muck yuck

Good god... you'd think that dirt couldn't GET into those secret places... and this is special dirt, the kind that's made from poop from particularly poopy goats. It's brown. And it is everywhere. Today, we mucked out the barn. I started in the morning and as any good Mark Twainian knows, you have to make it look like it's a lot of fun to get people envious of the crap work they need to help you out with. So I was Tom today and Mike was... you know, the other ones that fall for the whitewashing.

The drill: Rake all the crud out of the six available stalls and into the center section of the barn, so the tractor can come and scoop the dusty crap or crappy dust up and out of the barn, into a pile that will become compost at some point.

Then, once it's out of the barn, you replace the mucky shit with more hay. All the while having to fend off goats and such, chase chickens around and generally just keep the animals at bay. We opened up a field for the goats to eat and made sure they couldn't come back to the barn while we did this.

Then the work began -- when Mike used his tractor and scooped and re-located the crap, I moved the outer edges of dirt with a rake to the center of the barn again. Over and over and over and over and over. Oh, joy! My arms hurt!

Then it's off to Discount Feeds to pick up more hay and wormer (we wormed all the goats last week, but some have 'bottle jaw' and need it again).

So it's done. A chore that needs to be done more often than once a year, but it doesn't get done because we are doing a million other things.

Also, Mike re-attached the back barn door for me so that when it's really cold outside this winter, we can keep the little toesies of the goaties warm and cosy.