I opened the front door this morning and blow me, if it hadn’t started snowing!
After half an hour, it was like this:
Vesla had noticed.
When I went inside, she was shivering. We’re getting them the heat-lamp from the hen house.
Misty was still keen to go outside.
Holly was unsure.
Now it’s half-past-twelve and it’s stopped, but it’s still quite cold.
A Bad Guide 
Holly: always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Yet when she takes those glasses off she’s beautiful.
Yeah, but you should hear her voice. Holly is one LOUD goat.
You see: we NEED a video (ask your new phone, I’m sure it can help us…)
Vesla & Cloudy look sooo happy together!!
They tell in Saint Petersburg is snowing too. Here in B.A. a perfect spring day, just a bit chilly.
(sorry: they tell ME…)
Oh, a telephone video! What a good idea. Will it do that? When I’ve figured out how to make a phone call, that will be my next step.
And yes, don’t they seem happy together.
Sorry, I’ve been sleeping on duty. It started snowing lightly here yesterday afternoon and appears to have stopped around midnight. There may be a new round coming in now.
Beautiful photos, Arthur.
Just last night I was saying to myself, what Crown and his flock need right now is a bit of snow, to feel at home.
But then I lost that thought when a swarm of rich-text bugs ate my <a href="http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/julio-cortazar-axolotl.html"axolotl.
Evidently axolotls cannot abide HTML, or perhaps it was the English.
It rained all night here, and all the languages drowned.
But then into the Abyss swam Zippy.
(As I say, it took only one huge bite.)
I give up. It’s obviously an undersea implosion.
Does Vesla know something Misty and Holly don’t?
That third photo is classic.
No, all the top three.
No, the whole series. Tiptop post.
Thanks, Tom. That’s Vesla’s office. She sits there every morning and evening. How peculiar about the axolotls — and now I can spell “axolotl”.
Trond, the amount we pay you, you’re allowed to sleep on duty if you want to.
I’m working on the telephone video.
Courtesy of the Marginal Revolution blog, a story you can bank on.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/cities/a-bank-that-lends-you-goats-64788
And bear in mind that the modern novel in English really started when Conrad and Ford sat down together to write this seemingly innocuous exchange. ‘We come thus to the life purely literary.
(Second link’s a scanned copy and pretty garbled, but you get the drift.)
AJ, another story you had first.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/nov/09/graffiti-art-divides-council-opinion
Just as long as no one starts lending the goats money. That is a nightmare scenario I hadn’t even considered.
I can’t make out if Conrad was being sarcastic, rolling on the sofa crying “This is genius!”, or if he was just a very nice man making the best of this collaboration. Maybe a bit of both. “The writer” reminds me quite a lot of Mr Pooter in Diary Of A Nobody; Ford Madox Ford came up a few months ago.
I don’t know how you find these interesting goat links. Dearie and Principal are both reading Indian sources.
Pin, I was first, once again! Though, if you want get technical, I did originally find the story in the Guardian.
How your phone is behaving?
William Carlos Williams on Ford Madox Ford.
No, he meant it and tried all his life to produce similar effects, with often unintentionally hilarious results (you wouldn’t read Victory for the natural dialogue). Elaborately polite Conrad may have been; a nice man he was not. He’d generously permit Ford to help him out whenever he was stuck and then turned up his nose at his moral turpitude. Then again Ford went around like Charles Laughton all his life, waiting to be insulted, and the tone of these reminiscences is dreadfully stale; he basically wrote them for American Ladies’ Institutes and thought that’s how you address them.
My phone: I’ve got as far as making videos unintentionally. I’ve still got to find out how to do it on purpose.
This is good, if you’re paid up.
From Principal’s second link, about the writers’ stay at a hotel in Knokke:
“frigid rooms into which blew the sands from Holland; intolerable winds; interminable gusts of rain” – ah the well-remembered joys of the Belgian seaside!
If there’s one person I really, really hate it’s Percy Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists. But thanks for the link! I don’t subscribe to the LRB, my mother sends me old copies about a month later (giving approximately the cost of a subscription to the post office instead).
The Norfolk seaside on the opposite coast is similar, but possibly worse because of the very strong east wind.
Christ, the North Sea… Will we one day look back fondly on these sandstorm/hailstorm ordeals and think, yes, those were the best years of our lives?
Ah, you’ve been there too! No, we won’t.
When we were 17 we went on a School Holiday to the Belgian Coast. Some loony must have thought that it would improve our French. In Flanders! The chips met with our sincere approbation.
I’ll bet they did. Worth the trip just for that, probably.
I remember always getting tar on my soles, what was that all about? Never seems to happen on any other beaches of the world, certainly not here.
Yes, the tar is supposed to be “natural”, which is no help when you walk it into the house. I was told how lucky we were having such a great beach and that the weather would probably clear up before next week, but I knew there was something funny going on or why did the other kids go to Spain for their holidays?
Lovely poem by WCW, by the way.
other beaches of the world
Joni Mitchell sang “I’ve got beach tar on my feet […] they’re playing that scratchy rock ‘n roll beneath the Matala moon”.
After all these years I finally just now looked up the location of Matala. It’s on Crete, so probably not on the North Sea.
All your stories made me so eager to visit those beaches!
May be not now… ;-)
But I’m sure the place must have its charm.
The phone: baby steps, AJP, baby steps… You can do it!
I’m trying to upload to youtube an old video I found of the goats, but it’s been doing it for an hour and a half and there are still “225 minutes remaining” (= 03h. 45mins).
Julia, something tells me you would not care much for bathing in the North Sea (without a wetsuit, that is).
Crete is part of the wider North Sea.
Just as the North Sea is part of the Greater Indian Ocean, and Tibet part of the Taller Norway.
Well, Tom, if is true what Principal says, I’d rather swim at Crete’s part of the North Sea… :-)
A man called Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who teaches at Lower Cordoba University, believes that we mustn’t think in terms of nations but in terms of ‘Atlantic Rim civilisations’ and, well, the rest. I think (as I retrospectively gaze from the Schleswig-Holstein side at my fellow sufferers) that he may have a point.
And if you google him, up comes a picture of Imran Khan, which just goes to show.
Well, Schleswig-Holstein may be one thing (one place, that is), but here on the western edge of the Pacific Rim, the existence of a civilisation of any kind would have to be put down as putative.
Apropos that, the astute cultural historian Julia has just now opened my eyes to the fact that we seem to be dwelling, hereabouts at least, in an epoch of the Inflatable Baroque. (Empty bags full of hot air, you’ll have recognised us even from a great distance.) It is always good to be living in a Period as well as a place, or anyway the rim of a place.
(BLUSH) Oh, Tom, stop it!
Talking of balloons full of hot air, did you know that the chameleon was a symbol of the flatterer not only because it changes its colour, but also because he feeds out of air: like the flattered, says Alciato, “feeds on the wind of popular approval and gulps down all with open mouth.” . http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/emblem.php?id=A15a053
Great link.
That chameleon looks a bit like a demonic axolotl.
I have disappointing news. After three attempts, Youtube still can’t upload my video. We have a very slow connection, that may be the reason. I’ll try making a smaller video tomorrow.
Oh, I’m sorry. I hope our request (suggestion?) hasn’t been too much trouble!
No, not in the least. I had to figure out how do do this anyway.
Julia’s right, we’re all inflatable now.
In my limited experience with loading things to YouTube, I found that sometimes it was a terribly slow process and sometimes not, with no clear reason for the variability. So maybe it’s worth another try — who knows?
Oh, okay. Thanks. I will.
Well, Artur, about posting videos on Youtube, all I can say is that if the ghost of Teddy Adorno, that great hater of everything Pop, could pull it off…
My long period of silent goat-envy, by the by, in case you were wondering, has been relieved a bit by a surprising nocturnal animal encounter.
We also have opossums, raccoons, squirrels, the occasional skunk, many birds and too many bugs.
But no dead bodies… at least in the past two weeks. (Touch wood.)
One good thing about bugs is that they attract birds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/outdoors/8125749/Why-goats-are-on-the-rise.html
Ha!
Easy question: because AJP’s family leads the trends of animal pet.
What’s IN or what’s OUT? Ask the gurus from Norway!
Thanks Julia, I appreciate your confidence, but is this deja vu? Or are there several restaurants with goats on the roof? I remember an article about one in the USA. I do think in the long run they would much prefer a grass roof, although that requires a certain slope.
The birds are a bit put out by the cold this morning and are saying nothing on the subject of bugs or anything else.
This time of year the seabirds come in off the water when a large storm is on the way. They seem to pass over mere bugs in favour of human rubbish.
Artur, I have just checked your weather and it looks like the goats’ stylish curls will be decorated with a few more flakes in this coming week. If indeed they are not so decorated already.
Cold weather forecast here; we picked our apples this arvo. Sixty-one pounds.
That’s a lot of apples. I’ve never weighed ours.
Tom, we had a ton of snow on Thursday night. Everything is white. Thanks for the warning. I’m not a big fan of snow and I had hoped it was going to melt.