Friday, May 25, 2012

It's a Beginning

I haven't updated my Mopple Chronicles blog in a long, long time, partly due to time constraints and partly because Mopple, sweet though he is, is not the brightest bulb in the pack and training wasn't going too terribly well. We're going to try again soon (possibly with a different sheep, though I still want to teach Mopple to at least pull the wagon), but in the meanwhile I thought I'd start a more general-topic blog. This is it.

On a personal note, I spend most of my time these days writing and feeding animals (not necessarily in that order). I'm working on a book for Storey titled Homegrown Pork: Humane, Healthful Techniques for Raising a Pig for Food in Your Own Backyard, adding to an ebook on economical horsekeeping as time permits, and writing columns for Hobby Farms and Chickens magazines. Oh, and blogging as Martok the goat at Hobby Farms Online. It keeps me busy.

That's Ozark Jewels General Kerla, my two-year-old registered Nubian buck at the head of this post. Isn't he handsome? Does he not epitomise goatiness? Goats and sheep are my passion, hence my online name, Dreamgoat Annie. It's obviously a wordplay on Dreamboat Annie but also hearkens back to my youth (and Ann is my real middle name).

When I was 19, my parents and I moved to a farm in the sand burr country midway between Plymouth and Culver, Indiana. I rode my horse on the back roads near our farm and sometimes stopped to talk with an old German woman area folks called Goat Annie. She was very old, bent and wizened, and she lived in a tiny, tarpaper shack in the woods alone except for her goats. I thought at the time, "What a lonely life! And who'd want goats in their house?" Now I commiserate entirely. I could live in the woods with goats (but maybe in a bit nicer cabin). Funny how our values change as we grow older.

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