Adventure #7: Goats. Goats! GOOOOOATS!

For our seventh adventure (and if you are scratching your head wondering what all of this adventuring nonsense is about, just click here for all of the explaining. tl;dr: we are trying to make the most of these rootless summer months by looking! on! the bright side! This involves exclamation marks and photographs and numbered adventures. I hate me, too)

For this adventure, we are house sitting. This is all very ho hum and I wouldn’t blame you at all if you were thinking, “House sitting? Wow. What an adventure, Madeleine. I mean DREAM BIG!”

I get it.

Well, I get it until I look out the window at this. Here:

and if you thought that view was great, look at this one:

Say whaaaaat? Yes, that is what you think it is.

We are not only housesitting, but dogsitting( x2) and cat sitting (x3) and GOAT sitting (x4!! 4 GOATS!).

I don’t know why I was/am/forever will be so excited about the goats. Maybe because, pre-no dairy, goat cheese was one of my main food groups. Perhaps because the rotund white ladygoat you see here is named Little Mama, and she and I shared a due date when I was pregnant.

Or perhaps just because GOOOOOOOATS!

I love them.

Gus also loves them, but made a strange decision to show this love in a disturbing display of running and barking and frothing when he first saw them, and even though he now spends many hours sitting nicely at the gate of their pasture hoping desperately that one of them will play with him or at least let him lick their horns or something, they are too smart for these shenanigans and are keeping their distance.

Adam has been in a baseball tournament all weekend, so Olive and I have spent our days in a bucolic haze of sunshine and crawling and little picnics on the grass with cats.

When he comes home we walk the dogs and sit on the porch looking at all of this and scheming of ways to make it ours.

To date we have gotten as far as investigating the ins and outs of Squatters Rights. Apparently it’s not just as simple as changing the locks while the owners are away.

Why does everything have to be so hard?

Whenever we have looked at houses, Adam says, in the voice of a man possessed with a desperate need, that he wants land. Laaaand.  He says it bolded, underlined, capitalized and in italics. He. Needs. LAAAAND.

And I never really got it. It sounded like a lot of work. What kind of work? I don’t know…mowing? Or something?

But being out here I get it. Oh lord, I get it. I feel quiet and smooth and rested. all I hear is the crunch of gravel and the trees in the wind and my own cheesy musings on county life.

We have about a week left here, and we are going to use this week to squeeze every last drop of relaxed, slow delights from this adventure.

Picnics, and porches, and long hikes with happy dogs.

Long live the summer of adventure!