The Wonder Of It All

You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

As I stop and observe the outside world around me, I have been acutely aware that my experience is a bit unconventional.  For the last few weeks I have been eating, breathing, and sleeping GOATS.  This was our first year breeding livestock, with four successful litters born on our farm, nine new kids total.  They are so precious it makes all the effort worth while. 

I know what your are thinking...nine babies!  Sounds overwhelming, and some days it has been, but oh every birth was so exciting and exhilarating.  A little bit of chaos is tolerable when you know it is temporary!  It still amazes me how the births were all staggered a few days apart.  This week we witnessed the last two of our does give birth.  

It is extraordinary when you develop a relationship with an animal over time and you become close enough to be able to communicate.  The trust they had in me and the closeness I felt was beyond words.  So perfect that they all came at times when I happened to be working at home.  

We are enjoying the kids for only a few days, as they are all going to new homes.  It has been a priority to keep our goat families intact and not separate Mamas from their young.  We have been very fortunate to find some wonderful people who want to incorporate them into their homesteads. 

Rosemary and her kids

This evening we said goodbye to Bella and her two strapping boys, who are headed up to Napa to live a life of luxury, eating pasture galore.  It was hard to see Bella go since she was our first goat and has been here with us from the beginning of our adventures. 

I decided to keep our lovely doe May Daisy and her beautiful triplet girls.  There is something quite special about the Sable Sanaan/Oberhasli cross and I am looking forward to bonding with her gorgeous kids.  May Daisy is a super milk producer with great teat formation, and a gentle, affectionate temperament, all you could want in a dairy goat.  

Tuppens and her kids

After this weekend I can exhale and focus some attention on the family cow.  I think we all fell in love with the sight and feeling of having a real herd.  There is just something enchanting about seeing them all together, the dance of their hierarchy, their affection and frolicking, their beauty.  I will miss it until next year.  And until then...there is the MILK.  

Select photos by Lori Eanes 

Read More..

Today at 3 PM dont miss it!

Read More..

What is the Difference Between Bio and Non Bio and why does it matter

When two forces in the universe secretively combine to test your scientific brain you learn the incredible value of those lessons covering scientific thinking back in the days. Im not even talking about early uni days, I mean when I was 10 years old and my teacher sent us home with an assignment to describe a simple scientific thinking process. Something simple we observed at home or on our way home. I was confident I was going to be awesome for I was by then an excellent student. I was also a very inventive child that counted on my personal report with electrocution by the age of 8 and a serious bacterial poisoning by the age of 6. Apparently by then two electrical wires attached to a nail do not work as a lamp magnet, and the raw egg mixture Rocky Balboa drank cannot be kept under ones bed for days.

Tough life my bulb-has-no-light-because-its-broken example did not account for the fact that maybe the Power Station was down that day! Tears invaded me as I learned a much valuable lesson: Humility, observation, discussion. These are stepping stones for a proper scientific approach.

This lesson helped me adapt to the inconvenient mysterious and secretive combination of two universe forces that united strengths to make me, for a period of 15 days, a very worried father.

When my son suddenly appeared with plain red patches resembling mild edemas all over his body, my overprotective father software kicked out. My wife started blaming different bacteria, virus, read long pages of "Parenting is for Pros" websites. But by the end of those 15 days we couldnt understand this sudden rash-type plain red edemas that would emerge all over his skin, stay for 10-15 minutes and then vanish like they never were.

It was after bombarding myself with extensive literature on the many stupid things kids tend to catch, and after visiting a GP that reinforced everything was alright and surprisingly no Paracetamol (a GPs best friend) wasnt a necessary therapeutics, that I accepted I could not figure out what that was.

The kid was not getting better but he wasnt complaining of anything either. It was just those red plain edema-like patches surging from nowhere to invade his whole body, stay for a quarter of an hour and then leave like it has never been there at all. Luckily nothing resembling meningitis. We did the classic glass test; he is even vaccinated for the type C strain though.

What could that be if not two mysterious simultaneous forces in the universe that combined to piss me off big time. One had been triggered by myself and the other one by his nursery. WE HAD BOTH CHANGED DETERGENTS AT THE SAME TIME.

I honestly had thought of that before and even tested him with a cotton bud and a sample of the new detergent we had, but seems like these tend to change from brand to brand. Very little changes can trigger allergic reactions, but in fact what happened is that both us and nursery had changed from non-bio to bio detergent. 

I always had in my mind that bio would be better. I mean, bio... ermmmm... biological, isnt that so? Non-bio... ermmm... non-biological, therefore not organic at all. Quite a stupid uneducated consideration have I realised, only after reading the available brand literature on the subject.

(click on images to enlarge)

Read More..