Buddug has a laugh

Milking the &*(^%$$* goats - who thought that was a good idea?!

I swear, I have hosted a live radio show for over a million listeners a night. I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer prize, and I’ve gone undercover in the high school, pretending to be a high school student. And I have never struggled so hard to do anything with so little success. 

Night after night, I watch Rich out there, milking away. The milk just jets out from between his fingers, so fast that it makes an actual head of froth on the bucket. 

And then when I try, I get out a few tiny squirts, and my fingers slip down the teat, and I have to start all over.

Marmite, my particular nemesis...

And then there’s Marmite.

Marmite is our Toggenburg princess, blood as blue as the sky and formerly accustomed to wearing a jacket, getting three different kinds of hay and eating Marmite sandwiches with her warmed drinking water. (That’s why we called her Marmite…) She’s not getting that treatment at our place, unfortunately for her - having to settle for fields of grass, clean fresh bedding in her stall, a good stock mix with sugar beet shreds and oats, and regular cold water. (Note - she seems quite happy in her new reduced circumstances…)

But I cannot milk the %^*&^*& creature. Her teats are microscopic, and I just can’t get a hold on them. What Rich can do in twenty minutes - feeding and milking all three - I couldn’t even do in an hour. I milk each night for a little while and then let him finish before the goats, understandably, get fed up and start kicking.  

In the meantime, the three goats are producing about four liters of milk a day - eight pints! And although Rich keeps protesting that we just don’t need all the milk, he gets quite cross when the yield is down - he watches the levels carefully. When the goats have to stay in because of the rain, yields go down, so rainy skies mean frowns all around…

Milk and eggs, eggs and milk!

In the meantime, we have got to figure out something to do with all the surplus! I got a yogurt maker and have been making yogurt, which comes out really thin unless you add dried milk powder - which I haven’t ordered yet. So, not an unqualified success, although we blended our first batch up with strawberries and sugar and Benjamin declared it “Lush!”

Benjamin and his friend Buddug

Benjamin has fallen whole-heartedly in love with Buddug. Instead of singing him “Mary had a little lamb,” for bedtime, for a while he demanded “Joli had a little lamb,” which has now become “Benjamin had a little goat.” And he’s asks now every night for Benjamin-and-Buddug storiess, a boy who rides his magic goat into all sorts of adventures. Apparently they live together in a little house in the woods…