Marthajones feels poorly

Last night's great escape seems to have upset Marthajones. I found her huddled up in a corner this morning while her buddies ate. I nagged coaxed her til she agreed to stand up and wander around a bit -- just to get away from me probably. A bite of hay here, a lick of minerals there, but her spark was missing. She turned her nose up at bicarbonate. Rosetyler and Donnanoble, the middle of the pack does, were taking turns whacking her for no particular reason. I don't know what the problem is. She stood at the door to the yard for a long while, but it's too muddy to let her out yet.  Maybe she's longing for spring like the rest of us. Can a goat get depressed overnight?

Goings on

What is wrong with this picture?

I will tell you what is wrong with this picture. 

That is the barn aisle. 

That is not the goat pen. 

Yet those are goats. 

Maybe Marigold was right.

The goats are up to something. 

Into the abyss

They say bad things come in threes right?

Last night as I doled out the hay before bed, Tigerlilly and Bom Bom were messing with each other over their shared wall. As I stood there watching, Tigerlilly layed down to roll and...just like that, in the blink of an eye, before I could even breathe hold your horses, missy, she pinned herself nice and snug against the wall under Bom Bom's nose. Cast.

She seemed to understand the predicament she was in. She kept her usual diva attitude in check while I worked on getting a rope around her. Fortunately, chunky as she is, she's still small enough that a good strong rope under the armpits (um...armpits? well, you know what I mean) was enough to allow me to pull her free from the wall. No harm no foul.

This morning I left her in her stall while I let Thyme and Tyche, her immediate neighbors on the other side, out into the paddock. The paddock opens directly off the shed porch that runs down the length of the barn on that side. When I came back later to dole out hay (again), I found Thyme and Tyche in Tiger's stall. This is not good because, (a) where the heck was Tiger, (b) ponies aren't suppose to let each other in and out of their stalls, (c) the wall between Tiger and Bom Bom, is waaaayyyyyy too short to keep Thyme out of trouble -- Thyme's too tall and she likes to harrass Bom Bom -- ALOT, and (d) when I found Tiger, she was outside staring into --- and this is the third bit of badness -- an abyss of pony-swallowing dimensions.

That hole may not look large here, but let me assure you, the pictures don't do it justice. It is as big as a house. A friggin' whale of a hole. A VW bug could fit inside with room to spare. China is visible at the bottom. Someone, somehow, turned my nice smooth, mat-covered shed floor, into a pony-eating, leg-snapping, gravel strewn, crater-filled crime scene. This is where the ponies run back and forth like wild mustangs. This is directly outside their stall doors. This is a royal pain in the butt.

Oy. Ponies.

Squatters

We had a day of sun and loveliness earlier this week. It happily coincided with the day I finally had the cash to pay for a full load of hay, so I got to hang around the barn waiting for the hay guy all morning. I seized the moment to move a pallet of stall mats that had been sitting outside the new barn since Thanksgiving. They were leftover from a batch I bought to finish the stalls in the new barn last fall. They'd been dumped by the delivery guy in an awkward spot to start with and had stayed their all winter. You know, stall mats are h.e.a.v.y and they don't move themselves.

So there they sat all winter. Every time it snowed I noticed tiny tracks going back and forth between the pallet and the barn. At the barn end, they disappeared under the wall by the feed room. One especially dark night in midwinter, I caught a glimpse of a tiny creature sitting on top of the feed bin as I walked into the barn, before it vanished into the shadows. So I've known for a while that we had squatters and that they had set up house under the pallet.

 I was curious to see what was under there after I got the ton of stall mats off the pallet. Mice. Two to be exact. There were no signs of babies. I was happy that I evicted them before they'd had offspring. I know I shouldn't encourage mice, and I won't, but I would have been upset to to have disturbed a nursery. The mouse I got the clearest view of looked very healthy and sleek and their nest looked pretty cozy. It must have been, considering all the down feathers the mice had co-opted for their own use. Not surprising I guess, given their proximity to the chicken coop.

Both mice took off straight for the barn when I exposed them. Now every time I walk into the feed room I expect to see them there and wonder where exactly their new nest is. Somewhere inside the feed room I suppose. Ironically, none of the multitude of unremarkable cats live in the barn at the moment, so I expect the mice will stay. Though, I wouldn't put it past the chickens to eat one if it strayed their way in the light of day.