Eyes and Baby Meat

Before the sun was set last evening, the goats and dogs and I took a long walk around the little farm.  The dogs entertained themselves sniffing sniffs, and the goats were happy munching leaves and weeds.  I mostly just admired my goats.  They make such a pretty herd.  

Especially now that we have Little Buck.  His coat is soft and shiny, and he thinks it's fun to let the herd get ahead of him and then pretend he has been left behind, so he can run and jump to catch up.  His ears flop all over the place when he prances.  I can tell he thinks he's cute stuff.  He is. 

His eyes are the color of amber, and the setting sun makes them glow. 

Peaches has yellow eyes, and when she faces the sun her pupils shrink to tiny rectangles inside a shiny yellow marble. 

Dark River has bright blue eyes. 

So does Light River, although sometimes they are so light they look clear, or gray.  Square pupils never cease to be surprising when I notice them.  I think goats might be aliens from another planet. 

Wendigo has pretty brown eyes and always wears dark eyeliner.  Her bottom lids are droopy though, so the pink shows through and makes her look grouchy, even when she isn't.   

When she's getting petted and snuggled, she gets so relaxed that her entire face hangs down.  Her jowls wobble and her forehead droops down and her eyes get lost in her skin.  It's like her skin is too big for her face!  

Puck's skin fits him perfectly.  His chocolate eyes still shine bright, but under certain light I can see a faint transparent haze over this eyes now.  Cataracts, maybe? 

For some reason I counted up how many eyes lives here now.  One hundred and twenty-four!  This includes two for myself and two for Brandon, plus two eyes each on the twenty-five meat chicks that live in the brooder box in the greenhouse.  The picture above is from two weeks ago, when they arrived at the post office in a card board box. 

This is what they look like now.  They grow so fast!  And look at the size of those feet.  These are the bar-b-q special, which are some sort of cornish cross birds bred for their size and speed of growth.  I've never raised this kind of chick before, and I'm already amazed at how fast they grow and how much they eat! 

This is a picture of them all on day one...

 and now here they are after only two weeks.  Of course, they've consumed nearly an entire forty pound bag of food in these two weeks, and they drink the entire bucket of water each day.  It won't be long before they will be too big for the brooder. 

The hatchery routinely gives you an option for a free "bonus" chick, which I said yes to, but I didn't think about it being so much smaller than these meat babies.  It's name is MJ, and I worry that it will be squished by it's giant brooder mates.  So far, he's okay, and he walks on the backs of his big buddies when they crowd him out from the food.  

Home from Tybee Island

Do you remember the last time you saw the sun rise from the ocean?  Can you still hear the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, and smell the early morning ocean breeze, and see the flocks of pelicans passing overhead?  I can, even though it's been several days since I've been home from our family camping trip to Tybee Island in Georgia. 

We all converged on the campground last Wednesday, and stayed through Sunday exploring beaches, shops, and all the beauty of southern coastal towns.  I rode with my parents and my aunt (look at us, back in 1979!) and we towed my parents camper all the way there. 

If the moon's gravity creates the tides, and the tide sculpts pools and ripples in the sand, does that make these moon sculptures? 

We swam in the pool, rode bicycles, built sand castles, collected sea shells, fished, boogie boarded, cooked, ate, and drank plenty of tasty beverages.  We watched a movie, The Great Outdoors, from our beach chairs in the campground pavilion, and we laughed so hard we were nearly disturbers of the campground peace!  We even went on dolphin boat tours and rented kayaks and paddled to an island right on the border of the open ocean and the river delta. 

Despite the wind that constantly tried to blow us off course, my niece and I managed to paddle ourselves to the island and back again.  A whole pod of dolphins rose from the water to check us out, including a baby dolphin!  We saw them very close, right next to our kayak.  That's when I truly realized, there are things living in this water!  Big things, with snouts and fins and teeth!  I've seen dolphins and whales from boats before, but this is the first time I've felt like I was in the water with them.  It's a little scary, but so exciting!

If you want to see some of our vacation photos, click play below.   

  

Lordy, Lordy...

Tomorrow is my birthday.  My fortieth birthday!  Strange, isn't it, how a fortieth birthday seems to represent a certain maturity, but is also a reminder how much there is to look forward to.  If I think about all the life experiences that came with the first forty, and then try to imagine what the next forty will bring... I don't know if I'm excited or exhausted!  

But maybe that's one of the good things about entering middle age.  So many of my big ticket items on life's to do list are less demanding of my energies now.  There are check marks in the columns for school, marriage, career, dream home - even donkey ownership!  I can relax now, right?  I got this. 

Not that I expect anything to remain static, but I feel optimistic, which surprises me.  Shouldn't I be worrying about wrinkles and retirement plans?  Nah.     

Something about milestone birthdays encourage declarations.  Like that country song about the next thirty years, where he "conquers his adolescent fears" and plans to eat a few more salads and not so many beers.  Me too. 

I plan to grow things in my dirt.  I plan to have such good dirt. 

And I'll go to work, and do a good job, and I'll make more memories with my friends and family.  And I'll watch the sunset with my puppies. 

And I'll snuggle the cats.  Whether they like it or not! 

I'll do all those things, and even more.  Or I won't.  How would I know what the future holds.  After all, I'm only forty!  

Primordial Places

Most of the project sites I travel to for work are not that far from the beaten path.  But sometimes, I find myself working in a place that seems as though it rarely feels the tread of boots.  There are still wild places, not that far away, that feel primordial.  With hidden waterfalls...

and cascading streams.

These are usually rugged places - where the bones of the planet poke through.

These steep and wild places are sanctuaries for trees and forest life.  Because the trees are so hard to harvest, they are allowed to grow to impressive heights.  

Like Alice, my dimensions feel altered, and the scale of the world is different.  Ferns as tall as our waists..

  

and thickets of dense rhododendron to navigate.  It's hard not to feel vulnerable when your limbs are tangled in branches and the pattern of leaves underneath is perfect camouflage for the copperheads that are known the live there.  

Every little pool of water is filled with the buzzes, croaks and peeps of some of the most ancient life forms. My heightened copperhead awareness helps me tune in to every flutter of leaves in my perephery.  Sometimes I feel slight vibrations and stirring with the soles of my feet.  The soil is alive. 

On the forest floor, which has been mulched with decades of leaves, grow strange creatures, like this stinky and weirdly familiar mushroom.  Giggle. 

Pretty purple buttons poke through the leaves.  

Like vibrant sea anemone, the fungi spread their arms.

Ancient plant lifeforms, like this clubmoss, carpet the slopes.  

I have fond childhood memories of decorating a tree house with long strands of ground cedar, making curtains to shield me. 

Another clubmoss, ground pine, creeps on long stolons forming colonies. 

If it wasn't for all the snakes and insects, I could get comfortable on the ground pine carpet and take a much needed nap!  My coworkers wear fitbits, so now we know that I don't start really whining about getting tired until we've hiked seven miles and about a hundred flights of stairs.    

Coral reef, or forest floor?  

Decaying logs were moist, black, and covered in colorful moss and fungi. 

Is this a chanterelle?  There were hundreds of them.  

As we hiked down this steep valley, we saw a deer up ahead.  We slowly approached, waiting for it to dart away.  As I got closer, I could see it's chest heaving as it breathed.  It's eyes were closed and it was making a gentle snoring or groaning sound as it stood with it's feet in the flowing stream and it leaned its snout against the moss covered bank.  When it's tail flicked, tiny droplets of bright red blood spattered it's flanks.  That's when I noticed the still bleeding scratches and puncture wounds on both sides of it's back legs, and the large bite mark on the back of it's neck!  Something attacked this deer, and very recently too.  Could it be a bobcat?  A bear? a dog? a coyote?  A mountain lion!?  I wonder, was it watching us, while we examined it's dinner...  

Back from Vacation

I'm baaaack!  I'm home from vacation.  I traveled with my parents and my aunt all the way the shores of Lake Erie, where we set up camp at East Harbor State Park.  We are getting to be experts at camping.  We travel with some of the comforts of home packed into my parents camper.  My tent was very comfortable too, and this time, I felt I had plenty of room for myself and all my gear. I wonder what was so different this time?  I know - it's because I wasn't sharing a tiny tent with a giant Brandon!  

It was too cold for swimming, but the perfect temperature for hiking, touring, biking, and enjoying our nightly campfire.  And eating, of course.  We cooked delicious campers breakfasts in the mornings, with enough leftover bacon for picnic BLT sandwiches for lunch.  

We rode the ferry to Kelly's Island, and joined the other weekend tourists enjoying drinks on the balconies and seeing the sights.  One of the sights was these large groves carved in rocks by glaciers nearly twenty-five thousand years ago.  They were some very groovy rocks.  

We saw a picturesque lighthouse under deep blue skies, with sailboats on the water, children scampering on the rocks, and a lovely couple taking their wedding photos at the base.  

Sunrise over the lake was beautiful.  The sun was a brilliant orange ball that swiftly rose from the water into the pink sky. 

We rented a bike!  It's been years and years since most of us had ridden a bike, and I was nervous we would end up bruised and bleeding.  Luckily, riding a bike is just like riding a bike - you don't really forget how to do it. 

Weeeeee!!!!