As you know by now, the goats spend the day up at the reservoir eating their way round it. They enjoy their summer job, but in the evenings when I collect them they always seem very pleased to be going home.
Especially Vesla:
Look at those ears go.
When they come to the road …
they walk a little way, and …
they come to a stop . They want me to go first. Holly’s Errol Flynn moustache comes from eating sticky evergreen bark.
They’re quite happy walking behind me.
They see all sorts of potential trouble lurking in the shadows. It’s odd, they weren’t so worried last year. I wonder if it’s a phase, or if they can remember a bad experience that occurred along here? I can’t think what that might have been.
A Bad Guide 
Goats? Pah! What you need is heffalumps.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196797/Homeowner-sick-view-wild-hedge-snips-herd-elephants.html
I’m fascinated by the way Vesla seems to stay not only behind the other two but also noticeably off to one side. It creates a striking “exclusion zone” kind of image around the other two.
You’re quite right, she has to go last through gates too.
I’ll consider it. He’s fooling himself if he thinks it’ll only require two trims a year.
Jeez. I want to jump into the photos and cuddle those goats, especially little Vesla (which I guess is tautological…).
BTW, your road looks like my dacha road. I have to look at a map and figure out how much farther north you are.
We call her little Vesla too. I mostly call her Veshy.
It looks on my dusty globe as if Moscow’s about 55 degrees N. of the Equator and Oslo’s 60. (NY, Madrid & Beijing are about 40.) That’s plus/minus a degree or so.
“if Moscow’s about 55 degrees N. of the Equator and Oslo’s 60.”
Sheesh! Even 55S takes us right into the heart of our sub-antarctic islands – windswept, bleak and god-forsaken rocks visited only by wildlife and the dedicated nutjobs trying to protect them. There’s nothing between them and the Ross Shelf except the Antarctic Ocean. How (and why) you people live so close to the Pole I will never know. Maybe it’s just because I’m rather an oblate spheroid myself, but I definitely prefer being nearer the middle.
Holly’s Errol Flynn moustache comes from eating sticky evergreen bark.
Fair enough, so to speak, but where did Errol Flynn’s come from? From eating his mother’s jam en douce?
Isn’t it something to do with the gulf stream? Northern Norway is 70 degrees, and Svalbard, the islands including Spitzbergen that are also part of Norway — people live year-round there, my wife’s been there several times in connection with her work — Svalbard is only 600-and-something miles from the North Pole, the most northerly settlement there is. That’s all thanks to the gulf stream.
I tried to investigate, but could find only this, in Wiki:
Did Buckley come up with the name? It could have been even longer…
Yeah, when it’s dark at 3 pm in the winter, I also wonder what I’m doing here. But… as Mr Crown will attest, the (short) summers almost make up for it. They always seem like a miracle: 9 months of dark and cold, and suddenly lush green fields and forrests and light all the time.