Day 10

Ten days in and I am starting to feel absolutely exhausted. Pushing your body to the physical limit every day is, apparently, a tiring endeavor. Who knew?

Ruby only knows I have apples.

 

The first act of the day is to splash water on my face and ask myself when it will be time to sleep forever. The answer seems to be when I am dead, and not particularly being in a mood to die, I go to plant some seeds instead. 

 

Though I do not want to die, Lauren does seem to have a death wish for her plants, because there is no way I am doing this right. I dig a couple of narrow trenches, fill them up with poop, and then some dirt, and then dig more little trenches to sow the seeds. I feel like Johnny Appleseed, only instead of apple trees, I am growing beans and sunflowers. So probably more like Jack in the beanstalk story, but I do not feel like him, I feel like Johnny Appleseed.

 

Roxanne Beanandflowerseed.

I am excited to grow sunflowers, but I am sad because I realize I will not be around to witness the fruits of my efforts. That is the hardest part about helping out with the growing, is that I will not see any of it do any of the fun parts of having plants, namely being flowers or things that I can put in my mouth. Petting the goats is instant gratification, because they look all goat-happy and you know you did a Good Thing, but planting these seeds is like teaching an inner city kid how to read and then never talking to him ever again. Did he become president? A criminal? Die slowly because he wasn't planted low enough in the ground? It is all very stressful to consider.

 

Annuus.

 

All my beds made and trenches filled, I secure the trellises. I step back and decide that they have given some life to the dead shell of greenhouse. Like putting makeup on a corpse, the trellises make me feel slightly more comfortable. 

 

"Tell me I'm pretty!"

 

I move on to cleaning the patio. I KNEW IT WOULDN'T STAY CLEAN. But this time it is not poop I am after, oh no. The baby goats are getting older, and Merlin has been letting all the lady goats know that he is still available by doing a weird thing where he kind of cough-chokes, goes EEEUGGHHHHAAAMMAAAH with his tongue sticking out like he is having a stroke, and then pissing all over everything with his weird goatpiss smell.

 

Please believe me when I say it is...funky.

 

So I spray it off of the patio, the deck tables, the house. He is a thorough goat, but I am more thorough. Soon the patio is wafting with the fragrant scent of Utah hose water, and I grab Fugs to trim his hooves.

 

I quickly realize this is a stupid thing to do. Fugs has a weird club foot, and so after successfully trimming three of his feet, I get to the fourth, which is like a strange mess of sideways overgrown hoof. I try to break through the adamantium nail that he's got going on, but given that my clippers are not made out of equally hard imaginary metals, I am shit out of luck. Lauren brings out a jar of warm water, and we try to soak his hoof in it to soften the keratin beast, but unbeknownst to us, goats to not enjoy you jamming their feet into jars of water. It topples over like a 120-pound girl who just got hit with a goat, and we give up. Go forth, Fugly goat, and enjoy your one long hoofnail that is totally going to make the other goats think you do goat cocaine.

Now, for the past ten days, I have held my silence about a suspicious box that has been on Lauren's kitchen table, because it is not my place to ask about these sorts of things. It is not that the box itself was suspicious. It was just a normal white cardboard box, big enough to hold two decks of cards. No, it was the description that was suspicious. On the label it said "STD TATTOO KIT." 

I had been wondering and wondering what the hell this thing was all about. Not one to pry, I just assumed it was a kit for people who wanted to tattoo their STDs to themselves. I don't know. But I learn today that the kit is actually for tattooing codes on the goat ears for...some purpose. I forget to ask, because Lauren tells me that I have to hold the baby goats while she pierces their ears with an instrument that will burn with the pain of a thousand suns.

While I am all on board for the first part, that second bit sounds a bit unpleasant. But farm life is often unpleasant, so we decide to start with the most social and sweetest of the babies.

RUN, PAN! RUN FOR YOUR LIIIIIFE!

I said run, bitch.

Pan does not, in fact, run away. He runs right up to me, and puts his cute little hooves on my legs like he will, and I scoop him up and hold him while Lauren prepares the torture device. Pan is perfectly delighted to be held, and he gives me little goat kisses. Then Lauren puts some green ink on his ear and presses down.

"MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Pan yells out in pain, but thankfully it is short-lived. I let him go and he runs to his mother, and I am sad because I do not think he will love me anymore. This is a silly fear because immediately after he checks in with his mom, he comes back and gives my hand some more goat kisses. My conscience is soothed, and I am happy that the whole terrible ordeal is over with.

 

What's a little forced mutilation between friends?

 

"Okay, now we have to do his sister," Lauren says, loading up the tattoo clamp with new numbers.

Pandora is, shall we say, less friendly than her brother. She is a skittish little goat, and I honestly do not even know if I have pet her the entire time I have been here. She does not frequently hang out with Pan, or even her mom, Paula. So it is a little difficult to pick her out of a baby goat crowd, especially because she is nearly identical to one of the other baby goats.

I grab a baby and hope I've made the right choice (my preferred method of procuring children), but Lauren says, "I think the balls on that goat would imply he is not Pandora."

The one time in my life I didn't check, and it was when there was a test!

Oh well. Process of elimination says that if it is not the baby I chose, it is the other baby goat. Pandora is not an easy goat to catch, being nimble as a motherfucking deer and strong like a toddler. I catch a back hoof, and nearly get kicked in the face multiple times. It is adorable. I grab her other back foot and immobilize the poor goat, then take her to her horrible fate. Lauren cleans off her ear, applies some ink, and punches the needles in.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Pandora wails. Seriously, there is no other word to describe it. For anyone who is not familiar with baby goats, they make cute little goat noises, sure, but they also have the uncanny ability to sound like human children. It is surely evidence that there is a sadistic deity governing our lives, because I cannot imagine why evolution would make this a biological imperative. Now I am sitting on a bench, holding a little goat, and hear a scream that would shatter the heart of Satan, and I am certain that I would never make a good serial killer because I have just now learned that I do not like holding small animals down and inflicting unreasonable pain on them, especially when they sound like toddlers.

Which means I'm not a psychopath! Yay!

"Mom, tell Dad to kill that person, pretty please?"

I release Pandora and she runs immediately to her mom, just like Pan. But unlike Pan, she does not come to offer me any forgiveness for what I did. I will be surprised if she even looks at me for the rest of my stay. Girls hold grudges a bit more firmly, it would seem.

 

Then it is time to make at least some of my efforts become something beautiful. We take the pieces of wood Ed chopped up with his chainsaw and turn them into this wondrous thing.

 

Professional quality, right there.

We construct a jump that literally blows over in a soft breeze. Given that I am not a fancy person who even knows anything about riding horses, that seems just about right for my level.

Coco and I warm up, and then it is time to take the jump. I am exceedingly nervous, because I have a tendency to fall off of things, and when they are moving, that makes the likelihood of hurting myself go to about 1000%. We have set up a small pile of logs a little shorter than the jump, and I kick Coco into a canter.

She takes the logs.

She takes the jump!

WHOO! FLAWLESS VICTORY!

We execute the jump in a way that did not cause me to die, i.e. perfectly. Lauren is ecstatic for me, and I am the champion of everything. I tell her please to do not think of me differently just because I am god of all things now. She tells me to do it again. I figure that is no problem. I queue up just as I did before, and kick Coco into a canter.

Imagine, if you will, that you are driving your car. You see the exit you need to take, and you flip on your blinker and go to make the turn. And then your car is like, "WHAT DUDE YOU WANT ME TO DO WHAT? FUCK THAT SHIT I'M OUT" and pulls over to the side of the road and starts trying to eat grass.

That is what the next hour of my life is like. Coco does not want to do it, and having already forced one little girl to experience torturous pain, I am loathe to force an old lady into the same. I do not call it quitting so much as compassionate break-taking.

 

Besides, it is growing late, and I am very tired. I lay down for a while until the sun starts setting, and the setting sun is the most important part of the day because that is when the baby goats start getting all weird. Thankfully, I am around to film it all.

As if the cuteness could not be enough, I make friends with one of the No Name Twins. Up until now, they have been very shy, but one of the little dudes seems to approve of my defacing two of his buddies and decides to hang out with me.

With my heart full of baby goats, I go back inside and do things that are mundane and uninteresting and then go to bed.

Goodnight, grass.

GOAT OF THE DAY: Paula

Paula is the mother of Pan and Pandora. She is a very placid goat who just happens to...like, be there. All the time. Every time I turn around, there is Paula. Where are her kids? Who knows. She is not concerned with things like children when there are treats to be had. In fact, her and Kitt probably have a club about ignoring their kids in favor of candy. If I have kids, I want to be in their club.

"Did you bring mommy her special candy? No? Then get out."