Halloween Winner!!

Ok, so I'm late as usual.  I was supposed to pick a name this morning.  But life got in the way.

Anyhow, I wanted to say "Thanks" for all the Kitty Haikus, it was great reading them all.  Paul even came up with one, and although he (and Christine) were not entered into the contest, I'd like to share his cat haiku with you:

Cat licking it’s butt

Damn cat get off the counter

Go poop in your box

As you can tell, Paul does not appreciate the cats as much as I do.  

Anways.  What you all came back here today for; the winner of the chocolate kitties!

OMG, I just noticed Evil Kitty in the
background!  Freaky, hugh?!

It's blurry, but the winner is.......

Kristina!!

Congrats!  Send me an email with your mailing address to CarolynRenee at centurytel dot net and I'll get the box o' kitty chocolates to you! :)

And, since I couldn't help practically peeing myself after reading Leslie's haiku entry, I'd like to send her a little something in the mail as a Consolation-Cat-Prize.  Send me your mailing address to the email above and I'll dig up something kitty-like to send ya.

Hope everyone had a great Halloween!  See you in November (OMG, I can't believe it's November tomorrow)!

National Cat Day! ! !

Did you know that today is National Cat Day?!?

And as I'm sure any of you who have read this blog for any amount of time knows darned well that I'm thiiiisssssss close to being one of those crazy cat ladies.  If it weren't for Paul and my reluctance to be served divorce papers, I'd have a thousand cats!   Well, maybe not that many.  But probably more than I should have.

So in celebration of National Cat Day (which I can proudly celebrate because as far as I know, this is not a Federal or even State holiday so no taxpayer funds were stolen from the citizens to promote it) I would like to have a little quick giveaway!

But it's going to cost you something in order to enter.

Some of the Cat-tacular chocolates you - yes YOU ! - could win
from Louisa & Millie's Chocolates!

If you'd like to have some cute little kitty chocolates sent to you by my most favorite chocolate shop in the entire universe, Louisa & Millie's Chocolates, you must post a Haiku about cats in a comment here.

Bwahahahahahah!!!!

And, just to remind those of you who may have forgotten your third grade Haiku assignment, a Haiku is a short Japanese poem with the following parameters:

Three lines of verse, the first having five syllables, the second having seven syllables, and the last having five again.  For example:

Crazy cat lady
Cat hair all over your pants
You get no respect

I will have one of my personal feline companions pick a winner on Halloween morning and announce it sometime that day.  US residents only.  No immediate family (sorry Christine, go get your own darn chocolate).

Good luck!

The Taste of Fall

Fall is most definitely here.  Hot, instead of iced tea in the mornings, oatmeal instead of cereal for breakfast.  Crocs and t-shirts are replaced with boots and a flannel shirt for morning barn chores.

Fall here at Krazo Acres has my eyes, ears, nose and taste buds becoming accustomed to different Autumnal occurrences than what I grew up with back in Illinois.

Up "north", there was a very heavy leaf smell when the trees started dropping leaves, but I only occasionally smelled that here.  Come to find out, that leaf smell was from cottonwood trees and we don't have a single one (that I am aware of) on the property.  There was also that "frozen" smell....and that smell doesn't start here until sometime in late winter.  Here, Fall smells like wood burning stoves and the occasional waft of buck goat piss (I didn't say they were all good smells).

I smell stinky.....Oh so stinky!

Up "north", hearing geese calling all year was nothing new as the Canada Goose population basically stayed (and crapped) throughout the year.  But here, the occasional honking of high-flying geese signifies much shortened daylight and crisp mornings.

The fall leaf colors back home were much more spectacular than here, but the dogwoods, hickory sassafras and sumac add just enough color to make it pretty.

Dogwood spared by the bulldozer.

I don't remember there being a "taste" of Fall back in Illinois, with the exception of EVERYTHING being Pumpkin-Flavored for a solid month, sometimes two months until Thanksgiving.  But here, my new Fall Flavor is Persimmon:

When I bite into a squishy-sweet-spicy Persimmon, my entire being radiates "Autumn".  And since moving here, Fall hasn't officially started until I taste one.  Or thirty.

Some almost-ready persimmons.  For goodness sakes, don't ever
eat a persimmon that isn't totally ripe (i.e. squishy)!  Best bet is to
get the ones that have already fallen to the ground, usually after
a cold snap or freeze.

We probably have two dozen young persimmon trees here on the homestead, and I'm trying to keep Paul from bulldozing them and the animals from destroying them.  For some reason there seems to be a lot of small, dead persimmon trees and the live ones are not more than 4" in diameter.  I'm not sure if the forest is just too dense for them to grow bigger or if there's some weird disease that is striking them (and the sassafras now that I think about it).

I've been harvesting a bunch of seeds (i.e. eating a lot of persimmons) to build up my seed stock for the Seed Swap, and wanted to remind you all of the tab on the top of the homepage.  I'm still collecting some wild seeds, so if you're waiting for your little package of seeds (yes, I'm talking to you Kelly....sorry!!!) I didn't forget about you, really I didn't!  I've got envelopes with names on them, ready to send out once I get all my seeds harvested.

But in the meantime, I think that I should go find me some more persimmons on the ground to eat, I mean, collect seed.

The Silence of the Goats

A few weeks ago the lock on the feed room door was compromised (or more likely, not secured by yours truly) and the goats had a grain-orgy.

The dairy gals didn't suffer much as they are used to getting a good amount of grain twice a day, but the Boer gals, Lily and Pickles, got themselves quite an upset stomach.  Neither ended up with bloat, but both had pretty bad diarrhea for a few days.  I withheld grain from them - actually neither of them even wanted to look at grain - and put out a bunch more really good hay to encourage their guts to work on roughage.

Lily cleared up in three days, but Pickles still had the runs bad and she wasn't eating.  Like anything.   And I didn't hear so much as a single peep out of her, which is very, very abnormal.  She was walking around, but not enthusiastically.  She was drinking.  She was peeing, but not pooping much of anything other than a little glop plop once in a while.  I even walked her around the property, offering her just about anything she would normally go crazy over.  A small nibble here, a small nibble there.  And she wasn't chewing her cud because there was no cud to chew.  I'm thinking that Pickles was the one that got into the Chick Starter and that's why she was suffering so much more.

The day after the break-in, I gave the irregularly pooping goats some Probios.  Nettie got one dose, Lily got two doses and Pickles got five days of it.  But Pickles didn't seem to get any better.  I was really getting worried and had to consider taking her into the vet.  Unfortunately, there is only one vet around here that "kinda" takes care of goats.  Not sure why, because it seems that our area has a decent population of meat goats, but maybe us goat keepers are a cheap bunch and tend to only see a vet when we've run out of options.

I did some online research and a light bulb came on in my brain.  A few years ago, Nettie got into something and got bloat.  Besides drenching her with a baking soda / vegetable oil, giving her a dose of Probios and walking her around, I also gave her a couple shots of Vitamin B Complex.  Vitamin B will help a goat that is off it's feed or not eating.  It is a vitamin that will be severely lacking if the goat's stomach / rumen isn't getting enough quality hay or if upset from eating too much of something "bad".

I went to my local feed store to see if I could get an oral version of B Vitamins & one of the ladies there that raises Boer goats suggested a Micro B-12 5X treatment.  I also bought another tube of Vitamin B Complex to have on hand.  When I got back home, I noticed Pickles just mouthing some of the new "good" hay, but only actually eating a few leaves at a time, and still no sign of her chewing cud.  I gave her the entire 6ml dose.  And I swear, within a half hour she was eating hay.  Not like "OMG, I gotta have some hay right NOW", but taking mouthfuls and chewing, then taking another mouthful and another.  I don't know if it was actually the Micro B-12 5X that did it, maybe she was just ready to eat again.  But I can't help but give the B-12 some credit.

Pickles is continuing to eat hay like normal:

What?  Never seen a goat eat hay before?
Take a picture it will last longer.  Sheesh!

And started pooping like normal:

Up close & personal Action Shot!
Finally, some normal looking goat poop.

Tuesday was the first day she actually seemed interested in her grain.  Yesterday, she yelled for her bowl of grain come feeding time.

And this morning, she was yelling again.  Just because.

Well, it was quiet around here while it lasted.

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things just doesn't belong.....

Can you tell which thing is not like the others 

By the time I finish my song? 

Pretty snazzy red comb there for a pullet, wouldn't you say?

It appears that our order of twenty Rhode Island Red pullets turned out to be nineteen pullets and one rooster. And boy, am I mad!  We had gone into the feed store, specifically requested all females, paid more for them, took them home, cared for them for the past two months and now I find out that there's a stinking rooster in the bunch!  Now I'm going to be short one hen for my four teams of all-hen basketball!  All that money I spent on those pink, teeny-tiny matching uniforms for the gals totally wasted!!

But seriously, I'm not really that upset.  I can handle a 5% error rate on the sexing of day old chicks.  And then if I do decide to hatch out some eggs next year, I'll have purebred RIR's.

And if he turns out to be a pecker-head we'll plop his butt in the soup pot.

Trader of Goats

This weekend was spent finishing up a temporary (yet sturdy) goat pen, picking up two goats from a local farm, receiving one "rental" buck goat at our farm, trading one of the previously picked up goats for the stud service, breeding one of our does to the rental goat and receiving another doe that we had sold last year.

Your head spinning?  Mine still is.

The New, New Goat (as opposed to our not-so-new goat named, unoriginally, New Goat) had been with her doeling up until the day I traded her.  In anticipation of trading the doeling, I locked the kid up in the barn pen until the family who was taking her (and dropping off the rental stud) got to the house.  There was a lot of goat yelling.  And after the goat swapping had occurred and the family made their way home, you could hear the bleating of the little doeling all the way up to the highway.

I also trimmed the hooves of the new new goat, administered meds to both her and Pickles (more on that later) and started training the new new goat to the milk stand.  She's a little bit kicky, but seeing as I don't think she's ever been milked, she did pretty well.

The new new goat on the left, (not so) New Goat on the right.

Olivia was sold to a friend last spring.  She decided that goat keeping was not in her best interest so she said I could have her back if I wanted her.  She had already started drying Olivia up, so I'll just stop milking her and have her bred to the rental buck.

Welcome back to the herd, Olivia!  

She is Annette's kid from Spring 2012.

Merv the Perv (yes, that's his name), our Rent-a-Buck.

The buck we're renting is named Merv and he has already serviced New Goat.  Very enthusiastically, at that.  I don't know if it's Nigerian Dwarf bucks in general, but he and our previous Nigerian buck, Pan, seem to be overachievers when it came to breeding the ladies.  Technically, I've only seen one Saanen buck, one Nubian buck, one Boer buck and two Nigerian bucks doing their thing, but the Nigerians seem to take the cake when it comes to receptiveness and willingness during breeding.  Wonder if they're trying to make up for their small, uhm, stature.

Anyhow, we're still going to keep Merv around for another two weeks to make sure the breeding took.  He's a pretty nice guy, but I'm still going to use a long stick to scratch him.  I forgot how much Nigerians stink.

Yeah, I'm a little late

But in my defense, I did say that I'd announce the winner after barn chores on Saturday.  And barn chores seemed to last alllllll day yesterday.  More on that tomorrow.  But in the meantime, Miss Kitty says the winner of the book is......

Strange, I know.

Number Eleven!  My official name picker-outer is spending the night at grandma's house, so I had to use one of those random number generators from the web.  Not nearly as fun as having a kid pick a name out of the hat, but just as effective I suppose.

Now hold on so I can go back to the original giveaway post and see who number eleven is.

It's Chipmunk!

Yippee for Chipmunk!!  Please email me at CarolynRenee at centurytel dot net with your mailing address and I'll get the book in the mail to you this week.

See the rest of you tomorrow :)