My favorite thing that happened this week might be called Goat Circus. I wish I could capture this in a photo, but so far I’ve failed. The baby goats have started jumping onto their mamas’ backs like circus riders - they stand up there, looking around proudly. Like the woman in the Chagall painting on the back of the horse.
I said to Jan, “Look! Lydia is standing on Lulou’s back!” And she said, “Yeah. They do that.” Now, almost every day, I see somebody standing on their mother’s back. When the mamas start walking, the kids generally fall off. My least favorite thing that happened this week was that little Dancer passed away. I don’t know why beings are born into bodies that don’t work, that sicken and die. There’s got to be a bigger perspective, somehow, that I just can’t see. I loved that little goat. Once it became clear that he wasn’t going to make it, and we no longer had to make sure he was socialized properly to be a goat, I was free to comfort him in any way that was soothing to him. In his last days he joined me for Skype calls, he watched DVDs with me, and he helped me work - all sitting on my lap, where he would lay his head on my chest and just gaze up at my face. Once, when I had to work in the kitchen, I just put him in the laundry basket and set it on the counter and he watched contentedly. I really miss him. What comforts me at the moment is the last line of a song from the musical Bonnie and Clyde. “A short and lovin’ life ain’t so bad”. Journey well, little Dancer, you were truly loved.
Another issue with babies is emerging with Rain and her three kids, Puddle, Ocean, and Roger. Puddle and Ocean are girls, and Rain doesn’t feed them properly. She saves her milk for Roger. In order to deal with this, when we separate the mothers from the babies at night, we leave the two girls with Rain and the other mothers, only leaving Roger with the kids. But she still doesn’t want to feed those girls. So, now, we’ve been bringing her onto the milking stand in the morning, and instead of milking her, we bring Puddle and Ocean in and let them drink their fill.
Rains babies all have coats with white furs sprinkled through their basic color. This is called agouti. Roger and Ocean are black agouti, and Puddle is red agouti.
I encountered an agouti in Central America - that was the only time I’d heard the word. And, in fact, agouti coloring comes from the agouti signaling protein, which is named for the South and Central American agouti, who has individual furs that have bands of different colors.
When I was traveling through Central America as a piano accompanist for college students, we did some performances in Costa Rica. We were very close to the national park, Manuel Antonio. So, we took a day off to go to that park.
There was a hiking trail in the park, and several of us decided to explore. The only national park I’d spent much time in previous to this was Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Which is very crowded. And many of the hiking trails are paved.
The nature trail in Manuel Antonio started out like a path, but within a hundred yards it felt as if we were wandering in the rain forest with no direction or guidance whatsoever. And then we heard a sound in the forest. A very large cat was just off the path to our left. Immediately, we huddled together, terrified. I mean, sure, we knew that there were large cats in Costa Rica, but no one expected to find one in a National Park. On a nature trail.
I told the students that we should all get our cameras ready to flash (back then you could do that) and if the cat headed towards us, we should make them flash in the cat’s eyes. Maybe that would freak him out and he wouldn’t eat us.
But then, an agouti made a move in the underbrush. You know, they look like failed prototypes of rats. Like rats with weird stilty legs. In any case, the agouti was the cat’s target, we were not. The cat crashed through the forest after the agouti and we turned around and ran back out!
Anyway, this goat is black agouti (Rain's daughter, Ocean):
This goat is just black (Lulou's daughter, Lydia):
Notice how Ocean is sprinkled with white furs, and Lydia is more solid? That sprinkling is agouti.
Also, this week, I made more soap. My first unsupervised batch of soap was a total disaster.
I did not measure everything precisely. I think, because I knew that the goat milk did not have to be precisely 16 ounces, I somehow thought that the oils and the lye didn’t have to be exact, either. Well, here is the sad result of that misconception:
It looks as if my soap has been murdered! It’s bleeding brown soap blood! Ugh! I have mended my sloppy ways, and now weigh everything precisely to a tenth of an ounce. And, my soap is coming out perfectly! Wahoo!
