Haying and Playing: part two

Today was a hard-work day, but a really good one. I found some good, cheap hay on Craigslist and had it delivered, and the first order of business was getting 20 sixty-pound bales of hay up into the hayloft. That left us pretty tired for a while. Homero was thoroughly coated in hay particles glued all over him with sweat. He looked like a cake with coconut frosting. 

Then I discovered that we had a fair amount of fence repair to do. There is a section of fence that runs alongside a wall of blackberries, and the goats have been mashing it down to get at them. I suspect Xana: she's the worst fence jumper. Plus I hate her. We had to drive six new stakes and try to pull the mashed fence back up and affix it to the stakes. Hard work in the heat of the afternoon. But we recuperated after a cold beer and spent the evening paying with the animals.

Homero let the pig out for the first time. When he picked it up to put it over the fence, it screamed like you would not believe! Oddly, the alpacas hated the very sight of the pig, or seemed to, and chased him around the barnyard aggressively, kicking and making weird alpaca noises. I don't know if they just never noticed him before behind his fence, or if they thought he was an intruder or what, but we had to put him back in his pen or he would have got his little pink ass kicked. 

Homero has been teaching the goats tricks. The trick they are best at is standing up on their hind legs and walking; and shaking hands, which means pawing at your knees with their sharp hooves. We all wish he hadn't taught them that trick. Sometimes the goats get a little over enthusiastic. 

A day like this makes me really happy. Not that nothing bad happened; I picked a whole bowl of blackberries, getting quite scratched up in the process and then the goats knocked them over on the ground. I burned some food. The toilet overflowed. But that's life, you mop it up.