The goats haven’t been outside since it got so cold.
Today, I thought they might want to stretch their legs, and I let them out, Vesla first. Holly looked a little bit unsure of what to do…
Then she remembered that she could always butt Vesla.
Vesla had plans,
and led them out into the garden.
Where there wasn’t anything to do except nibble tiny rosebuds in the wind.
They very soon wanted to come back inside, which is exactly what I was hoping.
They’ve got it quite cosy now. You can’t see, but there’s lots of straw on the ground which gives off heat as it composts. For the first time, this year they’ve got a heat lamp. I’m so glad we didn’t shear them in October.
A Bad Guide 
They look unequivocally perplexed. They are clearly at a loss, with all the tasty green suddenly turned into inedible white.
They’re perplexed by it every year; kind of irritated too.
Yes, the non-shearing decision looks to have been proven a wise one already.
That was luck.
How attentively they wait for Vesla’s plans in the 4th picture!
They do. I wish I could say they were always like that.
What about Cloudy?
“That was luck.”
Shear luck.
Well spotted, Sig. Cloudy succumbed to pneumonia a couple of weeks ago, poor thing. The whole illness was over within a day. I think she must have caught it when she spent the day outside tramping round in the snow. My daughter says she was very thin, but she hadn’t shown any sign of discomfort.
Ohhh, I’m really sorry to hear this! At least she spent her last days in good company with her dear friend.
Yes. I’m hoping we can get Vesla a couple of faverolle hens for company, next spring. She and Cloudy were very fond of each other.
Our forecast is for a return to minus plenty overnight. One of our cats has taken to collapsing in the kitchen, as one leg gives way; he finds it terribly upsetting. We don’t find it a barrel of laughs ourselves. What we need is a good witch-doctor.
Ours is supposed to go down again too. Alex, our Yorkshire terrier, who’s 16 or 17, has worn out the hip joint in his back leg. Nevertheless, he does jolly well. He’s very game. We give him painkillers, that the vet prescribed, every day, and he’s fine. He can’t do stairs.
Good for Alex, a game old fellow he sounds.
Sad about Cloudy. I suppose spring (with its new hens) does seem very far away at the moment, to Vesla… and of course to you.
Our almost-winter autumn has been very wet and quite cold, though nothing in your range. Minimal heat in old draughty house, so the animals (three cats) become heat-seeking machines. The best thermal source, they unanimously conclude, is a prostrate human body.
At least no ashes from that to carry out.
(Yet, anyway.)
Haha.
Not yet is right, Tom: you must have seen the story in the papers about the hospital cat that snuggled up to the dying, and only the dying, to the point where staff would say ah, poor old Mr Culpeper, won’t be long now.
May you live a thousand years, I hasten to add.
I’d already forgotten that cat.
Yes, we saw a film about Oscar.
I have thought about him a lot.
He performs a precious service, I believe (despite the obvious Grim-Reaper-in-a-Catsuit aspects of the story).
A furry Guard of the Last Watch would definitely be preferable, for example, to intubation.
(Has anyone heard, by the way, of the so-called windmill cats of Kinderdijk, said to descend from a cat who rescued a baby in a basket from a flooded dyke during a great flood in the 15th c.? The story is a bit hard to credit, but nice all the same.)
I hadn’t heard of them.
My great-great-aunt and her daughter used to keep stray cats. The most they ever had at one time, she said, was nineteen. They remembered the number because they were glad it wasn’t twenty.
Twenty, that’s about how many we’ve had, over the years, and the divers locations.
(Just not all at once, thankfully…)
In Bolinas in the 60s/70s we knew an older couple, longtime denizens, who from their beachfront home maintained a pack of upwards of thirty cats. A friend of ours was employed by them to put out numerous bowls and clean out numerous cat litters. All this was considered a bit dotty.
My great-great aunt was considered a bit dotty, but she wasn’t in the slightest. What are you going to do, not give them anything to eat? That’s more than a bit dotty.
When I first met my wife, she (and then we) lived in a cozy little narrow one-way urban street in Cambridge, MA. We had various interesting neighbors. One of them was Stephen J. Gould, but more memorable was the cat lady. I don’t how many she had — more than twenty, I’m guessing. Once, while watching TV and absently stroking whoever was lying on the floor next to her chair, she noticed that the texture of the fur was wrong: it turned out that the opossum who lived under the porch had come indoors and joined the rest of the mob.
How very nice. Who told you that, did she? Maybe Professor Gould told you.
That was straight from the cat lady. I met Professor Gould maybe once.
We’re considered (probably more than) a bit dotty too. But we can still tell the difference between our cats and our opossums.
One of our opossums turned up dead in the bushes, a few months ago, sad, sad moment.
When caught unawares, opossums are often to be seen Playing Dead.
But this one wasn’t playing.
A little after that, however, a new opossum showed up at the door, requesting a handout.
They are infinitely shy creatures, their lives (and not only theirs) are fraught in the nasty city, especially in winter, as now, one offers what one can.
The neighbours consider this extremely dotty & c.
My mother always tried to hide how many cats we have… (never more than 5, well, maybe 7…) Sometimes she takes advantage of the fact that there is two or four that have similar colours (two blacks, two black & white), so she try to make believe to the inexpert that our cats are fewer than they really are.
We always been the dotty family of our neighbourhood (and of our family as well).
Tonight she phoned my daughters to tell them that Goofy went several times upstairs at the room they have at my parents house to steal stuffed animals. She believes he needs a stuffed friend, so she asked if they can give him an old teddy bear or something…
I wish we had possums or squirrels here!
Oh, what a lovely dog, Julia! Sometimes Topsy needs stuffed animals to carry around for a week or two. She likes ones that squeek. Your mother sounds great, much like mine.
Tom, we’re all dotty and proud of it too. I wish we had opossums living here, also kangaroos.
Artur,
The general dottiness of winter having got a bit too much of a bother, I have now fled south for the season (in my mind, naturally), to the relatively temperate climes of Uruguay.
Where, it turns out, the beaches are strewn with curious receptacles containing interesting photographic documents left by our mutual friends.
A dreadful tale about goats:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-12068352
Too much bread kills petting zoo goat in Middlesbrough goats
A goat at a petting zoo at a Teesside park has been put down after being overfed by visitors, a council said.
The council described Henry’s death as a “very sad incident”.
Indeed.
In the temple park at Nara in Japan, deer roam freely and are extremely tame. But you are asked sternly only to feed them with the dry biscuits on sale for the purpose, to avoid the above fate. One ate a piece out of my wife’s map as she was reading it, however …
I don’t expect you did, but just in case you missed The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k9p0w
Oh, thank you! Too bad I missed it. That’s a picture of an angora goat just like ours too,