Going, Going, Gone

The wipes bucket in the milking room needed emptying so I thought nothing of it when I saw a used wipe on the floor while tending to Cindy, always first in.  Switching out the girls on the stand is a pretty rapid process, one wants in for her breakfast and the other wants out, and I didn't pick up the wipe.  If I thought about it at all when I noted it in a different place while milking Ruthie, I must have kicked it over there.  Esther is a nonmilker and I take advantage of the "down time" while she eats breakfast to grab the bottles and run around to the nursery and feed Twenty-Two.  It was while milking Inga that I saw the diaper wipe had started a descent down a mouse hole. I watched it slowly disappear.  It took Missus Mousie the entire time it took me to milk out Tessie and Sheila to get that wipe all the way home.  I'm hoping she's just doing some redecorating, perhaps putting up new curtains or replacing the bedspread.  If the mice are starting to line their burrows in August, we're in for a long, cold winter.

About noon, I got a call from my neighbor to the south, Robert.  "One of your goats is in my vineyard!"  Wha-a-at?!  Grabbing a leash, my mind raced as I headed down the big pen.  How in the world had they gotten through the fence?  It's eight-foot deer fencing, topped with two strands of barbed wire.  A kid, maybe, but a grown goat would not crawl under.  How could there be a hole big enough?  By the time I got to the bottom of the pasture and met Robert, Sheila had gotten herself back on home turf.  Turns out that when Robert's guy fixed his fence in the spring, he didn't tie it in with Joel's fence at the last post.  There was just enough room for an enterprising escape artist to squeeze through and get to those tempting green vines.  Sheila, having been caught in the act, hadn't had time to do any damage, and Robert's workers had been trimming the vines anyhow.  I found enough wire to snug it up temporarily, and Robert said he'd make permanent repairs.  Trudging back up the field to the house, I gave thanks that only one goat had gotten out (I'd imagined trying to round up the herd), that Robert had been at the tasting room to see Sheila or I'd never have known, that the escape route had been closed, and that no damage had been done.

I emptied the wipes bucket last night.