Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!

My high school chemistry teacher had this awesome experiment he would perform to demonstrate the relationship between the surface area of a solid reactant and reaction time. You attach a couple feet of tubing to a small funnel that is sitting inside of a coffee can. You fill the funnel with starch powder, then light a votive candle and place it inside the can, next to the funnel, and put the lid back on the can. When you blow into the tubing, the starch is distributed throughout the air in the coffee can, creating lots of surface area, and the lid blows off the coffee can in a spectacular flash of a fireball. It all happens so fast that if it wasn't for the blurry blind-spot that was still seared into your cornea, you might question whether the fireball happened at all.

That's kind of how that feeling of loneliness from my first 24 hours here was. A giant flash of overwhelming, unbearable heat...followed by nervous laughter and a few glances in the mirror to make sure my eyebrows weren't singed off.

The internet issue wasn't so hard -- the farmhouse actually has a computer connected to dial-up (yes, dial-up!), and ASTL showed me an awesome coffeeshop that has wi-fi. The shop also sells beer and wine by the glass and has tanning beds in the basement -- I feel kind of like I'm updating my blog from the "Jersey Shore" General Store.

Additionally, in the 9 days I've been here, ASTL, QG, and I really have become friends ASAP. ASTL is a neat lady who knows everything there is to know about raising goats and alpacas, and QG (who's not actually so Q now that I know him) is always ready to strike up a conversation about everything from Star Trek conventions to lava lamps. (He also bakes cookies almost every day, which never hurts.)

Now for the actual work!

Everyday we thaw and heat milk for the bottle babies 3 times -- 6 AM, noon, and 6 PM -- and then spend about 45 minutes feeding them. In the mornings we top-dress all the pens in the barn with straw, and distribute grain, hay and water to the kids and does in the barn, and then to the general herd. I next do some sort of different chore between then and the noon feeding, usually raking alpaca manure or cleaning kidding pens. What's a kidding pen you ask? Oh, you put the doe in there and she tells jokes. *rimshot* But really, it's where you put a doe that is about to give birth.

My first couple days doing the chores were a little like a farce. For example: I was filling water tanks, but the hose kept coming apart at a certain junction. I'd run back, slipping in the mud, and plug the hose back together, spraying water on myself from head to toe, before running back to where the end was now comically floundering about like a fire hose in a cartoon. It was like something out of a Three Stooges film, with sped-up black and white cinematography and a tinny, ragtime piano playing in the background.

Did you know that goats wag their tails just like dogs to indicate that they're glad to see you? Well, take my word when I say that it's ADORABLE. Some of the bottle babies are so small that we hold them, cuddling and cooing, while we feed them. ASTL joked that she's going to check my luggage before I leave to make sure I didn't take one. Blast! She's on to me...

"Ma'am, you can't take a goat on the plane."

"But she's my personal item!"

Favorite goat lesson so far: If a kid has been orphaned, you can get a different, recently kidded doe to accept it as her own if you introduce it to her within the hour after she has given birth. Does have so many hormones coursing through them at that time that they'll mother anything (they'll even lick humans during that time, which is what they do to their kids to get them to nurse). IN FACT, if you make the orphaned kid look really helpless, the doe is even more likely to accept it. SO, a common practice is to hog-tie the kid and THEN place it in front of the doe so that she gets all Angelina Jolie on it and adopts.

As for the alpacas, they are much more human-shy than the goats. Whenever I enter their pen, they all stop whatever they're doing and stare at me like a Shark who's just walked into the Jets' favorite hangout.

Once you're a 'Pac,

You're a 'Pac all the way --

From your first skein of yarn

To your last bale of hay...

Favorite alpaca lesson so far: It's actually preferable for the alpacas to be human-shy. If a human handles them too much or pets them too much when they are a baby (a "cria"), they develop a really close bond to the human and thinks that he/she is an alpaca as well. In females, the condition is annoying but not too dangerous. In males, however, the condition is called "berserk male syndrome" -- the alpaca will charge or try to chest-bump the human like a fuzzy quadrupedic frat boy.

To sum it all up: I've adapted to life here much more quickly than I've ever adapted to anything before. Perhaps because I've had several conversations with friends in recent months about the need to accept change instead of fighting it -- I think just being aware of that need has made me heed it now that I have the opportunity. Accepting change, acknowledging that the present is now foreign and different from what we knew in the past, is scary -- but ultimately satisfying, and definitely necessary for growth.

μηδὲν ἄγαν,

Dorkas