We’ve packed the car. The house is clean(ish). The animals are settled. The farmsitter is on her way here. And we’re off to Ocracoke tomorrow morning at around 4:00. If we can wait that long.

Aren’t we dorks?

Tonight they’re calling for scattered light frost, and while I really don’t think we’ll get one, it just seems too soon to be worrying about it! I guess I’ll throw some reemay or old sheets over my peppers and basil, but the tomatoes are too sprawling and the okra too tall to be able to effectively cover them.

Next year, I may try to make the beach trip a little earlier, because my focus by this time of the year is more on home and homeschool and getting ready for winter. Plus it’s gorgeous here right now—who in their right mind would want to leave?

Rosemary is lumbering hugely around the pasture; her personality has taken a turn for the docile lately. She waits at the fence for somebody to come rub her forehead, and when I’m in the garden she hangs around rather personably. I like cows. They stay alive in this wet and humid climate, as opposed to goats, who sometimes seem as if they’re just looking for a good excuse to die. We’ve dried Tallulah up completely, because she struggled with haemonchus contortus worms so bad this summer, and the only course of action seemed to be to quit milking her. And she does seem to be putting a little weight on now. We quit milking Maggie for the same reason, though she’s not dried up; she has her doe kid with her. So we’re just milking Cookie, once a day, and getting about a half gallon of milk from her, which is enough for some cheese. I have ordered a temperature controller for the refrigerator on the back porch so that I’ll be able to age some cheeses this fall, which really sounds fun!

I think all the goats are bred. It snuck up on us this year: Jessamine is due in the middle of January, and the rest in a cluster in the middle of February. I wasn’t sure about the middle of winter for kidding and milking, but since we’ll be milking Rosemary starting at the end of November, I guess it really doesn’t matter!

Before,

after,

and during.

DH before…

…and after.

I picked the Suburu up from the mechanic’s the other day—it was there for ten days (he got the flu in the middle of working on it), and all the annoying little (and not so little) problems are fixed now, and it’s a pleasure to drive again.

During the time the car was gone, I never left the farm. For ten days. I got an amazing amount done—tons of house organizing and cleaning, some gardening, lots of playing with my new computer—but by the end, I was pretty much stir crazy and ready to see other adult, non-DH humans. The funny thing is, I was kind of unaware of how long I’d been home without leaving until I got out again.

So we’re still keeping our fingers crossed on Rosemary being bred. The neighboring farmer that stopped by the other day looked at her and said,”Why, yeah! She’s bred!” I asked him how he could tell, and he said,”Cause of how she’s sorta big in the back.” I’m looking at her, not knowing what he’s talking about, and I go,”What do you mean ‘big in the back’?” He says,”You know—big. In the back.” Now I’m starting to get an inkling what we’re talking about, but as he’s starting to squirm a little, I wickedly persist. “No—what do you mean?” There’s this long pause, all of us standing there looking over the fence at Rosemary, and finally he says, after clearing his throat,”Her cooter. Her cooter’s kind of big.”

Not very mature of me, but hey—you take your fun where you find it out here in the country.