Goat milk

Look at this -- two posts in one month! Crazy, eh? Perhaps I can chalk it up to trying to "take it a little easy" i.e. staying home on occasion without weeding... Also, Mike and I switched from a satellite internet connection to a cell-phone-tower internet connection, which seems to be a bit faster. (Note that this also means that if all goes well, you're more likely to get upcoming baby pictures despite the fact that I won't have much access to the faster connection at work that I sometimes use to upload photos now.)

Anyway, what's new here? First of all, Wenatchee made it onto the AARP (American Association of Retired People)'s list of 10 best affordable cities to retire to for 2011, so if anyone needs a place to relocate to, apparently we're a good bet.

Second, Mike got to take a basic photography class at the community college for his job -- he's been practicing overexposing and underexposing and light and dark and this and that, so you might get some more-than-point-and-shoot photos here eventually.

Third, potential babyface seems to be doing well. Doc gave him/her permission to go ahead and come out anytime now, so we're suggesting earlier (but planning for later) :) It's funny because he/she squirms so much more strongly than he/she used that it makes me think of him/her as super buff now... although that's in-utero buff, I'm guessing that out-of-utero buff is a whole different ballgame.

And fourth, speaking of ballgames, Mike and I have been trying to decrease our time spent working and increase our time spent funning. So a couple of weekends ago we went to an Applesox baseball game



and this past weekend we went to see the Sound of Music on the ski hill in Leavenworth. Trip still pending to the Rocky Reach Dam where you can see salmon swim-jump up a fish ladder to get through the dam. Will keep you posted.

Despite the reduced proportion of weeding to sightseeing, I still have a lot of garden pictures for you. Here is Mike weeding, farmer-john-esque style.



and the goats liking the output.



And here are a few more shots of the garden,





plus some harvested arugula and watermelon-shaped zucchini





and potato and sweet potato plants





(we've also had a lot of sugar snap peas and kale and strawberries and a few raspberries and garlic starting, and I see green beans and broccoli/cauliflower and tomatillos on the horizon -- exciting).

This year our garden output is way more manageable than it was last year, when we were swimming in chard and couldn't keep up with it despite regular trips to deliver to the food bank and jars and jars of green tomato salsa. I have to admit that it's not because we were smarter about it this year, but primarily because we let the weeds take over in June, and so we're left now with just the strongest survivors (and it's been a cooler summer, and we didn't set up the drip irrigation quite as effectively as we did the sprinklers last year -- modifications pending, though). I do think that next year we'll manage to trim down the scale of planting and eventually find the right size space for what we can use. But in any case it's nice to see (and eat) stuff growing.

And the newest news from here is twofold -- first, we (i.e. Mike) almost finished putting up a fence around the little yard with our willow tree in it so that we can let the goats graze without having to lift them up over the temporary electric fence (there's a trap door from the main fence). Once that's done and we try it out, we can see how it works and how to perhaps down the line hook up the electric fences in other parts of the yard to get a more thorough goat grazing system going...



And second, we starting milking Frosty and Gigi. We had been planning to do this for a while now, but kept putting it off. We decided to milk only in the mornings, which means only separating the mamas from the babies at night and letting them nurse during the day. So one evening when I was out at a meeting, Mike went ahead and put all the babies into the kennel. And apparently they did great for about 4 hours. And then just before I got home they all started bleating and yelling and crying. And I'm a bit of softie when it comes to sad goats anyway, but apparently biologically speaking, baby goat bleats are close enough to baby human cries that they're known to be especially torturous for pregnant women and in some cases (but not this one) can even bring on lactation. So we put them all back together again.

We decided next time we'd try again once it was already dark and they were already in bed (i.e. in barn) for the night. So after the Leavenworth Sound of Music outing, we put Frosty and Gigi into the kennel. And it was totally fine. No problem. A little yelling in the morning, but nothing intolerable. Now, if you recall, Frosty hated being milked when we did it a year or two ago. And at first, she seemed to be a little better this time. By now, though, she has decided she can just outsmart us, and rather than spend a whole lot of time kicking the milking bucket, she just sits down on the milking stand. And she's heavy enough at this point that it's pretty hard to milk with 50+ lbs of goat sitting on your arms. Gigi had never been milked before, and while she kicked a lot the first couple of times, she might be getting a little better with time (?).

And perhaps because we started earlier this time (babies are 3 months rather than 5 like they were the last time), and because there are two goats being milked, and maybe we're a little better at it (?), production is up. Our high seems to be 2 cups a day with just one milking, way way way higher than we ever got with two milkings a day last time. So production is good, even if behavior still has a ways to go. Mike decided to check our dairy goat book to see if it said anything about milking problems, and apparently there's a tiny paragraph that says "occasionally some goats will kick a little, but usually it's not a problem." So either we're doing something seriously wrong with this whole system (which is totally possible) or we have ourselves some stubborn goats (also totally possible). Hard to know whether to use more negative or positive reinforcement, as neither seems to work all that well, at least superficially... we'll have to see how it evolves.

But meanwhile, goat ice cream is on the agenda, and at the very least Frosty and Gigi (and babies) have definitely learned that if they go happily into the kennel at night, they get hay all to themselves, and if they wait while everyone else gets fed in the morning and go into the barn when we let them, they get grain. And that they are totally on board with -- now it's just the standing patiently to be milked we have to work on.

Empathy for babies

I've decided that pregnancy is designed to give you empathy for babies. In the "blehhh, i'm hungry and don't know what to do about it and feel nauseous and can't walk up the hill without being winded and don't understand why you're waving a rattle in my face" sort of way. Since it's hard to remember how all that feels from when you were a baby, I figure it's a good reminder before there's a new one around, especially one without quite as many words to express it. It's almost countdown time around here, meaning we could have an actual baby baby arrive in the next couple of weeks, or he/she might hold out for quite some time yet.

Here, unlike in much of the rest of the country, it has been one of the coolest summers of the past 40 years -- which means it has really been quite pleasant -- temps mostly in the 80s, some 90s recently... Normally I might feel like I'm missing summer, but I have to say this year I haven't really minded. Mike has been making his way through the garden-weeding, and I did a little yesterday too. We're still trying to get things in place for goat milking trials and a better goats-eating-the-lawn-fencing system... and I'm still putting the pieces in place to be ready to take time off of work. So we'll see how it all evolves.

Traveling has just recently gone on hiatus. I had a couple of recent work trips -- to Hood River, Oregon and to Boise, Idaho (which, apparently, has the largest Basque community outside of Spain, and was having it's Basque festival the weekend I was there).


Basque festival dancers


Basque community center


Paella on the street


Capitol building

And Mike has had some overnights away for work (fish monitoring stuff). We also just decided (somewhat disappointedly but probably wisely) to forego a trip to Sandpoint, Idaho to swim a one and three-quarters mile swim across Lake Pend Oreille -- we've been hearing for years about what a fun event it is, and had been hoping to finally make it there this year... but between the driving distance and the swimming distance and the cooler weather this year making for cooler water temps than normal (and apparently, nobody seems to make or rent out wetsuits that would fit 8-months-pregnant people -- go figure), we figured we'll just stick at home instead :)

Other than that I can't really think of much other news. Except that Gaspar (one of Frosty's recent babies) got his head caught in the fence yesterday so effectively that I couldn't get it out without running for the wire cutters and cutting the fence -- it was actually kind of scary, he was yelling and yelling and his tongue was sticking out and turning black (although maybe goat tongues are always black? I have to check) but he was pushing so hard to try and get out that I think he might have been in danger of suffocating if he were left too long... and Ed was bumping him from the back (I've heard that goats sometimes do that -- beat up on each other when they're stuck in a bad spot) and Frosty was sitting by him but couldn't do much... So I was glad I was home, although probably he wouldn't have done it if I weren't (at least there wouldn't have been as many riled up goats hanging out by the fence waiting for me to throw them weeds). But once freed, he ran off seemingly unscathed -- except, I assume, for a whole lot of adrenaline (which I think potential babyface and I got a good shot of ourselves).

Oh, and I can't say I'm really one for purposeful belly pictures (as opposed to pictures that just happen to have bellies in them), but I figure some of you far away might be looking for them, and since we've got to be pretty close to (hopefully) maximum size now, here's one for the record.

Summertime home and away

Homefront
One of our chickens is called Broody. She looks like a barred rock, those salt-and-pepper colored chickens, but with a little more black than most. She's tried several times over the years to hatch some eggs (which is called going broody, and is not super common among modern domesticated chickens, thus her name), and normally we try to dissuade her from it, as she usually tries in winter. But recently she tried again, and we decided to let her go for it. She was pretty dedicated too, always on the nest box with 20 or so eggs underneath her, but every once in a while she'd get up to eat and either another chicken would take her spot or she'd just get confused, and end up on the wrong nest. So no go in the end. Not that we need any more chickens, but we thought maybe it was time to turn some into soup at some point.

Speaking of chicken soup, we've been working lately on trying to scale ourselves back a little, both to create a little more leisure time and soon enough, a little more babyface time. Successes so far have been mixed. Good successes have included 1) the returning of the alpacas, 2) the purchase of a new used car (I guess that's not quite scaling back, but good given the totaling of previous car in montana, and our upcoming need to fit both hay and a carseat into the back of a vehicle (subaru station wagon found on craigslist from a guy who lives two hours away, but who actually turned out to be someone Mike works with -- small town (or towns) I guess)), and 3) the purchase of riding lawn mower (cute, eh? and so far, very very useful).



Partial successes have included using the goats as lawn mowers -- they do a good job of it but the logistics make it hard to do as often as we'd like to -- for now we have to take them out of the pen on leashes and then Mike lifts them up one by one to put them inside the electric fence -- so we're working on a better system. And in general there are probably just too many goats right now -- they are, as you know, very cute, so if you know of anyone who wants a few dwarf goats (especially boys, so we can whittle down more to girls and maybe do more milking, maybe), let me know.





Less successful pieces probably revolve around the garden right now. Well, the part of the garden with asparagus, raspberries, and strawberries has been really successful, mostly due to the incorporation of weed cloth when my mama was visiting. The rest of the garden is, well, too big for our schedules this year. Between my decreasing ability to weed (both because of big belly and because of a busier work schedule) and our multiple June travels (more below) the weeds got a bit out of hand. We considered scrapping the whole deal, and then we considered retilling it and planting something like wheat that doesn't need weeding (or much of anything until harvest), but in the end Mike decided that he could squeeze in some weeding after work, at least for the salvageable parts, and for the rest, we might still consider winter wheat, which gets planted at end of summer and harvested next spring (probably where the tomatoes/onions/peppers are -- not much success there so far and our summer tends to be too short for them anyway, given that we started them a little late). Anyway, Mike's had quite a bit of success knocking good chunks off here and there so far (still weedy on the left, weeded on the right).



Oh, and meanwhile we have eaten radishes and lettuce that made their way up through the weeds.



Travels
Many travels the last few weeks. A week in Minnesota for a wedding preceded by a couple of days on the Oregon coast for a different wedding. Mike, internet reverend that he is, had had a long dry spell in the wedding department, and then within three days he officiated two of them. The first was at a lighthouse near the ocean (I don't have good during-wedding pics but this was before with some other friends from Wenatchee),





and the second was for Mike's dad and his girlfriend of 16 years -- much Cochran-side-of-family time ensued plus a little boatride out on the MN lakes, despite the unseasonably cold temperatures (oh, and a visit to the grandma in the last photo, plus other family/friend visits that remain picture-less for now).







Despite having just spent a week out of town, and despite the garden yelling for weeding, Mike and I decided to take advantage of three-day fourth of July weekend to go to the San Juan Islands on the Puget sound of western Washington. A four hour drive to Anacortes and one hour ferry ride to Orcas island later, we stayed at a rental cabin on the property of a naturopath named Magda and spent the weekend walking around the beaches and eating big breakfasts and looking inside pottery shops and hiking around a lake and driving up to the top of a mountain with a good island view.











And the following weekend (which was last weekend) included two more treats -- a birthday-party hike for a friend's 50th bday party (don't worry, we only went partway up the trail, til it got too steep for big-belly-me) and then a visit from our friends Zhao & Jonathan from Utah, with a requisite stop in the faux-Bavarian village of Leavenworth.



Meanwhile, all is well around here. I'm home today because we have a plumber up to fix a bunch of longstanding drain problems and put in a deeper kitchen sink and maybe set up piping for a water softener (our well water is really really hard and full of iron, and stains everything red). As for pregnancy stuff, all is going well, still can't say I'm a huge fan, but it won't last forever (hopefully). Actually, I find I really have very little to say about it -- looking forward to feeling less big and swelly soon-ish, but all the important parts (kiddo, me, mike) are looking good, so that's really all we can ask for.

Interesting note on the pending-kiddo stuff, though. I mentioned to Zhao and Jonathan, as I had mentioned on the blog a few posts ago, that we were taken a little by surprise at the extent of negativeness that popped out when people started talking to us about having kids. Friends we visited in Minnesota actually said they found the same thing -- one compared it to when you're in high school and the kids one year ahead of you say, "Well, just wait until you get to calculus, then you'll see what hard is," which made me think that maybe we've just been lucky enough to be outside of a context for the last 15 years in which your peers are all doing more or less the same thing as you, and so now being back inside the more "universal" realms of childbearing, the calculus dynamics come back into play(?). But our friends who live now in a very Mormon part of Utah said they actually see the opposite -- that everyone they meet is so singularly positive about having kids that they feel like they never get any realism to balance it. Which made me think that maybe there's something too about the more secular less "family values-y" culture that we seem to interact with more these days, and wonder if perhaps people guided towards cultivating individual interests and careers rather than towards larger families have just ended up more surprised by the difficulties and less appreciative (or at least less communicative) of the fun parts of kids... anyway, just ponderings... :)

Meanwhile, I imagine you'll get still at least one or even two more blog posts before babyface makes his/her out-of-utero appearance, but will keep keeping you posted :)

The garden is in

Well, the alpacas went back home to their original owners. It was a little sad to see them go, after all, but I think they're much much happier back in their "natural" habitat. And although our barnyard looks much shorter now, it's probably better for us to have simplified a bit too.


Loading up

And my mom came to visit for a week! She spent a lot of time weeding, occasionally assisted by the goats



or by me or Mike



but mostly she did it on her own. See overly-large, now planted, garden below.



Note the new experiment with drip irrigation. Working so far, we'll see how the plants do when the heat arrives.



Oh, and we caught a glimpse of one of the gophers digging our yard into dirt piles (so small for the damage they do!)



We also trimmed goat hooves, and the-mama-in-town means you get better pictures of this as well.





And while mostly it was a working visit, we did get to tool around a little and go to Lake Wenatchee



and for a little hike near the Icicle River





where we saw mountain goats.



Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the younger baby (non-mountain) goats with Frosty.



And the older babies plus Ernie hanging out in the compost bin.



All the babies have become good climbers, jumping onto and standing on hay bags, hay barrels, and Breezy and Dublin's backs (which I haven't been able to catch a photo of)... videos still to come...







and here are a few of the requisite kids plus kids photos.





Meanwhile, I went to Montana this past week for a conference. The conference itself was really nice, but the ride there involved a pretty good car accident. Potential babyface and I both came out a-okay, not much worse for the wear outside of a little scare, with the whole thing involving some big holes in the road and blown out tires and fishtailing and hitting a concrete barrier and deploying a couple of airbags, so we're all grateful that the outcome was so good.

And people were super nice, truck drivers pulled over and put out cones, rescue volunteers flagged traffic, I had some ambulance rides across rural Montana, mostly just to check out babyface (and to x-ray a bumped up hand), all of which checked out just fine. Mike came out for the weekend so we could meet up with his bro/sis-in-law/nephew and drive back together... with a quick stop along the way at the tow lot to empty maps and CDs out of the somewhat smushed, probably-not-so-salvageable-even-though-it-had-really-had-a-lot-of-life-left-in-it car.



Looks okay in the back still, though, see?



Anyway, it was a bit of an eventful trip. Next week we head to Minnesota (by plane, and which we hope will be much less eventful) for Mike's dad's wedding... will keep you posted.