Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Merry Christmas Late

Merry Christmas everybody. Yes I know I'm a day late. Yesterday was Christmas. However, for me, it was just another day. Oh I don't mean that in an anti-religious way. I mean it in a hubby's never off and was finally home and that means we worked all day in spite of my pain (shoulder injury). Fun fun fun. We got a lot done though. We moved goats, we fixed a hole in one of the goat houses--it just happened to be in the buck pen. Now I'll tell you that our buck (male goat) is pretty friendly as male goats go, but we had just seperated him from his 'ladies' who are now several months pregnant and need to be alone, and that makes him pretty, um, testy to begin with, not to mention we are now pounding away in what must seem to him a threatening manner on his house. My job had nothing to do with the construction, my job was to keep a lookout for Mickey and defend my somewhat vulnerable hubby as he worked. It's hard to bend over and hammer in nails while keeping your eye on a goat. Mostly Mickey ate while we worked, but there were a few times he came over and challenged our right to be in his pen.

Mickey is a big dude. He weighs over 300 pounds and is all muscle. Well, let me restate that, he's three hundred pounds of muscle and HORNS. Big horns. Horns that can do considerable damage. I'm standing there defending our position with a shovel---I know that sounds mean but when you're facing down a 300 pound goat with huge horns you need protection if he gets aggressive. And goats, along with sheep, have the hardest skulls you'll ever want to come across. Luckily when Mickey does 'fight' with us, it's somewhat half-hearted. You can tell he really doesn't want to hurt us. Deep down he's a terribly friendly guy... BUT he's still a male goat and those instincts kick in like crazy. There were a couple of altercations. In fact he darned near won one of them. He got one of his horns hooked in the shovel handle and nearly ripped it out of my hand (a Boer goats horns are big and hooked not straight) and even got me in the hand as he twisted trying to get the shovel away from me.

Luckily we both got out of there with our skin after hammering in the final nail, and from the safety of the outside of the pen petted Mickey and made friends again.

I'm happy to say the weather was fairly mild yesterday, for winter, and that made working a nicer thing. When we got inside, we even replaced a leaky faucet with a piece that's like the new Grohe faucets. It's really pretty. Best of all, our bathroom faucet no longer leaks!

Some Christmas huh? Well, it's just par for the course around here. Hope yours was wonderful. All in all, ours was pretty nice.

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