Parentheticals

We talked to everyone in the general vicinity about the goats, and no-one complained. They are being quieter recently, so I would expect that we can keep them. I called about getting a chicken license, and the lady said that I don't need one cause we are A-1 zoned (so apparently the animal control guy was completely wrong about everything). La-La (the big goat) has decided that she is top quadruped in the yard, and as such she tends to head but Rusty and Clarabell (the small goat). She also likes to jump up on the massive wooden spool that we got for our goats. Clarabell is a younger goat of a smaller breed. she is timid right now, but I expect that she will become bolder soon. She invades the chicken coop and jumps all over everything. A very energetic goat. The chickens broke out of their coop last night and pecked up the yard. It was funny to watch them, and they all went back to the coop when the sun went down, so they know that it is their place. Apparently one of them...

This last week has been memorable to say the least. During the week I spent most of my free time cleaning out the old shed, fixing it up, and building a goat proof fence for the purpose of protecting our garden. In case you have not heard - the thought of getting a goat has moved from being a not so distant future thing to a completed thing. Alison has been watching the classifieds and we found two that we wanted to get. We also were wanting some chickens, but a ward member was had a surplus of four chickens, so we went over to their house and got them. Perhaps I will be uncle Farmer Mike instead of uncle Pirate Mike. Unfortunately everything has not been smooth sailing. We got one of the goats Saturday at 3:00, and by 6:00 we had a visit from the Salt Lake County Animal Control Unit. Apparently someone was bothered by the goat and decided to call the government instead of talking to me. The story that the animal control guy told was that they had received a complaint that...

This weekend we had a ward camp-out. It was pretty fun. Friday we went up to 'big cottonwood canyon' and set up our tents. They provided hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner, and then we talked for a while. I played a 'angry bear' game with the little kids where I was a bear and hid some honey and then went to sleep. They stole my honey, and then I chased them around angrily until someone gave me more honet to appease me. In the evening we brought out marshmallows (apparently we were the only ones in the ward to bring them) and shared them with all of the kids. Since we use only 5 marshmallows total (out of a 1 lb bag) it was a good deal. If we don't find some way of getting rid of marshmallows they just go stale. Sara slept well (Andrea kept us up this time :), and breakfast in the morning was great. We came home before noon, and took a nap. We went over to the Sumption (if that is spelled correctly) residence and picked up some old firewood to add to our pile in t...

I think that I am in love. Perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but I just discovered Butterkase (probably butter-cheese in German). It is fairly mild in flavor, very soft, very smooth, and it melts pretty well too. My next cheese making attempt will probably be Butterkase. Sara, Andrea, and Alison were all sick over the weekend. It made for a tiring weekend for me (Sara was having a hard time breathing, so I stayed up most of the night Saturday making sure that she was OK.) I have re-colored my Polynesia card image files, and am going to make another partial printing of the cards to see if my color changes brought the cards into alignment with what I thought that they should look like. I will also make another pass over the rules to make sure that they are all current. For Sunday dinner I made four cheese pasta with shells (three of the cheeses were home made: parmesan for saltiness, derby for the flavor & meltability, and ricotta as faux 'meatballs'). The ricotta c...

Sara's eyes are lightening. They are still blue, but I think that she will probably not end up with blue eyes in the end. She is now above her birth weight, and continuing to grow rapidly. This morning I could smell fires as I rode my bike into work - apparently Utah is still ablaze. I played two games of Polynesia with my actual cards this weekend. They were well received. I am now starting to clean up the art work more, as well as correcting the colors for printing. I am thinking of changing the point symbol from a 6 pointed star to a sphere. The color will still indicate how many points it is worth, but the black star will be replaced by a white sphere (to indicate one point). I tried to build Nethack4 on my machine, but I can't seem to get it to run without errors. It took a few hours to get as far as I did (and no-one that I could see has posted online that they were able to get as far as I did using visual studio as the compilation tool). I posted how I did it...