just the two of us

My grandma was not able to come this morning. UH OH! I have yet to figure out how to milk a goat and even if I were to try, Orlando won’t be here either to help wrangle and hold the goats down. I panicked for a couple morning hours, but then Sylvia and I agreed that we could do it. Orlando had showed Sylvia how to hold the goat from the horns the other day so she did that while Patricia hugged the goat in place. I decided it was now or never for me to figure out how to milk a goat. I tugged, squeezed, pulled, and pressed the udders in all different manners until I finally figured it out. I was milking a goat! Another awesome part about it is that we didn’t have to tie their legs together either. The only thing stopping the goats from running or fighting was Sylvia holding the horns. This is a lot to say because when we first started off milking it was Orlando holding the horns with all his might, me hugging the goat and rubbing the stomach, and my grandma tying the legs and milking. Now, all we need is Sylvia holding onto the horns and me milking.
This morning I took the goats for a walk. I find myself laughing right now because how often do you hear someone is taking their goats for a walk. Anyways, I was walking the goats through the woods when we came across a huge deer field. The goats trust me completely now and they don’t have a leash on them so when they saw the deer they ran off towards the tent as fast as they could. This was really surprising to me because:
1) I had never seen so many deer at once in my life and
2) there was this huge reindeer with gigantic antlers staring directly at me and not running away with the other deer. When the goats noticed I wasn’t running with them they stopped and started baaing (goat sounds) like crazy.
The entire time I was completely still just staring at the reindeer and field because I was so shocked and scared. Then when I heard the goats I reacted and walked away from the deer. I don’t really know how to better explain this experience, but I feel like the goats were trying to protect me or warn me in a way.
On a sadder note, Patricia has left us. It is now down to Sylvia and I. She had decided to go about this experience a little different from what Sylvia and I were doing. Her way of doing it only allowed her to do it for a week because that’s all she prepared for. Also, with school coming up soon she really needed to get her senior project together.
I was planning on doing some laundry today, but the weather was too humid and cold to dry anything. Everything was very wet from the rain the night before. With this humidity came a very powerful smell of feces and other bad odors around our living area. This needs to stop. After serious discussion, Sylvia and I debated whether to make a bigger enclosure for the goats and chickens or an enclosure around our campsite. We decided that the best and easiest thing would be creating an enclosure around ourselves to keep the chickens and the goats from attracting flies and bad odors to our living space.
Hopefully, tomorrow will be a lot better day weather wise.