Baby goats in 2026?
Happy Saturday friends!
As you read this, I will be in Pittsburgh visiting my brother, Nic, and of course Princess Penelope! Plans: painting his bathroom and/or painting his buffet and desk. Now, to most, this sounds like a chore but Michael and I can make anything fun! π
FROM THE RANCH THIS WEEK:
Fall is the time to breed goats for springtime babies. We didn't do that last year and we won't be this year either but I do miss it! I feel like I'm at the point where enough people around here would be up for goat yoga, but now have no baby goats to do it π€·πΌβοΈ In Colorado I knew enough people with small farms that wanted to buy baby goats so it wasn't a problem to sell them. But here, that's not (yet?) the case. In case you wonder: buy why would you sell them? Don’t you love animals? Just imagine…we started off with 6 goats in 2017. In 2018 we had 5 babies. In 2019 we had 7 babies. In 2020 we had 12 babies. So, without selling the babies, in just 3 years we would have gone from 6 goats to 30 goats. You can’t just keep having babies and keep the farm running. Luckily the Equine Gestalt Coaching program I was part of was based in Colorado so there were a lot of Colorado grads who had farms or were getting farms to do this work. So my babies always had good homes to go to :-)
If you want to see how boy goats act in the fall, check out our boy Heart here.
And if you want to see Dancer give birth to her triplets in the spring of 2024, click here.
The whole reason I'm even thinking about this is this ππ½
That is a BIG deer footprint! I'm guessing a buck looking for some girlfriends.
So many pretty sky pics this week:
I was sketching bears this week (a couple of them look SO surprised lol) but once I got to the big bear (full body) on the left, I started thinking about turning this one into a great big colorful painting! Yes, right? About 4 feet tall or so? Yes, I think that might have to happen:
Speaking of creative things, don't you think something like this should be painted going up the back stairs to the loft and my bedroom??
OMG! Yeeeeessssss
Throwback story to 2017, we'd only lived on our Colorado farm for 10 months and were learning something big every single day:
And the coyote adventures continue! Tonight Brad, ManChild and I were just finishing up chores, it was not quite dusk. We heard coyotes howling in the distance and turned to look. Brad spotted one a couple of hundred yards off and then as we all figured out exactly where he was talking about, the coyote moved and another joined him. A pair! We thought they were on the other side of the big ditch to the east of our property.
ManChild said, "I'm going to communicate with them," and started yipping and howling back at them. They answered. Our Border Collies Onya and baby Lucy aka The Dumpling were standing near the barn doors with me, listening. Well The Dumpling was, Onya probably couldn't hear the coyotes, she's 14 and fairly deaf and blind. Midgie was in the house.
Listening to ManChild, I was pretty much in awe of the sounds he was making. It sounded like a cross between an adult coyote and a pup—howling interspersed with high pitched yips. I expected to continue to watch and listen to the pair from afar. Ha. The coyotes started running down the ditch road toward us! It's at a diagonal and I thought they were on the other side so l wasn't too worried. Suddenly the closer coyote, who was much larger (German Shepherd sized) veered off and began running straight at us.
Shit.
It was on OUR side of the ditch!
It was still about 100 yards away but moving quickly. I said, "Oh my God, it's coming right for us." Brad was staring off to the right saying, "Where? I don't see it.”
ManChild lifted his arms to make himself big and RAN TOWARD the east fence, directly toward the coyote. (He's 9!)
The coyote didn’t stop.
I yelled to Brad, "Look left!" and stepped back to scoop up the puppy. Onya was still standing near the barn with me right next to her. All of this happened in about 5 seconds. Brad saw ManChild running toward the coyote and saw the coyote at about the same time. He lifted his arms to make himself big and yelled but that didn't stop the coyote either. He ran to the fence next to ManChild and the coyote finally stopped. At this point it was about 30 yards away from them.
Brad climbed the fence (a 4 ft barbed) and ran at the coyote who took off like a shot. When Brad stopped the coyote stopped so Brad ran after it again. The coyote stopped once to look back and realized that Brad was still running toward it and took off again.
This definitely ranks up there as one of the weirdest experiences we've had here on the Mother Ranch yet!
My thoughts: did it not know that there were 3 humans over here? Was it actually, knowingly, running AT humans? What did it think was over here? What did Michael's noises mean to it? A hurt animal? Another coyote? Maybe it's own pups?
And that was the final straw and how we ended up with two livestock guardian dogs!
Next week there will be real buttons to sign up for the two online freebie art classes (Nov and Dec) and the online Women’s Circle starting Jan 5, in the mean time, call/text/email me if you’d like to join! If you haven’t read about it yet, click here!
THE MEMES:
Have you guys watched Alien Earth yet? This was my first thought during the first episode:
Wonder what ever happened to Cam Newton?
I had to ask ChatGPT about this, did the person responsible really get stabbed?, here's what it said:
"Ha! Yes — in a manner of speaking, they were.
Here’s the backstory behind that meme:
When the commenter says “I have excellent news for you,” they’re jokingly referring to Julius Caesar, who quite literally was stabbed — 23 times, to be exact. π‘οΈ
And he’s the one (along with Emperor Augustus) responsible for messing up the original calendar. The original Roman calendar did have September, October, November, and December as the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months — until Julius Caesar and then Augustus inserted July (Julius) and August (Augustus) in their honor, pushing everything down by two months.
So yes, the guy who “messed it up” got stabbed. Repeatedly.
Excellent news indeed."
Do you guys follow the Dull Men's Club on Facebook? ππ½
ππ½In case you don't know what a PE is, it stands for Professional Engineer. A Professional Engineer (PE) license is a state certification showing an engineer’s proven competence. It requires passing the FE and PE exams and gaining about four years of experience under a licensed engineer. ππ½
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This is an AI-free newsletter! While I love to use AI to help me figure out a piece of software I don't understand, my intention is to use it to help me with the drudgery, never with writing, art, creation. All em dashes are intentional and mine, I was using them way before ChatGPT was a twinkle in Sam Altman's eye :-)
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The Mother Ranch art on Substack.
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Julia MacMonagle
Author
Owner of The Mother Ranch, a healing space in Apex, NC offering art e-courses, Equine Gestalt Coaching, and NeurOptimal Neurofeedback.
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