Adventures in Goating

Is goating a word? Not sure, but goats have been a large part of my life lately. They have kept me super busy for the past month and a half. I blogged about sweet little Tag, whom we rescued from the meat pens at the county fair. He's been with us for almost two months and it's been a busy, crazy two months. He brought home with him some respiratory disease that he picked up from the fair no doubt. He got a snotty nose and was pretty depressed. It was passed on to Coco my 7 year old doe who was down and wouldn't get up. The vet gave us an antibiotic shot for each and they improved. Then the next our old goat Dym went down and there was no saving her. I don't *think* she went down because of the respiratory thing but I don't know. I think it was lousy timing. The vet came out and put her to sleep. She was 13 and had a good life. Definitely the coolest goat I've ever had, such a sweet soul. I miss her a lot.

Dym and Tag were nearly twins and I like to think he was sent to me to ease the pain of loosing her.  :( After Dym was gone that left Tag in the pen with Dym's two kids, Coco and Heston. They were not nice to sweet little Tag. They put him in his place at the bottom of the totem pole. It made me sad every time I saw them head butting him or chaisng him. So I contacted his old owners, the people that raised him, and asked if they had any doe kids they would sell me. They ecstatically said "Yes!".

Wesley, Greta and I went to their farm (which was awesome by the way) where we went into a building that housed all of their kids. There had to be 30 cute little baby goats. She brought us into a pen with about 7 kids that she selected for us to choose from. It was so hard to pick one! I want a certain one and Greta was partial to another one. So, naturally, we bought both of them. Meet Daphne and Lily. Tag grew up with them and is so happy to have a pair of goats his own size to grow up with.

Birthday Girl

Greta turned 9 years old yesterday. Where does the time go? Greta is a sweet girl, very compassionate. She's very into arts and crafts, sewing and making stuffed animals and slime. Every morning I wake up to find her sitting online looking at YouTube videos about slime making. This summer was a very slimy summer and things got out of hand with her leaving slime all over the house and ruining some furniture. So she lost her slime privileges. I was done. But since it was her birthday I decided to be nice and let her and her friends make slime at her birthday party today (although it will only be played with at the table).

She invited several girls from school (but mom they are all my best friends...) and we ended up with 10 girls total plus her brother and Alex. It was a full house with lots of screaming and giggling. Greta loves unicorns and had a unicorn themed party. I tried my best at a unicorn cake but think it turned out just ok. Too much frosting made all the layers unstable and it turned into the leaning tower of frosting. The girls liked it and that's all that mattered. I did have fun making each cake layer a different pastel color and making a horn out of marshmallow fondant.

Happy Birthday sweet girl!

The Voyage of the Quadcopter

Sean has been interested in building a quadcopter for years. A quadcopter is just a fancy name for a drone with four propellers. He's been acquiring parts and slowly building the structure on his 3D printer. He'll be really interested and work hard on it for a couple of weeks, then lose interest and put it away for six months. This is been going on for about two years. He finally pulled out all of the parts and motors and put it all together and finished it this summer.

He took the kids outside with him for the maiden voyage (I was gone at the time). It flew around and they all had a great time with it. Then when I got home he took me outside to show it to me. It flew well for a few minutes before he lost it behind a tree. He tried to fly it safely away from the tree but failed and stuffed right into a huge oak tree by the house. He hadn't installed the beeper yet that tells you where it is so we had no idea where in the tree it was.

It did have four little lights on each prop but it wasn't near dark and we weren't sure the batteries would hold up until it got dark enough to see them. Luckily they held out and we found it way up high in the tree.

Sean tried throwing a football at it to dislodge it with no luck. He then tried a bow and arrow with a string tied on in hopes of catching the limb and shaking it. Still no luck. The last resort was to climb the tree and try shaking the limb. Didn't work. We had a storm moving in and had to work fast to save it before the rain destroyed the electronics. He ended up taking a saw up there, locating the branch it was on and sawing off the branch. That worked to dislodge it. I stood under it and tried to catch it but failed and it hit the ground hard breaking off a couple of propellers.

He printed off more arms and replaced the broken propellers and got it back in the air......just in time to slam it into the fence sheering off several vital parts. Poor little quadcopter.