Well, I’m about halfway through my leave and it’s been fairly full so far, even though I haven’t managed to do very much from my ‘jobbie list’ ❗ We’ve had two ‘holidays’ since I’ve been home. First weekend, we went to collect a goat and two kids, and as we decided that it would be too long a journey for a day trip, we booked a night in a B&B. The B&B was really lovely, and run by a Dutch gentleman who used to work for Shell. He had talked to Dazzle before on the subject of her weaving. She took several items to show him and he was so impressed that he traded our nights board for one of her rugs, bought one of her wall hangings and commissioned her to make three rugs and three wall hangings, one of each for the three rooms in the B&B. The main purpose of the trip was to pick up the goats which we did. The two kids proved to be a hit in Breckenridge, where we had stopped to try to bottle feed them. First though we had to try to clean out the back of the Land Rover as it was awash with pee and poo, from a very nervous goat. One mother that we met there suggested the names of Emma and Rachel for the kids, as those were her twin daughters names. One daughter had come over with her, while the other stayed in the car, and Emma announced the the brown kid was Emma and the white one was Rachel. We told them that Rachel was the more ‘difficult’ of the two and the mother agreed that her Rachel was the more difficult of the two too. We finally got the new goats home and them struggled to get them to take their bottle, so we ended up training them as ‘milking assistants’, much to the initial disgust of Tonya and Kari, the two milk goats. Tonya is much more tolerant now, but only when she was on the milking stand, Kari still fusses. The next weekend, Dazzle had a surprise for me. I knew we hat to go to Denver to meet a lady who was selling us meat for the dogs, what I didn’t know was that Dazzle had booked an overnight stay at a hotel and that we were going to see some of the events in the National Western Stock Show. It was interesting, we saw some highland cattle and met and spoke with people about them and also saw some of the sheep dog trials. The day after getting back from the Stock Show we had to go and pick up the first load of our own Highland cows. So now we have Maybell, Hamish and Akira on the ranch too. So, so far its been a very busy leave. As well as getting three cows and three new goats, we’ve also had the four goats that we were selling picked and gone now.
