Itty Bitty Hooves

A Heavy Subject

I try really hard not to think about weight issues. I’m active, and do a lot of physical work every day so it’s kind of easy to tell myself I’m in good enough shape. Until I see a picture of myself that is. It’s probably common for most over-weight people. They convince themselves they’re in good enough shape, and they stay away from pictures. After a short picture taking session today though it’s plain enough to see I have to do something. I know I’ll need help though. A product like Miracle burn can be a great aide in diet struggles. Check out the dietawarenessinstitute.org website for a great comparison of the weightloss products and their effectiveness. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of buying products that can be quite expensive. It’s a lot better to know if they have a good history of success before spending the money, and seeing which is right for you.

The Great Escape

I had the whole herd of goats out in the one acre back yard this morning. The fencing at the back of that area is marginal but I don’t usually have too much trouble with it. Usually if someone does escape the area it’s one of the smallest, and they are dairy kids and very easy to catch. The worst time was when all four of those got out and I couldn’t figure out where to get them back in from the same place so I had to reach over the fence and lift them over. While they’re smaller than all the rest, they’re still getting pretty big to hoist over a fence.

Well today, I had another escape, it was only two, but this time it wasn’t the dairy kids, it was two of the seven month old boer cross kids and let me tell you those girls are not ‘hoistable’. Worse yet, they’re not particularly catchable at all. Luckily one of them is fairly friendly. You still can’t grab onto her but she will come when called. Even more lucky is that they’re both food-aholics so totally bribeable. I got a bucket of grain and shook it. They both ran to the area of fence that they’d gotten through at.

Now here’s the rub. A goat will manage to get over a low fence, through a weak spot, or under a loose bottom, but they will NOT go back over/under/through the same area no matter what. So Bob had to hold down the fence as far to the ground as it would go (which was pretty far, — the reason for the escape in the first place) and I held the bucket just out of reach. Specs, the easier one to at least pet and who will come to you was the first one over the fence to get at the bucket. Cherry– not at all people trusting was a bit more difficult, but she finally gave into temptation and greed as she saw Specs chomping away on the grain just out of her reach.

So we managed to get them back in the yard, and put all the goats back in their goat pasture. They have plenty to graze on in there, but I had wanted them to trim down the yard a bit. They’d had it really well ‘mown’ and I let it grow back up. Before I can put them back in there though I’m going to have to really examine that back fence for more trouble spots. I can’t have the ‘wild ones’ getting out. I’m really lucky it wasn’t Blonde who had gotten out. She’s worse than Cherry when it comes to trust.

Off To The Show

We went to a goat show again yesterday. Once again we were merely bystanders. Regular audience members. It’s kind of weird. Until just recently with the goat shows it had been years upon years since I went to a show just to watch. Be it dog show, horse show, livestock shows of one kind or another, or even rabbit shows, for the past 30 years when I went to a show, I was IN the show with one animal or another.

I don’t really suppose it was necessary to go to these shows to learn the specifics. Basically goats are shown just like most other animals. The methods of showing most commonly resemble that of dog showing, or sheep showing. Showmanship methods are the same for every animal on the planet–the basic premises is don’t get between the animal and the judge. The judge needs to see the animal, not you as best as possible.

Other than the breeder sale I want to go to in September, I think I”m done with observing now. The next show we go to we’ll be entered in with the goats. Probably next spring.

I do want to go to the auction however, to see how the production sales prices compare to average livestock auctioning. I know usually they’re higher, but I want to see what we’re looking at as far as future visability for selling at the bigger production auctions next year vs selling from the farm or at livestock auctions. I can’t honestly say I will be going to the production sale JUST to look and observe however. haha… I do hope to have some cash in my pocket and perhaps make it home with a nice purebred doe. (shhhuuuussshhhh, don’t tell anyone. haha)

Work Ethics

I was late for work yesterday. I mean really late, not just a few minutes. I ended up working a lot of overtime hours to make up for the difference. Now a lot of you might be sitting there scratching your heads because you know I work at home. How can you be late to your own house? Does it pay to work overtime?

Well the answer to the last question is no, not really. At least it doesn’t pay more.

The answer to the others is that when you work for yourself you have to have a very, very strong work ethic. You have to be able to demand that you put in the hours. Of course, that makes sense. After all, if you don’t work, you can’t make money no matter what the job, or who you work for… but what many people who work outside the home for someone else, and dream of the freedom of working for themselves don’t realize is how easy it is to slack off when you don’t have to punch a time clock.

Even though I work from home I absolutely have set hours. No one set them for me. I am the one who determines what is needed to make my business work. I expect myself to be in my office by 9 am at the lastest every morning. I used to even require mandatory weekends but I am now able to give myself weekends off most of the time unless something special turns up, or there is an emergency. Nice huh?

Well yesterday I had good reason for being late. There were massive thunderstorms in my area and it is just not smart to be on the computer and especially online where I do most of my work under conditions like that. So Mother Nature kept me out of the office. I spent the whole morning watching TV–which was nice…and agonizing over not getting the work done that needed done… not nice.

In order to complete all the work I had available to me that day and make the money I wish to make I ended up working until 9 pm instead of my normal 4 pm.

No one was sitting there with a whip. Consequently no one is paying me time and a half either. I will make the money I would normally make for the work, and that is the reward.

So what makes working from home so much better than working for someone else? Well, I don’t have to share the money I made with anyone else. I get the entire profit from it. For me that’s only a small part of what makes working from home a good thing.

I can set my own hours. That doesn’t mean I don’t have to put the hours in, but if I were to decide that I like starting work at noon, and working until 9, I can. If I decide I want to start at 9 am and then take from noon to 4 off to run errands, or play with the kids (if I had any), and work again in the evening, I can. There is a flexibility to working from home that is liberating.

No one tells me what hours to work. It is both a blessing and a danger. When working from home you have to make yourself accountable to YOU. Otherwise, as nice as the flexible schedule is, and the money can be, there won’t be any money if you don’t put in the work.

Working For Your Money

Some folks have told me that writing a four hundred word article for only four dollars is not worth the effort. There are times I might agree with them. Certainly there are opprotunities on-line to make more than that for much less work. There are other requirements involved in doing those however, and they’re hard to come by.

If making money isn’t an issue then it’s not and good for you. Me, I need to pay bills and like to have money left over when possible to do cool things like by the DVD “Astronaut Farmer” like I did this past weekend.

If I can do four articles an hour, which I can fairly easily, then I can make sixteen dollars an hour. When you think about it that way it suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad deal.

Sometimes we can talk ourselves out of things easier than we can see the good and talk ourselves into them when it comes to working. There’s no such thing as easy money. If it wasn’t work, no one would pay you for it. LOL

Smart Goat

Okay, when it happened I added an quick little expliative in between Smart, and Goat yesterday, but now it’s funny.

I was on my way out to feed in the morning after milking and I heard the chain rattling on Mickey, our three year old Boer goat buck’s pen. That’s nothing really all that unusual. There’s two things in Mickey’s life that make his ‘chain rattle’… food and *ahem* girls.

He rattles the chain on his pen all the time when I’m on my way with food. I didn’t think anything of it until I glanced up and saw him half way through the gate into the doe’s (females) pen. Ahhhhh smart @!@* goat. He sure was a happy camper though. It’s mid-summer so no one was ready for him, or interested at all, but that didn’t make any difference to Mickey. He thought he’d died and gone to goaty heaven.

Well his joy was short lived. I managed to get him back into his own pen after a few minutes of petting, rubbing, and cajoling. It’s not like he’s far from everyone. His pen is right next door to the girls. Obviously since it has a gate that enters theres. Well, you can’t blame a fella for tryin’ I suppose.

Fun Windows For Kids

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Anniversary Gift

A few weeks ago I said I was going to get a Canvas On Demand present for my husband on our anniversary. His eyes watered over when he saw the post about the .anniversary gift There went the surprise. HAHA, but surprise or not, he was thrilled when it came in the mail today. The picture turned out beautifully. There were a couple of problems along the way regarding the ability to upload a large enough file size to get a clear blow up of the original picture but the Canvas On Demand folks were fantastic to work with and willing to help every time.

They immediately called, and emailed me to let me know there was a problem, and we decided I would send in a hard copy of the picture instead of using the computer to upload it.

The following week the mailer they sent out still hadn’t arrived and I called them. Again they were terrific and said they would put another in the mail immediately.

I recevied that one with no problem and put the picture in the heavily padded envelope and sent it off to them.

It arrived today and even though he knew it was coming it brought yet another tear to his eyes to have his beloved pet Justice who is gone now immortalized on a canvas print. It looks so much like a beautiful painting that it’s hard to believe it isn’t an artist’s work.

Here’s a shot of it hanging on Bob’s office wall.

Thanks for the beautiful anniversary gift Canvas On Demand.

More Work For The Wicked

I started a new on-line job just recently. It’s a lot like the blogging work I’ve been doing without using a blog. That’s really nice. The pay is good and the volume of work is really good. No complaints on how much I can make in a day. It really does just depend on how much I want to put into it. I don’t have to stay at the computer all day hitting to see if I can catch an assignment. If you want to know what I’m doing and how to get in on it, leave your email in the comments thread and I’ll let you know.

Inside Fun Pics

It’s been so hot outside that I’ve had to find most of my ‘fun’ indoors during the really hot part of the day from 10 am to around 6 or so pm. We did get a thunderstorm last night while I was sleeping. The thunder and lightening started around 8 pm, but no rain until after I went to bed. I could barely tell it had rained at all. The ground was barely wet and there were no puddles anywhere. Either it didn’t rain as hard as all the hububb in the sky indicated it would, or the ground was so parched it swallowed it up before it even hit the dirt (most likely).

Anyway, Bob and I spent a lot of time playing around with the camera inside the other day and got some fun pics I’d like to share.

First I got two new fish last Thursday. A pair of Angel fish. Both are ‘marbled’ but one is barely marked and white. She’s really pretty. I don’t know for sure if she’s a girl or not, but she looks so feminine I can’t help but call her a ’she’. The picture kind of gives her a golden cast, but she’s really very white.

The other (we’ll just say ‘he’ for the sake of argument, lol) is a black and gold marble. He’s really marked well.

Here they are together. This pic shows how white the white angel is:

Then of course no picture set would be complete without Baby keeping an eye on things. She’s trying to nap during the picture session and plainly isn’t too pleased at being kept up.

Sylvia had to keep an eye on things too to make sure all her ‘pets’ weren’t being disturbed too much, lol:

She quickly decided all was okay and was just satisfied to keep an eye on things while she rested:

Here’s a picture of one of our goldfish, one of the danios (the thin silver fish), and if you look closely, the body of the plecos

Here’s a closeup of one of the goldfish. They’re getting pretty big. They’re probably 4 times the size they were when I got them back in January:

And the final picture is one of the guppy tank’s sunken ship.

That’s all the pictures for today. I need to get outside and get some pictures of this year’s foals. They haven’t changed much since I posted their dayold shots. It’s only been a few months, but they’re so cute anyway.