The Boy Who Cried Goat

I think my blog will mainly consist of tall tales from now on. People I haven't heard from in months are contacting me asking about the small farm that I've started in Vermont. Are you guys really serious? From Maren Holmes now worrying about how Drew is going to want his own chickens and goats, to Tommy as happy as a proud daddy could be that I made the jump to the farm business, to my grandmother informing my mother that I've just got a goat, I've heard it all. And I'm now sure that the people I haven't heard from are actually wondering, too embarassed to ask, if I really do have these animals roaming my three acres of land. You guys crack me up.

Jaimelee couldn't believe that I didn't mention Alexis in the first blog, so here we go with an Alexis update: She's been awful! I guess I should sugarcoat this a little, but it would be hard to do. She's been sick for almost two weeks. First with a fever and now with a stuffy nose that constantly wakes her up every night. So long to the wonderful 12 hour sleeping schedule. She's been waking herself, and consequently Jaimelee, up every two hours for the past week. I'm going the Bob route and pretending not to hear her. It's been working out well for me so far.

The fat jokes might actually be working as she has also lost her appetite during this sickness. She still hammers her cereal and afternoon squash, but could care less about her bottles. Unfortunately, the sumo wrestling thing no longer seems to be a viable option for a future career for her. I'll get some Ben and Jerry's this afternoon to see if I can get her back on the wagon.

Because of the stress that she's caused both Jaimelee and myself, we decided to hire a live-in nanny to help us with our parental responsibilities. She's from the Czech repulic and is cool with staying in a make-shift bedroom we made above the garage. So far we couldn't be happier with her. We're just hoping that she learns the English language relatively quickly. When she talks to Alexis with her Czech accent, Alexis thinks it's the funniest thing ever.

World Is Ending

With my sister constantly telling me the world is going to end at any minute, I've decided that I better jump on board with phase one of armageddon, setting up my own blog. As you'll see with this post, everything in my life is modeled after my wonderful sister. My patience, my driving, my love of baseball all come from me seestor. Why not follow her footsteps in all other areas of life? So, again, here's phase one of my master plan to become everything that my sister is (she likes to end sentences in prepositions as well).

In all honesty, I do think this blog will provide me an opportunity to stay in touch with many people I otherwise may neglect on a weekly basis. If you read Lisa's blog, http://www.ranchogardiner.blogspot.com/, as often as me (about once a month), you will miss many exciting stories in the life of JAJ. I'll put pictures as part of this blog (and eventually will), but our high speed internet just got passed by a turtle with a donkey on its back.

With armageddon right around the corner, I've decided to follow my sisters footsteps and get 15 chickens. If the world really is ending, I really wondered how long we could survive on 15 chickens. So, I decided to step it up a bit and we also got a cow (they're so cute), a goat (when we're feeling like feta), a pig (when we're feeling skinny), and two fish (just for fun) that we're keeping in a bucket until I can dig a pond.

In addition to all of this meat and protein, we also decided to plant our very first vegetable garden. What started out as a small idea of tomatoes and carrots, blossomed into a pretty enormous garden with beans, squash, onions, zucchini, corn, cucumbers, radishes, pumpkins, and the tomatoes and carrots, of course. In total, our garden is 40' x 12'. We are lucky that this is going to be a shared garden with our very helpful neighbors, Eric and Kelly. We rototilled Saturday night, mixed in some lime and compost early Sunday morning and planted everything most of Sunday afternoon. Who knew a garden was so much work? We're very happy and thankful to be sharing this workload with Eric and Kelly. If it were just up to JL and me, we'd end up killing the goat in a time of crisis... as we're both skeptical that this garden will produce any food at all. Can't wait to compare my harvest with Lisa's. Even if I don't produce as much as Lisa, I still now have a goat.

In addition to the garden and buying all of those animals, I also installed a gutter system in my house. No, I'm too cheap to install the traditional gutters, but if a gutter is defined as " any channel, trough, or the like for carrying off fluid" then what I did can be considered a gutter system. I had some left over rock from my patio project (still not done yet... thanks Jay). I decided to dig a little trench 19 inches around the house and then cover this with the leftover rock. It doesn't look the greatest, but it'll keep dirt from splashing up against the house.... and it kept me busy while the girls were out looking for vegetables to plant... only to come back with flowers.

As for Memorial Day, we'll be burning the trees Eric and I took down while we were bored this afternoon and probably look to take down more. We'll probably have some friends over so they can hang out on our back rock patio with us and our goats, chickens, cow, pig, and fish. Should be good times.

Hey, this blogging thing might be fun. I'll post pictures of all of my animals as soon as my high speed internet gets out of the 80s.