The goats have been spending the past few days in the sun in front of the house. It’s comparatively warm, about 5C. (The rope in the foreground is Topsy’s, nothing to do with the goats.)
They look very bedraggled. They have long wool with bits of hay fastened to it:
Misty has a new hobby. She likes to stand in the wood shed.
And chew the bark off the birch logs.
She loves it in there.
Her teeth seem to be getting longer. With horses they have to be filed down, but I’m not sure about goats.
A Bad Guide 
Tricky business, weighing up the relative advantages of basking in the sun or chewing the bark off logs.
It’s not easy being a goat. Dearie, my daughter wants to know if there’s going to be any blossom or daffodils left when she goes to London during Easter week. What do you think?
Welcome back, girls, we missed you!
comparatively warm, about 5C ¡jajajaja! (here we feel autumn is coming because temperatures are around 15 / 20C)
Some magnificent html is coming out of Argentina. I might faint if it gets to 15C.
24th April. Hm, one of our local villages is having its daffodil festival on March 26th. London has a much warmer subclimate than Cambridgeshire villages. If the Londoners have late-flowering varities planted widely, there might be something left, but I’d guess that it would be rather fag-endy. There would still be lots of daffs in much of Scotland – I still recall the beauty of a huge display of Pheasant’s Eye in early May one year – but about London A hae ma doots.
http://www.shootgardening.co.uk/plant/narcissus-pheasants-eye
;-)
Astonishing, that’s right (that’s me)
:-D (proud Cheshire Cat smile)
Now I realise that the title of this post might be connected with the previous one…
Mayor Motion Picture… Return of the Goats
Alma is wonderful! I’m sure there’s no many teenage girls interested in daffodils, I love that. My eldest, the yesterday yelling girl, seems to be like her.
I could have Pheasant’s Eye here.
Yes, we have yelling. They have wonderful displays of daffodils in Britain, Julia. My mother was telling us about a big one at Hampton Court. We’ll also be going to the zoo – and the hairdressers.
No, no, I wasn’t saying Trini seems to be like Alma because of the yelling!
I was thinking about their interests, which I love.
In fact yesterday she was worried for something else (she looks like a little girl while all of her friends look like little women…). Most of the time she’s lovely.
And now, for something completely different: ¡A trabajar!
No, I know. They do sound similar.
Talking of daffs, I’ve always thought that Wordsworth’s beautifully disguised slower ball was a real wicket-taker.
“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude”
Yes, I can’t think of a better subject. Do you think Wordsworth was a cricketer? Probably held a straighter bat than Coleridge, but that’s not saying much really.
Could it be that Misty is chewing bark “because” her teeth are getting longer ? Not intentionally, of course – but if long teeth are uncomfortable, the goat may feel an urge to do something that will wear them down, such as chewing bark. That must be more pleasant than a trip to the dentist.
Alternatively, perhaps Mother Nature provides bark so that goats, after letting their teeth grow long for a while – for esthetic effect, like Easter hats – can restore the original condition when the season has passed.
I made a mistake there. Since Easter is not upon us yet, they must be Valentine’s teeth.
That’s a good question, Stu. Thank you very much. We’d better ask a vet. Our goat vet (they seem to specialise by species rather than by disease) ran off to Sweden, we’ll have to find another one.
Special teeth for a festive day suggest there’s going to be special food. Their birthdays are coming soon.
“ran off”? Isn’t this like “huir” or “escapar” in Spanish?
Why he/she ran off?
It looks like peaceful and quiet, but it seems to me that this part of Norway where you live is full of secrets and adventures…
She split up with her husband (also a vet, but a bureaucratic one) and moved to Sweden. It’s a lot cheaper to buy an estancia in Sweden than it is here, and I think she needed enough room for her daughter to practise her show-jumping*. She had a Land Rover and a couple of horses, so I doubt she actually ran. It was too bad for us, she was a great vet.
*Her daughter isn’t a horse, just a very keen rider.
escape goat vet
Yes, I blame her for my own inadequacy.
Oh, I’m sorry.
(so it’s more like a romantic/psychological thriller/dramatic-comedy of fulfilment and overcoming)
Sorry again, I’m being a bad person
Norwegians & Swedes love psychological thrillers! I hadn’t thought of the vet as being part of one, but she would have been a great tv detective (she was very smart). In riding boots, driving her old Land Rover to the scene of the crime. One week a hamster owner disappears, the next it’s the ambitious younger son of the lord of the manor who is falsely accused of goat rustling.
¡jajajaja!
We bought our house from a vet couple. We duly discovered that our garden played host to many bones of small animals, well scattered. It did occur to me to wonder whether they were in the habit of using defunct creatures as compost accelerators.
I am almost embarrassed to say, that I graduated from High School in Puyallup, Washington, home of the Daffodil Festival http://www.daffodilfestival.net . So far I have usually only been in England at Christmas and in the Summer; but once owing too the ill-health of an aunt-by-marriage, I was there around Easter, and I was blown away by the number and impact of the daffodils in Somerset. Acres of commercial bulb fields aren’t a patch on (continuous) municipalites that bed them out!
I’m also embarrassed that the Daffodil Festival site isn’t burgeoning with blossoms and yellowness. It’s pretty bleak, isn’t it?
I love it!
Do the goats EAT daffodils (when the daffodils arrive)?
Yes, I love it too. If only more schools had a sense of humour they wouldn’t be so unpopular with the inmates.
The goats have a damn good try at eating the daffodils and the tulips. They don’t seem to be poison for goats. I’m forced to keep them out of the garden after the snow melts or they would decimate it. They think I’m a complete bastard when I block their entry and they are very articulate at showing it.
Artur, are you actually able to sort out what they are saying?
Here we have been having such (timely in a historical sense yet untimely in a meteorological sense) “apocalyptic” hailstorms that the buds and tender new green leaves have been shorn and shredded before the neighborhood deer have had a chance to browse.
I can tell what they’re saying. They all have expressive body language, and when they don’t like what you’re doing it’s the way they say it rather than what they say. Misty can ask me for things by shifting her gaze back and forth between me and whatever it is (the gate, the rose bush, etc.). The other two haven’t cottoned on to this, so she often speaks for them all. I’ve noticed that Topsy the dog does this too.
You’re still having biblical weather, I hope you’re dry. How is your injury, is it any better?