ASK ME ABOUT MY GOATS!

WE'VE GOT GOATS and I'm obsessed with them. Can you believe how darling these faces are? And these girls are so nice. I adore them. BUT WAIT. Back to the beginning. We bought the new house about 8 months ago.  It's on 10 acres of land, which is mostly wooded and hilly, with a bit of pasture, and about an acre that is mowed. Sidenote for those who enjoy geology: Our hills are truly odd for Michigan, which is a really flat state.  We've got hills because we're in a glacial end moraine.  The geology was formed between three glacial lobes 13,000 to 16,000 years ago and marks their maximum advance.  It's pretty awesome and reminds me a bit of where I grew up in the driftless area of Wisconsin (a part of Wisconsin that is very hilly because it escaped glaciation).  You can read more about our geology on the website for a local land conservancy. Since moving, we've been asked many times if we have plans for the land. And the plan has been to not do much.  Just live on it and enjoy it. We harvest fallen trees and burn them to help heat the house.  We take walks with the dogs. Jon contemplates hunting the deer (though honestly we see the same deer over and over, so it would be like killing a friend and I don't eat mammals anyway, so Jon would be on his own).  We do have a few deer cams and they are fun. MAYBE, maybe, maybe we'd get some some of livestock eventually, we said.  The land doesn't have pens or fenced-in areas, so this was a down-the-line proposition.  Maybe we'd get sheep.  Maybe goats. MAYBE.  In a few years. But then we fenced in a half-acre behind the house to prevent the dogs from visiting the neighbors (which they had taken to doing.) And then we discovered that there is quite a bit of poison ivy on our land.  QUITE A BIT. And then we discovered REPEATEDLY that I have an above-average allergy to poison ivy. Did you know that goats have a barnyard super-power? THEY EAT POISON IVY! I work in town part-time and its a small town where everyone is chatty.  I tend to have trouble with small talk (I'm an introvert), but I do alright if I have some topics to ask people about.  I started asking if they had goats or know anyone in the area who did.  I just wanted to see what breeds people had an how easy the goats were to keep.  No one knew anyone with goats for months and months and then one day, a fellow named Pat, who is a sheep farmer, told me he did know someone with goats and it was a shame he hadn't known I was interested in goats sooner, because this guy, John, had a really nice pair of goats and had just given them away. "Too bad!"  I said. But then Pat appeared again the next week and said, "You know those goats?  My friend still has them and he says you should call him." A few days later, we went to John's house and met the goats.  First impressions:

1. THEY ARE HUGE.  Their shoulders are at my hip.  That's about 38" above ground.   People think our dogs are big and the taller one is only 24" at the shoulder.
2. They are very social.  They walked right up to us when we arrived and hung around with us the whole time we were talking to John and Eileen about the goats, which was almost an hour.
3. They are well-behaved. They didn't jump on us at all or butt us.   They have been living free-range and never left their owner's land.  They peacefully coexisted with sheep and chickens and dogs.
4. They have a lot of personality.  They definitely look for little opportunities to misbehave.  One went into a greenhouse as we stood there and uprooted some vegetables.
5. WE LOVE THEM.

I've started a quilt that depicts the goats, but I'll post that on it's own another day.  Because today, the goats are getting all the glory. GOATS!!!!