Little Goats

I finally got photos of our babies up. We have been terribly busy, so it has taken awhile.

Here is a photo of all our babies at this moment. Laurel ought to be giving birth very soon now, as she is now two days past her due date. Nana and I delivered Chava and Perchik all by our selves on Monday night, as Mom was at church. Sadly, we didn't have any goats give birth when we had some of the S. and H. over on Tues.

Isn't Lizzy cute?

Now I get to go finish 4-H projects for "Spring Achievement" tonight. Yay.

Babies!!!

We have new baby goats!!! Three. Out of Clemintine. Two does and one buck.

Jane, Lizzy and Fitzwilliam. (it was Matt who named them. :D)

Lizzy is almost identical to Clem with a black head and a large black spot on her rump and hind leg. Jane is the ordinary boer color: a brown head with a white body, and Fitzwilliam is almost completely black. Lizzy is the only one with full ears; the other two just have flipper ears. I'll try to get some pictures up for you, Sarah. We are bottlefeeding Lizzy, but the other two Clem gets to feed.

Not fooling anyone

...................................................................................

Dear ___________,

Not all students capture the interest of Tulane University. In fact, I've sent emails to only a select group of students from your high school. Obviously you are one of them. I feel you are the type of student that should already be thinking about the key things to consider when choosing a major and a college...

...Sincerely,

Vice President For Enrollment Management
Tulane University

................................................................................................
Why can't colleges just tell the truth? It isn't like anyone would actually believe all the crazy things they say about "knowing what a wonderful student you are" and such. It makes one feel as if they are being manipulated. If they told what was really true, their promotional letters would read something like this:

"Dear _____,
We bought a long list of the names of juniors who took the PSAT, and your name happened to be on it. We don't know you from Adam, but if you want we will send you a whole bunch of promotional material for our school. I'm not sure you really want to go here, seeing as you *did* mention something about photography or other arts in the PSAT survey, and we actually don't teach anything like that here, but still you might want to know about us.

I doubt you will reply, but hey if you do, we would love to have more students,
Sincerely,

[insert random college name] "

It might not sound terribly wonderful, but it is preferable to all this silly stuff that they make up about "seeing my wonderful wonderful test scores" (which actually were not all that wonderful).

Searching for Life

At first glance, everything still seems dead. No life anywhere, just brown trunks with brown branches and brown leaves covering the dark mud from the melted snow. If one looks closely, though, small green shoots can be seen pressing their way upward, struggling their way through the blanket of last years remains. Spring will come.

Oh dear, not more rain.....

The wind is very strong right now. That is an almost sure sign that we will be having rain in the next 24 hours. Oh yay.

Karen just got her basement dry, and now it will probably full again. With all the snow that melted and the rain last week, she had over two inches of water in her basement, and the drain refused to work. Karen and I ended up having to suck all the water up with her faithful water dragon. Karen guided the nose of the dragon, while I swept the water towards its snout. Karen rewarded the dragon with the name of "Nick". It consumed the water very rapidly. We had to keep emptying out the dragon because he filled up very rapidly. It took two days to finish removing all the water from Karen's basement, but Nick the water dragon never tired. In all we removed over 800 gallons of water from Karen's floor. :p Hopefully it won't get flooded again.

Finished

I completed my first quilt today. Please excuse our messy basement. It was the only place where the quilt could adequately be spread out. Also, the colors are somewhat different in actuality.

Not tired yet....

Mom told me to not worry about the time and to "keep biking until you are completely worn out". I probably would have kept going, and been in to the Upper Penisula by the time I wanted to stop, but I ran out of road. The road I was on finally dead ended in the highway after 5 and a half miles. : (

There is one spot on my bike route that always makes me a little bit scared. There are no houses around, except for this rather run down little shack and then the old railroad grade crosses the road. Several times, when Sarah and I would go biking, there would be tough looking guys going up and down the railroad grade on four wheelers and motor bikes. Anyways, I had just past the railroad grade when I heard this noise, so I looked over my shoulder and saw this four wheeler racing towards the road. I started biking a little bit faster. The four wheeler turned in the opposite direction of me. I had gone on for a little while when I noticed that the four wheeler had turned around. Now I was kind of scared. My imagination started getting a little wild. I could just see a big creepy guy with a long black beard and tattoos covering his arms. I started biking really fast.

The person on it was steadily catching up with me. I was just hoping that he would pass me before we got to the stop sign so that he wouldn't pull up along side me. He hadn't passed me, so when we go to the intersection I stopped. I could hear it come behind me and stop. I was too afraid to look behind me. Then I heard this voice. I looked over and there was this elderly gentleman, possibly in his eighties, with a red helmet strapped to his ancient face. He gave a grandfatherly smile and said something about there being more road this way. I smiled back at him, feeling somewhat silly because of my crazy imagination.

Solitude

Finally, Smooth Ice!!

Last night, Dad took us all out to our lake so that we could go ice skating. He and Mom and Bunny had already been out skating for an hour. The sun was setting when we go there, so we laced up our skates in the fading twilight, and hurried onto the ice. It was really awesome ice, cause the rain we got had frozen on top of the thick ice already floating on the lake so now it was very smooth. The sun went down very quickly, and soon it was completely dark. The stars were so bright, sparkling through the crisp night air; only a sliver of the moon could be seen. One could easily find the different constellations: Orion, the big dipper, the Pleiades.
At random times you could here loud bubbing and the sound of ice moving, as the ice settled on the lake. As you skated, sometimes the ice would groan and shift where you were, but it was still very safe.

We had a pretty awesome game of tag, though Mamita didn't play. I can skate faster than Daddy, so I was only it twice. :D The only difficulty of playing tag, was that the lake was very large, about half a mile wide I think, so it was hard to keep everyone together. Mamita tended to off skating to far reaches of the lake by herself, and it was so dark that it was hard to see where anyone was, so we tied a flashlight to her scarf so we could see her. We skated for only an hour cause Nana's skates hurt her feet. : (

Daddy says we can go back this morning and then ice skate for another hour cause he doesn't have to go to work till 10:00 this morning.