The Vet came out for a visit today to check the lump on Rosie’s neck. It turned out to be a very common abscess that goats and sheep are susceptible to. The Vet that comes to see my goats is a kick. Everybody who has goats or sheep knows her and she is obviously well thought of. When she got out of her pickup today she looked at me and said “So, you’re still in the goat business!” and then she made a comment about my herd increasing and had to know the names of all the ladies. She even thought the CW singer theme was clever.
She showed me how to give Rosie a shot and then left some penicillin for me to administer for the next three days to kill off the bacteria that cause this type of abscess. The things I have to do for these animals!
Speaking of, I mentioned in the last post that I had to fill out a USDA survey. The front of this thing was very official looking and warned that “Response is required by law” I also had to have it filled out by 2/3/2012. Part of what they wanted to know was total farm related expenses. At first I thought they were asking for just feed costs and the figure on that made me wonder where I got the money to continue this operation. but I was mistaken, what they wanted was the TOTAL FARM RELATED EXPENSES for 2011 and that figure was way more than I would have guessed. The receipts don’t lie, between the feed cost and the new tractor tires and having the pump service out to hook the water trough back up and Vet costs and…… I spent much more than I thought. I’m glad I didn’t have to pay it all in one lump sum.
When my renter says he does a 5M/year business, I’m thinking a lot of that is cost and not income. That’s OK, as long as I’m having fun, right?
In other news I did find MOST of the pictures I need for this site. We had backed them up on CD’s. There are a few I’m sure that I will not be able to recover, but I have the majority of what I need.
Speaking of computers and such. when I re-installed the OS I found a screen saver I had seen several years back called webcollage. In brief when the screensaver kicks in it does a random word search through various search engines and takes parts of the resulting images and creates a collage. Kind of neat right? And obviously Not Safe For Work! the internet being what it is. This is relevant in a moment.
Part of my daily routine is to feed the inside cats in the morning. There are two of them and they don’t like each other and so we do what my wife refers to a “herding cats”. One gets to roam for a while and then gets put back in it’s room and then the other roams. Why can’t we all just get along?
So while the one cat is out I have to keep the dog with me in a separate room because the cats don’t like the dog either. While the dog and I are in the living room I go to Netflix and watch old TV series. Well, first I watched Harry Potter on DVD and then it was the BBC series Merlin and then I found a series called “The Dresden Files” that had a short run back in 2007 or so. Got it? All about wizards.
I noticed at the start of the Dresden series that it was based on the novels by Jim Butcher and so I looked the author up on my phone’s Amazon Market app and there are quite a few books that I will now, maybe, have to read. You know just to see how it compares to the series. Anyway, I just finished watching an episode of Dresden Files and switched the cats and walked into my computer and the screensaver had kicked in and right in the middle of the collage it was building was a picture of several Jim Butcher books.
WOOOOOOOOO!
It was just a weird coincidence, or else the universe is telling me I’m a wizard. Nahhh!
I’ll stick with herding goats.