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.

Game show host

In the central Washington tree fruit industry, the end of fall harvest season is quickly followed by winter meeting season. When it's too cold for the fields, it's time for the classroom. All the packing houses, where fruit is cleaned and sorted and packed into boxes for storage and shipping, hold winter meetings for their growers. All the chemical distribution companies, who sell growers pesticides and provide recommendations on how and when to use them, have grower meetings (they even have special meetings for organic growers). Tree fruit industry groups holds two-day conferences. The state department of agriculture holds recertification classes for pesticide applicators to renew their spray licenses. And so I've been hitting the circuit of winter grower meetings lately too, usually as a speaker in the Spanish language tracks.

Ever since small farms have given way to larger commercial farms, farmers have needed to hire extra workers to harvest crops. Earlier in the century, workers came to Wenatchee from Arkansas and Oklahoma to pick fruit during summer and fall. More recently, Mexican migrants have traveled to do the picking. Many of these migrants have now settled in Washington, and while there are still plenty who travel the coast following the harvests, those who have stayed have often moved into positions of higher responsibility in the orchards. Many of them supervise harvest crews. Others drive tractors, and still others are pesticide applicators. Some have bought their own farms and orchards and become independent growers. The orchard industry in Washington, while largely still run by an "old-boy" network of Anglo growers, is really powered by up and coming Mexican workers. And with fewer young people wanting to go into farming, existing farmers getting older, and more Mexican immigrants settling in the area, it is likely that in the next 10-20 years, the higher echelons of the orchard industry too will look quite different than they look now.

In response to these changing demographics, the larger winter grower meetings have added Spanish language sessions to their agendas, creating parallel tracks of lectures in Spanish and in English. And in recent years these Spanish language sessions have become so popular that attendance is now far outpacing attendance at the English language sessions. Many of the English session attendees are thinking about retirement and yet the Spanish sessions are overcrowded with young new orchardists. Many of the speakers in the Spanish language sessions were born in Mexico too, and started in the industry as fruit pickers. Now, as trainers, they seek as much to inspire their audiences to move up in the ranks as they do to teach about pesticide or tractor safety.

And so it is into these rooms that I walk, as a little gringa, to talk about pesticide regulations and sustainable agriculture. Often I feel like a game show host. At work we have gotten our hands on an audience response system, where each of the (3-400) audience members presses a number on a small calculator-shaped responder device to answer a multiple choice question displayed on the screen of a powerpoint presentation (picture below from the Turning Technologies website).

Like a game show, the results are recorded by the computer, and then a graph flashes up on the screen, showing everyone just how the group answered. Individual answers are anonymous, but within a matter of seconds everyone in the room knows, for example, what percent of the audience works with pesticides, knows about pesticide regulations or reduced-toxicity chemicals, or wants to have more information on using natural predators as insect control.

So I spend a lot of time pacing large conference rooms with a microphone, asking audiences to press the buttons on their magic responders and interpreting from their answers what a given group is like, what they think, and how the subsequent presentation should best target their interests and knowledge. I give presentations in English language sessions too, and while that's in some ways easier, it's not quite as fun. Part of it is that the Spanish sessions have a warmer energy to them. Part of it is that because the Spanish sessions are geared towards audiences with less formal education and lower literacy, there is no room for a rushed presentation with tiny-font typed slides and jargon -- the burden is to be creative and engaging. Part of it is also cultural, with teaching directed not just to peoples' brains but also, as one speaker I heard yesterday put it, to their hearts and spirits... Which is a bit abstract I know, but at the end of the day just means there are more and varied ways to engage people. Part of it too is that, at least for me, there is less winning over to do of the audience. I get credit just for being a Spanish-speaking gringa, without having to spend half my presentation subtly convincing people that a young little upstart recent arrival to "the industry" can still be worth listening to. Not that the English sessions are unwelcoming -- maybe it's more that the English language participants are more reserved or sometimes more complacent. The Spanish speaking growers are newer to the old-boy tree fruit network too. Maybe they just understand new arrivals better.

Anyway, work lately has therefore consisted of driving all over the state to these winter meetings. This has been made simpler by the major snowmelt we had since last I wrote. Simpler, but a little sad. We had probably built a good 2 feet of snow in Wenatchee when a Hawaiian front called the Pineapple Express came through. It rained for two days, and then all the snow was gone. The water pushed snow off the mountain passes, closing all the roads to Seattle for several days due to avalanche danger. High water levels from rain and snowmelt took bites out of the mountain roads (photo from the Wenatchee World newspaper).



The goats were happy, as they had never really liked the snow. But Mike and I, who had just been gearing up to go snowshoe hiking, were a little disappointed. Luckily there is still snow if you go slightly up in elevation, and so it is pretty easy to get to winter, as we did multiple times to ski while Yoni the bro was visiting in January. But meanwhile in town, a low and foggy cloud layer has settled, turning normally sunny Wenatchee into a consistently gray space (and grounding all four of the daily airplane flights that typically serve as the alternative to driving to Seattle). It's not actually too bad -- the roads have reopened by now, and the planes have started flying again, and you can still drive 20 minutes up the mountain to get above the cloud layer -- it's just been a bit of a change. [Recent update: It was sunny yesterday for the first time in a long time! And today we even had a new half-inch of snow.]

On that note, I'm going to close this summary of work and weather. I'm writing this on a plane ride back from a San Diego conference on migrant farmwork, so maybe our next installment will move from settled specialized workers at Spanish language training classes to migrant fruit pickers and cross-border labor issues... we'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, sending best wishes to you and yours.

Winter in Wenatchee

It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because until now I had always had more ideas stored in my head than time to write them down. So whenever I had the chance to blog, I already knew what to say. But November took care of all those low-hanging fruit posts (hee hee), and so since then I’ve been in a bit of an empty spot in terms of what to write. But here we are now in January, and so maybe it’s time for a catch-up.

The first news here is that we have snow, and a good bunch of it at that. The fall stretched long this year and it stayed warm unusually late. And then from one day to the next, it became winter. See photos of snowy mountains (from my window at work and my walk to work) as well as a video of goats in the snow (although turns out that by now the snow is way higher than it was when this video was taken a few weeks ago).

Luckily Mike and I had trimmed the goats’ hooves before the snow came, because it turned out they weren’t big fans of the process even when it was warm out (and we were slow at it). It seems they’re not really huge fans of the snow in any case and spend a lot more time in their dogloo (improvised goat house) now than they did in summer. But they have grown enormous fuzzy coats that make them super cute. Here are contrast photos of goat pen in fall and the dogloo covered with snow in winter.

Winter is interesting (and neat) here for a lot of reasons. First there are lots of places to snowshoe and ski (both cross country and downhill). Second there’s a lot of snow to do all that on. Third, the city doesn’t plow the roads terribly well, so snow tires are a huge help all over town and especially on streets like ours where the plow rarely comes. And the bigger roads tend to be plowed toward the center of the road, so for example three-lane roads turn into two-lane roads with a 3-foot mound of snow in the middle lane. Which would be fine, except that because the roads are often one-way, you have to decide as soon as you turn onto the street which direction you might want to eventually turn off from it, because there is no crossing the snow pile if you choose the wrong lane.

Fourth, things look different covered with snow. Normally when you drive south towards Yakima, for example, you get into this severe, stark, desert canyon landscape, really different than the wavy hills and orchards around Wenatchee or the forests and craggier rocks up towards Leavenworth. But when they’re all covered in snow, some of that difference is muted. What does stays the same, though, even in winter, is that the weather can change dramatically from one place to the next – from rain in one spot to clear skies 10 miles down the road to snow over the mountain passes to serious wind another 10 miles down the road. And when there’s a lot of snow falling in the mountains, crews close the roads across the passes for hours or days at a time, and before the roads reopen, push snow off the mountains to minimize avalanche danger. Which means that you can’t always, for example, drive to Seattle in winter.

These uncertainties of traveling in winter certainly came clear when Mike and I and my brother Yoni who is visiting for a few weeks tried to get to and from Montana to visit parts of Mike’s family – you never really know if you’re going to get to leave on the day you plan to, or whether when you check the online mountain pass cameras (fancy :)) you find that you need postpone your trip a couple of days on either end. I think that’s why a lot of people here just tend to stay put over long winter holiday weekends and save the traveling for summer.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I should write a little about my job on this blog. It’s not really quite as fun as the goats, but there are definitely interesting parts. So let’s talk a little about apples. In the apple world, this is the time of year when you’re pruning trees and perhaps thinking about which trees to replace or add to your orchard. Until recently, most of the apples produced in this area were red delicious and golden delicious, but since the advent of all sorts of newer varieties of apple -- varieties that tend to get less mushy when stored and transported, and/or that haven’t had as much of the taste bred out of them – lots of orchards have been tearing out their old trees and planting Braeburn and Gala and Fuji and Honeycrisp and Pink Lady.

And even more recently, they’ve started planting Jazz (look for them in your supermarket) and other “club” varieties – varieties that you have to qualify to plant (i.e. the supply is controlled by breeders or whoever) and that you also pay more for the privilege of planting in the first place. But of course, with a controlled supply, club varieties command a higher price. That is, of course, if they succeed. Essentially, when you’re deciding whether or not to plant a club variety, someone from New Zealand will send you a box of apples for you to taste and pass around to your friends, and then you decide whether or not to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to plant fruit that you are guessing consumers might like in three years once the trees start producing. If you guess right, it’s a big payoff. If you guess wrong, you have to absorb the costs.

Tree fruit growers are actually a lot like gamblers. There’s a lot of skill involved, but also a lot of luck, and a lot of moving around of large quantities of money. Cherry growing especially can come with huge risks, as cherries are more weather-sensitive and produce during a shorter season, which also creates some labor complications. Because most of the labor in tree fruit is seasonal (and much is migrant), if you’re a grower, you rely on workers coming back each year to pick fruit for you. This means that your workers have to not have taken permanent year-round employment since last year and have to like (or need) your orchard enough to come back.

Cherries in particular are picked in a three-week window in July, about a month before apple harvest. And while orchards support a small crew year round, they need an enormous influx of workers to pick cherries in July, after which they drop back down to a smaller crew for a month and then increase again for apple harvest. Which is complicated… as in, where do people live if they migrate from place to place and job to job every few weeks? And what do pickers do in the month between cherries and apples? The housing issue is somewhat resolved by orchard-sponsored and state-sponsored housing camps (trailers & tents) that spring up in summer (of course with issues of their own). But the problem of peaks and valleys in labor is a bit trickier. In an ideal world there would be other industries that need workers during the down times for tree fruit, but in practice that’s not quite the case.

And let’s say you have an orchard with early cherry varieties and late apple varieties – if you lay off half your workers for a month after cherry harvest, they might find work in other orchards, ones with late cherries and early apples, and may not be available when you need them again for apples – which of course puts you at risk of having acres of apples rotting on the trees without the ability to pick them in time. So many orchards have been trying to base their choice of new varieties (including club varieties) not only on cost and taste and storability and likelihood of consumer appeal, but also on how the timing of the fruit compares to the timing of labor. Or they start nurseries, or they start coming up with other ways to keep people employed in the down times.

Of course, seasonal and migrant workers face a whole series of challenges on their side as well, both related and unrelated to the challenges growers face in keeping them employed. But I figured I’d start here with growers, and with their ever-expanding efforts to find just the right mix of fruit varieties and ways of farming that can capture ever-changing price premiums and consumer/retailer preferences and labor constraints and government regulations and so on and so forth with a product that takes a 3-5 year investment to even begin to pay for itself. Next time we’ll try to shift the spotlight to workers.

With that, here's hoping you are all well and having a good start to 2009.

Goatscapades

Note: This is one of two posts created today (wowsers), so if you're just logging on, scroll down for more below.

Escape

I’ve started running again. I had stopped for a couple of years because my knees were complaining. And then it took me two years (and some nice but not fabulously helpful physical therapy and chiropracty) to realize that if I just bought some knee braces at the drug store, I could run again and be pretty okay. But I’ve also found since that starting to run again, after two years off, is hard. Even the short distances that were routine over ten pretty-consistent years hurt more now. But I still like trying.

In any case, I went out one Sunday morning for a little run, probably a couple months ago now. And as I was coming home, the neighbors’ kids & grandkids were driving down the hill in their van to church and stopped me to tell me that Frosty was out of the kennel. I went to the backyard and sure enough, there she was outside the fence, hanging out and eating some grass. I went inside the house and got Mike and we went out to do some goat herding. Of course chasing Frosty didn’t work, as she is still smarter and faster than even both of us together. And so we went for the “leave the kennel gate open and sneak up behind her to encourage her to go back in on her own.” It worked, and we closed and locked the gate back up.

But we were confused. How did Frosty get out in the first place? The kennel had seemed pretty secure with the gate closed… well, except that the wire that had been tying the gate shut was actually much looser when we put Frosty back in than we had left it the previous day. Maybe the neighborhood grandkids had come over to play with the goats and had decided (unsupervised) to open the cage and go inside and then didn’t know how to close it well. Hmm….

Just then the neighbor grandpa drove by, rolled down his window, and let us know, semi-scoldingly, that Frosty had gotten out the day before as well, when we weren’t home, and all the kids had spent a good while chasing her and putting her back in the cage. So that Frosty-retrieval explained the loose gate tie, but still, how had she gotten out in the first place?

We went inside to think. Maybe the kids had gone into the cage earlier that day to play with the goats and didn’t close the gate well, which had allowed Frosty to sneak out later and that’s why they had had to chase her down. We didn’t want to get them in trouble, and we didn’t know for sure it had been them, but we couldn’t really figure out any other explanation. We decided it’d at least be important to know if our theory was plausible, to stem future escapes… So we resolved, finally, to go over and talk to grandma. Out the door we went, on a mission, only to find that… well, somehow Frosty was out again. So much for blaming the grandkids, this was definitely our problem, not theirs. And so much for blaming the loose gate tie – Frosty was out through the newly tightened gate just as easily.

We again opened the gate to herd Frosty in. But this time we forgot to tie Clay up first, and so of course, before Frosty could find her way in, Clay found his way out. (Oh, by the way, we’ve been considering spelling Clay “Cle” after the town of Cle Elum not far from here. Maybe I’ll try it on from here on out). Now, Cle (hee hee) isn’t quite as fast or sneaky or skittish as is Frosty, and so I could get close enough to him to reach down and try to grab him. But he turned out to be a little faster than I had hoped, which meant that as I reached for him, he jumped away, and I had to dive to the ground and tackle him in order to catch him and put him back in the kennel (sorry, no dive tackle photos available).

Anyway, we eventually got both goats back inside, and decided to stay and watch for Frosty’s escape route. She didn’t wait very long before sticking her nose between the horizontal bar of the bottom of the kennel and the chainlink above it, pushing the two apart and squeezing herself outside. See the following first attempt from a few weeks prior.

Obviously, there was too much chaos to actually get footage of the escapes themselves. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

So we dug out a bunch of wire from the shed that we probably should have used to tie the bottom fence bar to the chainlink long before, and we (i.e. mostly Mike) tied the two kennel parts together every six inches and eliminated the newly discovered escape route. Safe.

Leashing

The episode did however, make us wish again that the goats had more space. Even though we move their kennel every couple of days onto fresh grass and build climbing hills out of cinder blocks, they don’t really have the kind of room to run around that they would if we had a fenced yard. Anyway, in absence of a fenced yard, we figured that if we could train them to walk on leashes we could at least take them out to visit the obviously greener grass on the other side of the fence.

So one Sunday we marched into the kennel and, as usual, Frosty and Cle hid inside their house. We reached into the house to clip the leashes onto their collars, and Frosty started screaming bloody murder. Not just regular bleating here, but tortured yelling. Terrible. She stopped once we clipped her in and let her go, but still, terrible.

After a little prodding they came out and ventured, leashed, outside their fence. And then they freaked out again. Feeling us following them, they started to run, which meant we either had to restrain them or run after them. Restraining them elicited these terrible coughing choking sounds, and running after them just elicited more running on their part and then more running on our part and soon we found ourselves just running around and around and around the outside of the kennel following two tiny freaked out goats.

After a couple minutes of this, we figured it was enough for the first day. Back in their house and off the leashes, they calmed back down. In search of at least one positive experience to associate with leashes, we brought out some grain, which they love, and are even willing to eat out of our hands. Frosty was tentative, but Cle was excited. He was so excited by the food that he even let us pet him while eating and he started walking on top of us in order to lick the hand that had the leftover grain molasses on it. Apparently he had gotten over the leash scare. Frosty was still another story, but at least she appreciated the snack.

Baby steps

The next week we came out with leashes again. While the goats still resisted being clipped into them, there was no screaming this time. And we were able to put a stop to the desperate running, and just have them stand or walk at the end of the leash chomping grass while we sat on the ground. They even seemed to be learning how to untangle themselves from the leash rather than freak out because they had inexplicably tangled themselves up in it while turning around in circles. Progress.

By now, actually, they’re quite comfortable on leashes. Frosty still won’t go on voluntarily. She still runs into her house and you have to reach all the way to the back to clip her in. But once she’s on, she happily trots out for snacks.

Cle, on the other hand, stands next to the gate and tries to sneak out as soon as you open the door. No more fear. He can’t wait to go for a walk. In fact, you have to grab him and block the doorway while putting him on the leash in order to prevent premature leaving. Still makes us wish we could fence part of the yard (we’re considering it), but at least it means they get more variety and more socializing time. Cle even allows hugs now once in a while. He allows you to pick him up and untangle his legs from the leash.

Frosty is still skittish, but bit by bit it’s getting better. Both of them have even taken to biting my finger when I stick it through the fence… although that started hurting as they got braver with the biting. Even so, they figured out when I started complaining (or when they realized I wasn’t made out of food) that the biting wasn't so helpful, and so now they just smell and nibble and say hello.

Confusion

We’ve also taken to putting the goats on leashes and tying the leashes to a post in the yard when we’re outside. They like being out without necessarily having us hold onto them. Once, though, while they were on the leashes tied to the post, the neighbor grandkids came back over to see them. The older girls are quite good with them, but the younger boys don't get the whole “if you run at them they startle” thing. Which meant that anytime one of the boys moved, Frosty would freak out and bleat and run like the wind to the end of her 6-foot leash only to get whiplashed back from around her neck and crash into the ground.

After a couple of rounds of this and a muddy nose for Frosty, we and the older girls figured it’d be better for all the kids to go play somewhere else for a while and let the goats calm down. The kids got up to go, and the goats, rid of what had looked to us like something they had hated, walked after them to the end of their leashes and started bleating after them – don’t leave us, please. Hmmm.

Needless to say, then, we’re making some slow but sure goat progress. And now that it’s fall we’ve been able to take Frosty and Cle out to the neighbors’ lawn as well to eat their leaves. It’s a win-win – the goats love the fallen leaves and the neighbors love not having to rake.

We’ve also been having a bit more rain lately, which has meant goats sticking inside their house and getting all their straw wet and stinky. But they’re still cute. And we’re entering the time of year when the grass stops growing and we start feeding hay (which they seem to like quite a bit actually). We'll just have to wait and see how winter treats them.

Meanwhile, there has been a request from anonymous blog fans for goat videos, so here goes.

Picture posts

I'm going to try to post twice today, so stay tuned. First some leftover pictures and updates.

1) I have started swimming with the Wenatchee masters swim team. The upside is that I like swimming. The downside is that they swim from 5:30-7am in the morning. But even that has some advantages. On my way to the high school pool one morning, I saw a whole bunch of kids in dark clothes playing out in the middle of the road. Dumb and scary. But then I got closer and realized it was actually three deer walking down the street.

2) As fall turns towards winter, I figured I'd post a series of pictures which are, essentially, my walk to work -- pre-snow. We haven’t actually had snow in the Wenatchee valley yet, but we’re starting to see some dusting of the hills on the edges of town. And that impending snow has meant going and getting studded snow tires for the car (mountains plus snow apparently equlas everyone in town switching to snow tires for winter) -- go figure. Anyway, here's that walk to work, starting on our block and ending up at the research station.

3) Also, here are a couple of pictures from the “Some Enchanted Eating” benefit dinner put on by the CSA that Mike has been working for, which we spent a Saturday a few weeks ago helping to decorate and serve food for. Fun (and apparently the dessert was yummy).

4) And lastly, Mike & I just came back from a quick weekend trip to Houston visiting old friends and also my bro, who is playing masked carillon in the country's biggest Renaissance Fair. Here's a taste of the slightly odd but creative energy that goes into the loose re-creatings of medieval times that currently characterize Plantersville, Texas (including a movie of Yoni playing -- ooh... (hope it works)).