The Weekend in Photos

Jeff started out Saturday morning with the weed wacker, to trim our walking trails. He ran out of gas right by the pump-house and stopped in there to check on it. Found a leak! (Which he repaired on Sunday.) Since we are planning on updating our water system imminently anyway, he began work on that project. On the tractor, he began leveling out on the side of the shop (formerly known as the pole barn) because we will be putting a new pressure tank and water storage tank there. He had just begun when I took the picture and is much farther along now.

Anytime Jeff moves dirt, the kids move in. Here they are fighting amiably for the title of King of the Castle. By the end of the weekend, there were many more dirt piles and broken pieces of shale which the kids turned into gorgeously landscaped estates (they each had a hill-top to design).

The peacocks have moved in. We’ve seen them every day, multiple times a day. One day, the kids saw the male and the hen mating. The male displayed his plumage on Saturday morning and we were all roaming around, within feet of him. He is pretty beat up, though. There’s a county park with peacocks nearby and the peacocks there are much more beautiful.

See how close they are to Mikah? Mikah, Jeff’s helper on the water project, decided to get to know his tool box again and organize it. His tools were spread out in his room, in the kitchen, in the shop, in Jeff’s toolbox. So Mikah got them all together and got his own toolbox back in order.

These are madrone stumps we (I say we, but it was really Jeff and a friend) took out last fall from between the shop and the house. The goats love to climb on it. I have yet to see one of them on the tippy top. But I think it will happen. This is what the goats were doing when the peacock was displaying near Mikah.

Then the peacock made his signature call, which sounds disturbingly like a child’s cry for help, and the goats, lickety-split, got down off the madrone stumps and came to see what the fuss was all about.

Then they all wandered around together, pecking and nibbling. The goats’ preference is still to hang around the house, although they are not scared anymore. They’re getting stubborn in their familiarity, in fact. Now they don’t follow us everywhere we go, because they know their own minds. However, the kids have been “shepherding” them to various places of our property to eat down the weeds and get variety. Fiddlesticks, the three-legged matriarch, gets tired though, and calls them all back to the barn, whether or not we approve. This is such an adventure for us and we wouldn’t trade it for the world!