It's been awhile

Sorry I’ve been neglecting my blogs. John is visiting his extended family in Indiana for the holiday and between doing the chores and everyday upkeep and chipping away at Have a Cow and my Hobby Farms assignments, blogging completely slipped my mind.

BUT, here is my big news: I got the go-ahead from Storey to submit a proposal for Feeling Sheepish! To say I’m thrilled is an understatement. I began working on the proposal yesterday and am having the time of my life.

Much as I adore goats, I honestly prefer researching sheep. It’s the history, you see. Goats were domesticated before sheep by perhaps one to two thousand years, but because humans utilized wool even before domestication (they picked shed undercoat out of bushes and such), sheep and humans go way, way back.

And, sheep are just plain interesting creatures. Studying their behavior is fascinating stuff. Take Mopple, who despite being raised with Edmund, still prefers to hang out days with the sheep.

Old Angel, who was fostered on a doe is quite the opposite; she reluctantly spends her nights in the sheep fold (we can’t let her overnight with the goats lest she ingest too much copper from their mineral tubs) but she joins the goats the moment she’s let out for the day. Last month she marched past five rams to hang out by Martok’s buck run when she was in heat. He had a visiting girlfriend and paid her no mind; as you see, she seemed quite depressed.

This proposal gives me an excuse to add items to my sheep ephemera collection too, though I already have a fat photo album of goodies if the book is a go. The picture at the top of this entry is one of my favorites, taken around the turn of the century in Burra, a former mining and pastoral town in South Australia (read about Burra here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burra,_South_Australia and here: www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/burra.htm). Don’t you wish you knew the story behind this image? I’ve tried to find out, but no luck so far.