monday's mountain musings

Another craptacular day here in the not so sunny south, it is ok though after yesterdays excitement I needed a day of relative boredom.  Not that yesterday was extremely exciting  by any stretch of the imagination but we lead such a laid back, non stress ridden life that we sometimes forget that  shit happens  and sometimes we ourselves are the cause of the  mess.Thus was the case with life around the homestead yesterday.

Somehow in our chores the night before  last the gate to the goats pasture was not hooked proper. Needless to say  when we went to do chores  yesterday morning I saw one of the goats up behind the pasture fence. I also noticed that Tiny Tom the last of our goat kids that was born and also the frailest had gone missing. When something is out of the ordinary my heart always skips a beat or six.

I saw the doe out so we called her, opened the gate and she came trotting right down to get back in  albeit with a large patch of hair missing from her hind thigh area. It is a large patch too, from her hip  area down to her elbow on her hind leg, she must have  really squeezed to get out the tiny opening  where the gate wasn't  hooked tight. Other than the hair missing she looked and acted just fine and went right to tending Bo her baby.

Tiny Tom on the other hand was still MIA so I set about searching for the sorry little beast.  I wandered up and behind the goat shed and found him huddled, weak and  not in very good shape. Why or how he got up there is beyond me. I scooped him up and took him in  to his mother who wanted nothing to do with  him and he was having trouble standing so off to the shack he came with me. I made him a bottle and he wouldn't drink, within  seconds he could no longer stand and within minutes  he was dead. It was as quick as that. I don't know if he had an underlying condition or not, he was very very small and had been a whiny little cuss since his birth. I thought about doing a necropsy  on him but I  don't have much experience in  baby goat post-mortem examinations  so decided against it. Any who,  he is now buried in the (15 yrs from now) compost pit  and  we have learned  one of those harsh life lessons of remembering if you open it be sure to close it. We were actually very lucky that was all that happened  through our careless oops.

In other news, the cabbage  and broccoli  survived our brutal winds, rain and hail that we have been having the last few days. I cringe every time the weather  gets a bit wicked, after last years gardening misfortunes I am weary of what this year brings while trying to remain optimistic about it. The good news is after today the weather is supposed to be nice the remainder of the week and be in the mid 70s  so we better rest up today while we can  as the rest of the week will be busy.

 I have started a face book "frugal homesteads" group. There is a lot that I do not post on here yet find important  or interesting and like to share them but don't want the blog to become a bunch of links. I also made it so we can have  discussions on  various topics  yet not in a typical forum format.   If anyone is interested come and join  us there.