BOO!

The witching hour is upon us. Goblins are gobbling. Ghosts are moaning. Monsters are wreaking havoc. Bats are flying (or not, depending on if they have recently landed on anyone's head and been knocked senseless). Spiders are spinning. Black cats are traversing the land in opportunistic search of well-mulched flowerbeds. The veil between the worlds thins as we speak. Look carefully. You may just catch a glimpse of a dark form gliding past the moon, wearing a large black hat with a red buckle. BaaHaHaHaHa!!! Do not be afraid. Simply leave Peanuts on the doorstep.

Fame Is A Fleeting Thing

There will be NO living with him now! Watson has become a 'calendar guy'. Just check this out.
Oy. Yes, Watson is featured as 'Mr. February' in the new 2008 Fainting Goat Calendar. Personally, I don't see it. He's nice and he makes a good assistant, but let's face it. He just isn't 'all that and a bag of Peanuts' when it comes to looks. Plus, if you add in the whole 'faint-if-I-see-a-bird-fly-over-or-somebody-looks-cross-eyed-at-me' thing, well, you understand where I'm going with this. I suppose the best we can hope for is that fame won't affect him. Still, I'd be willing to bet he's considering a position with the Chippengoats. I'm here to tell you, though, if he even thinks about doing a centerfold, I'm outta' here!

How Time Flies!

As of last Friday, it has been one year since I came to live here and savored my very first Peanut. I can not even begin to remember a time without them. Oh, Sacred Peanuts! One whole year. As a great philosopher once said, "All that we know comes from sense experience, and from reflection upon experience." - John Locke

Word!, Bro. Life is good!

Jenny Craig, Please Help!

Today the goatmother decided to trim Boo's hooves. Ordinarily, in a perfect world, this would not be cause for concern. The world is not perfect. Boo is overweight. Why else would we refer to her as the U.S.S. Boo? However, Boo is not really just overweight. Boo has sort of gone more into the realm of 'Caution: Extremely Wide Load', or 'Danger!, Contents Under Extreme Pressure', or 'Lookout Bro!, Big Wack Booty In Da Hood!' To top it all off, Boo is not even remotely interested in being cooperative when it comes to having her monthly 'hooficure'.

So, the play-by-play unfolds like this: There is no way in hay that Boo is going to get up on that stand. Used to be you could get her head in the front and the goatfather could lift her back end up on the stand. Used to be. That was back when she weighed a mere 160 pounds. At last count, Boo weighed in at a whopping 200 pounds of non-lean, non-cooperative, caprine chaos. Chaos? Sweet little Boo? Obviously you have never seen her when a) food is involved or b) her feet are involved. As a matter of fact, when Boo walks across the pasture it measures a good 5.0 on the Richter scale. If she runs, it's 'Duck and Cover!' (Except for Watson who has fainted back at the gate from the original seismic disturbance.) Therefore, the goatmother puts a leash on her collar and ties her up. A bucket of nice alfalfa pellets and grain is placed in front of her in an effort to distract her attention. No problemo, right? Wrong. She pulls, she twists, she becomes 'Mighty Pretzel-Goat', she dumps the bucket of goodies (how sinful!), she falls down, she gets up, she, horror of horrors, bites the goatmother on the butt!!! Ahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!! Trust me, even the neighbors know when Boo gets her hooves trimmed. Perhaps even the neighbor's neighbors know. Several miles away they probably know when Boo is getting her hooves trimmed. Oy.

I, myself, can NOT understand this. I mean there is food involved. Wouldn't you think that would create some incentive for her to act well? Plus, the real problem is that as long as Boo remains in her present 'condition', NONE of the rest of us are ever going to see even one kernel of grain.

I'm not taking this lying down - or standing up or even thinking on my stump! As we speak I am composing a letter to Jenny Craig. I have no doubt they will take her on when I explain to them just how desperate we are and just how many Peanuts are involved in the pay-off. After all, who in their right mind could possibly resist that? If Kirstie Alley can do it, so can Boo. That's it. PERIOD. End of discussion.

As for the goatmother, she'll be the one sporting that nice goat-bite imprint on her cakes. How avant-garde! Très chic!!! I mean ain't nobody got a tattoo like that one!

Always Trust A Wooly Booger

So you see, of late we have seen many, many of these little guys crawling about the barn and environs. I know, people refer to them as Woolly Bears, but I call them Woolly Boogers. I'm a goat. What do I know? In truth, they are the larvae of the Spotted Tussock Moth. More night fliers. Just what we need around here.

Still, the Woolly Boogers are quite useful. People have their long-range forecasting models and their Doppler radars, learned meteorologists, and all sorts of 'equipment' to forecast the weather. With all that equipment, one would think they'd have the weather pegged, wouldn't one? But, no, most of the time they say it will do one thing and it actually does quite another.

Goats, on the other hand, have a much more sophisticated and reliable means of predicting the weather. At least in the case of the winter weather. You see, the way it works is that in the Fall if one notices many Wooly Boogers crawling about , resting on latches, falling in the water tub, crawling up the side of the barn, or residing on that dried leaf you had your eye on from way across the pasture, it means we are going to have an 'exciting' winter.

Now exciting can mean a lot of different things, but in general it means we are in for a wild ride. Maybe a lot of wind and rain, maybe a lot of snow, maybe a lot of cold. Take last year, for example. We were treated to great 'herds' of these Woolly Boogers, and sure enough, we had one of the wildest Novembers on record. That one month contained everything from huge winds, to record rainfall, flooding, snow and even thunderstorms.

I will say that I don't believe I've noticed quite as many this year as last year. That has to be a good thing, but I'm sure we're in for at least some snow. As a matter of fact, we had our first significant snow in the mountains in the middle of September! That is WAY ahead of the normal schedule. I suppose that means the goatmother is going to be bandying about on that sled again. Oy.

So, you can have your La Nina's and whatever else those weather guys come up with, but we goats know that you always but ALWAYS trust the Woolly Booger. It's just that simple.

A Ferocious Fall

Well, well, well. If they say, 'Spring has sprung', then I guess you could say, 'Fall has fell'! All right. I know that isn't very eloquent (let's just say Ella thought of it...). However, the fact is that instead of easing into Fall as we usually do, Fall has entered doing great goatie leaps! We've already had a deluge of rain complete with 44 mile per hour winds and it has already snowed up in the mountains. Ay yi yi.

Along with the high winds, there was a period of 10 hours with no electricity in the barn (or anywhere else). It made it extremely difficult to select the best stems of hay. Anyway, at the time, the goatmother's aunt and cousins were visiting from Arkansas and Texas. Since we had no electricity, no bathroom services were available for awhile either. I heard that everywhere the goatmother's aunt goes, the commode goes out. In essence I suppose it was probably her propensity for a lack of 'facilities' that caused the whole power outage. Stranger things have happened.

And you know, whole trees came down in the wind. One fell on the neighbor's wood shed and several went down around our pasture. Of course this hasn't been all bad because the goatmother keeps supplying us with lots of leafy limbs. Viva les feuilles! Plus the goatfather has gotten to use the chainsaw which always puts him in a mucho macho good mood. I believe it has something to do with those primal pioneer genes harbored by males, though I can't be positive.

So, today we had a thunderstorm, which is not normal fare for this part of the country at all. The goatmother says some people even had hail. You know, that stuff that falls from the sky and looks like frozen white goat berries? Still, you couldn't swear by me, since I had my head buried in a succulent flake of hay at the time.

The very worst part of this whole thing, though, is that with the arrival of THE TIRE, in addition to the unsavory weather, those of us dedicated to maintaining a peaceful environment, remaining ever-vigilant, and upholding the directives of Homegoat Security have become somewhat lax in our resolve. Witness the picture snapped at 8:00, this morning! Yes, what you see is a large and apparently well-fed coyote strolling placidly down the road in extremely close proximity to our pasture and THE TIRE! Oy. OY. The only redeeming factor in this situation is that if Watson had seen him, he probably would have fainted. As it is, he was spared. Still, this can not be good. Not good at all. I suppose, in retrospect, it is quite a good thing that the coyote appeared well-fed. It leaves a lot less room for chevon on the menu, and that just has to be a good thing in my estimation.