe in their validity, it's somewhat contradictory to resist them and at the same time not understand why other people (growers) resist your scientific recommendations. Again, a mismatch between understanding how people work and understanding how "science" (or in this case "social science") works.

Health and border issues
Meanwhile, there have been some interesting, perhaps more rewarding, pieces to my job. I've been attending a lot of rural health care and farm worker health focused conferences, which has been a new thing for me. I was just at one in San Antonio, TX (which was really a neat place, actually), and went to a western region one earlier this year in San Diego, CA. In San Diego it was particularly interesting because we were so near the Mexican border that we got to accompany a group down to the border fence and check it out. This was a church-based group that does communion across the fence, in protest of plans to turn the slatted fence there into a solid wall.

The issue with the wall there is that this is a spot where few people actually cross illegally, but where many people come to meet and wave at family members living on the opposite side. So the impact of a solid wall there would be more psychological than preventative. It's an odd spot too because it's right on the beach, and so this fence that separates the Mexican side of the beach from the U.S. side of the beach just extends out into the water and then stops. And people on each side are walking the beach and buying ice creams and selling bracelets and meeting up with family members, and now taking communion in this bilingual strategic religious/protest ceremony, with border patrol looking on. Here are a few photos looking towards Mexico (the bottom one is the city of Tijuana):









Of course this is all tied in to immigration debates, as Mexican immigrants crossing the fence are among the highest profile groups in national debates, even though they are not actually the largest group of immigrants here. But the crossings are dramatic, they involve a relatively high risk of thirst and heat-related deaths crossing the deserts, and yet people continue to come, motivated by the prospect of jobs. U.S. employers are hiring farm workers and construction workers, even in a recession and despite government and societal censure.

For people who come to work in agriculture, theirs is a lifestyle of staying out of the way of border police, and migrating with the crops from California or Texas up to the northern parts of the country and then back. Which makes it hard for people to access health care when needed, and yet they work in high risk jobs where it can be crucial. And many migrants now come from parts of Mexico where not Spanish, but rather Mixteco or other indigenous languages are spoken, providing new linguistic obstacles to accessing health care...



Okay, you're right, these aren't migrant health workers, they are the Wenatchee hospital delegation performing in the Apple Blossom parade (see more details below), but it almost fit!

Anyway, in terms of my job prospects and how they relate to all this, I'm finding what I do interesting enough to stick with it for the moment, or at least while it lasts. Or ideally, to find some way to do it part time and spend more time with more goats and chickens and gardens at our soon-to-be new place. And I'm betting that some new opportunities will arise as the old ones potentially fade. Meanwhile, Mike and I like it here enough to try and stick around a little longer and see what happens.

Not work

What else is new these days outside of work?

Well, the spring green has come and gone in Wenatchee -- there are about three weeks of green here, where hillsides turn from brown to all shades of green (and then fade back to brown). The green is complemented by thousands of wildflowers all over the place. They say (whoever they are) that you get attuned to really light shades of green when you live here. It's only driving to the west side of the mountains that makes you realize that our green, relatively speaking, is not a deep green like theirs is... I guess it's a different kind of pretty.



The Wenatchee Apple Blossom festival has also come and gone, with a big parade down Wenatchee Ave (and some vendors selling Greek food in the park, which I greatly appreciated). Here are a few parade photos, with different pieces of Wenatchee valley culture represented (plus one with the traveling princesses of Penticton from across the (other) border in Canada).









Here are a couple of pictures too of a spring mushrooming trip. Apparently our new soon-to-be home-canyon may also yield mushrooms in spring and fall, according to the funny older guy who sold us the place (and who invited us up last month to visit and see what he had fixed up before the closing and also to feed us cookies and fund our purchase of a washing machine). Funny.





Meanwhile, I've also started teaching beginning Hebrew to a Messianic congregation here -- a group that follows Old Testament practices but concurrently believes in Jesus. It's an odd combination, but kind of fun to be teaching them basics. I also have a bit of an out-standing request to teach Spanish to friends, and the latest thought has been to combine such Spanish lessons with hiking excursions, but we've really been lagging on the hiking front lately. Once we're settled in with the move, we're hoping to get back to some hiking outings and wine tastings and visits to apple orchards south of here owned by guys who remind us of Willie Nelson (or who did when we got to visit this past winter).

Oh, and we're pretty sure that Frosty the goat is pregnant -- she has not been going into heat anymore, and her udder is getting more visible. Of course, we tend to read signs into any changed behavior, like "She's lying down a lot, she must be pregnant" (even though the weather has gotten significantly warmer and more worthy of lying down in the shade) or "She looks fatter around the middle, she must be pregnant" (even though we've reintroduced the goats to grass, which generally makes them bloated -- see pictures of growing grass below!). But still, we're thinking that come August/September, there may be some goat babies around.





With that, I'll go back to packing and moving, and will try to check in again from the new house, once we get ourselves an internet connection working. Here are a couple pictures (and a windy out-the-car-window video!) of our new commute from Olalla Canyon towards Wenatchee (in springtime):







Best wishes and happy end of May!

Spring...

A few spring outings, in mostly picture-blog form:

1. Up Saddle Rock (one of the hills in town)




2. Up Castle Rock, a similar hill but nearer our house, with good views of Wenatchee.




3. Ridge to River race -- relay that started at the top of the Mission Ridge ski hill 12 miles out of town and included a cross-country ski, downhill ski, run, bike ride, and kayak paddle on the river down below. Our team (sorry, I can't figure out how to get it un-upside-down!):


4. Spring bloom and getting greener in Wenatchee:








5. Goats in spring (back from Moses Lake!):

Hoof trimming:




Lawn mowing:


Cleaning out the winter pen:




6. Other stuff:

In May, Mike & I are going to move to a new place -- about 20 miles from where we are now, up a canyon outside of town -- downsides include the longer commute, but big big upsides include more living space with a couple of acres and a barn and fence, i.e. more room for goats (plus gardens and potential for chickens and hopefully on-their-way goat babies). Stay tuned for eventual pictures of the new setup.

Also, it's Apple Blossom Festival here in Wenatchee, which means a park full of food vendor trucks (including kebabs and gyros, food I like that we don't normally get here!). It also means music and events and apple blossom princesses, and a big parade for which people have placed plastic chairs on the sidewalk along the parade route a good 3-4 weeks in advance to reserve their spot for watching. So walking around downtown now means avoiding the hundreds of empty yard chairs lining the streets. We'll check out some of the events and keep you posted.

Meanwhile, a picture from (a meeting in) Plain, WA, an hour uphill from here.

Winter wrap-ups

It's been a busy month -- I keep building up updates in my head without writing them down, and now my head is getting too full. So I'm going to try doing some smaller snippets more often the next couple of weeks and see if I can catch you up.

Snow activities
Although there is still plenty of snow in the mountains, it's starting to look like spring in Wenatchee. There are little flowers blooming, snow tires have come off, etc. etc. So, it's time to post these last winter-y photos before they start seeming totally out of place.

First is from a snowshoeing outing near Mission Ridge, one of the downhill ski slopes nearby.



Second is from the Hogloppet, an 18 mile cross country ski trek from the top of Mission Ridge to Blewett Pass, another of the mountain passes nearby. It was beautiful at the top, and I wish I could post more pictures from the rest of the trek, but we had to drop out (too bad...). It was seriously seriously downhill for the first several miles, and while I'm reasonably competent on cross country skis (especially going flat and uphill), I find downhills bordered by cliffs and trees scary. This is definitely not Minnesota skiing. So Mike & I decided to just walk the first downhills, but were foiled when the sweep skiiers caught up to us and needed to pass us to keep up with the rest of the pack (and they couldn't pass us as long as we were still officially in the race). On our way walking down off the course, we ran into the downhill ski patrol, who offered us a ride down the ski hill in a skiier-pulled tobogan. I have to say that was pretty scary in and of itself, being pulled in a sled over steep downhills and huge dropoffs, but for the ski patrol of course it was fun -- they like pulling people down in a sled.




Snow driving
The altitude here is funny in that you can be very solidly in springtime down in the valley and then cross the mountains in a snowstorm. This is especially true this time of year, and is only really strange I suppose when one is used to the snow line separating latitudes rather than elevations. One such journey across the mountains involved me having to stop on the side of the road with all the semi trucks at the top of Snoqualmie Pass to put on tire chains, which I had meant to learn how to use beforehand but of course hadn't. Not surprisingly, I missed the meeting I had been heading too, but I did learn how to successfully use chains. Also note, speaking of snow and latitude differences, that Mike & I went to Atlanta in January to visit friends and for me to go to a conference, and we went to a big park whose main attraction for the winter was a "snow park" -- a hill with manmade snow that inspired weeks-long waiting lists and pricey tickets to go sled down. True, snow is really amazing when you don't see it much, but it just seemed so funny at the time coming from the top of Snoqualmie.

Kitchen adventures
Our kitchen adventures mostly stopped with the end of fruit season, but we had a couple of winter hurrahs. First we dehydrated some late season (stored) pears in slices, the first test run for our dehydrator -- yum. Second we tried to make feta cheese, which didn't really work out. It was looking great until we put it in salt-water brine to harden and store (as per recipe) and instead all the cheese melted, making for a soupy white salty water mush. Found out later from a lady cheese-maker around here that the cheese wasn't hard enough before we put it into the brine. Next time we have to wait more, more patience required. Meanwhile, same said cheese-lady gave us some of her whey, with which we way more successfully made Danish Gejtost cheese. See more cheese photos and descriptions on Mike's newly created blog (http://truemn.blogspot.com).

Goat updates
We have slowly but surely gotten Frosty and Cle used to us enough to be a little more friendly. This also means they are pushier and no longer have qualms jumping on top of us if they think we have food for them. But we like it better than their earlier shy standoffishness.



Meanwhile, they have also learned how to be more aggressive with dogs. They have taken to pulling us around the neighborhood at breakneck speeds on leashes (I'm sure we could exert some more control here, but I always feel bad that they don't (yet) have enough room to run around, so if they're running on the leash, I tend to just go with it). Anyway, in running around the neighborhood at breakneck speeds on leashes, we inevitably run into dogs. First Frosty and now Cle too have taken to rearing up on their hind legs when encountering dogs and walking two-legged toward the dogs to scare them. It happens even if we're really on the dogs' territory, but it also sometimes alternates with running away from said dogs. See the picture below to get an idea of what it's like, except that here it's Mike and not a dog. See too a picture of them climbing around our neighbors' unfinished construction project (with permission, but still...).



In any case, Frosty and Cle are actually on vacation right now. They are in the town of Moses lake 1 1/2 hours south and east, at the farm where we originally got them, hanging out in a pen with a buck named Tahoma Citation and a protector llama. The idea is to deal with Frosty's heat cycles by getting her bred and accordingly having goat babies in the fall. So far no news, we're wondering if the trip down and the buck and llama scared all the heat cycling out of Frosty for a bit. So we just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile in our goat-less-ness, we've teamed up with a goat dairy lady (lady of the cheese references above) who has needed a little help on her farm. So we're occasionally helping her milk her goats and clean pens in exchange for learning goat milking tips and in exchange for overly large quantities of milk, eggs, and cheese-making ingredients.

So, that's it for winter update #1. Mike & I are heading to New York tomorrow to visit mi familia for Passover, but I'll try to keep going on these blupdates. But meanwhile I leave you with the following photo, entitled "Dances with Goats," soon to be a major motion picture I'm sure :)

Goats thinking about spring...

Frosty and Cle have been way more active the last few weeks. Instead of hanging around in their house, or not wanting to go out in the snow, they've been high energy. When we take them out on leashes, they drag us around running.



When they think we're not looking, we see them through the window jumping and head butting their way around the kennel. Check it out for yourselves.



They've also taken to pushing each other off the top of various obstacles, and helping each other scratch itches -- maybe their coats got so thick during the winter that now they are overheated and itchy -- we're not sure that the whole scratching each other is so effective (see below), but really, who am I to judge goat itches?





The other news on the goat front is that Frosty has started going into heat. Female goats go into heat about once every 3 weeks for about 24 hours. We knew that if we ever wanted to get milk, we'd have to breed Frosty, so we'd have to introduce her to a buck during one of those 24 hour windows. We had been wondering how on earth we would know, though, which 24 hours was the right 24 hours -- the books say that does in heat look a little nervous and act a little funny and that if there were a buck around, it would be pretty obvious that the doe was in heat. But we don't have a buck, in part just for that reason. Bucks get really stinky, especially around does in heat, peeing on themselves and all (literally). Cle, for example, is neutered.

So, everytime Frosty started acting a little funny, we would wonder if she was in heat. It became a bit of an ongoing joke. And then one evening she was acting a little more funny -- running away at the offer of food, getting spooked by Cle. And in the morning she started bleating... loudly. Neither of the goats is terribly vocal normally. And when they do bleat, they are pretty quiet about it. But in this case Frosty just bleated loudly for a good 36 hours.

We were glad that we lived in a house where our neighbors liked and approved of the goats. If we had moved to a new place thinking our goats were all unobtrusive (as they had been until now), we would have been in trouble. And of course Frosty's heat cycles last 36 hours rather than 24, and come about every 17 days rather than 21. So now the whole neighborhood can follow her progress.

This got us thinking, we can't have Frosty making this kind of racket every two weeks forever and ever. So maybe it's time to get moving on this milking idea and find a buck. But apparently that's harder than it sounds. One woman we heard about who has Nigerian Dwarfs in Wenatchee doesn't offer buck service, and the lady we bought the goats from a little farther away hasn't answered our email yet. One other place seems to offer the service but charges about the same amount as it would cost to buy a buck, which seems silly. So we're in the process of trying to find a solution. We'll keep you posted.