"An art thief is a man who takes pictures." - George Carlin

When I went to bed last night we were getting the rain they predicted and I could tell by the noise on the roof it was coming down pretty hard. When I got up at my typical 3:30 I could tell it had stopped because MoHo was quiet. Then I went out to get some firewood from the front porch where we stack a day or two worth of it and was surprised to see WHITE everywhere.
Snow doesn't make any noise when it falls.
It was still falling when I went out to feed the goats at 6 a.m.


There's so little good stuff to watch on TV that after we've seen the reruns of the reruns on HGTV we go looking for programming we wouldn't normally consider, including PBS pledge drive shows. But last night we hit a winner! They showed a digitally remastered version of a Roy Orbison concert from 1987, 14 months before his death from a heart attack. It was filmed at the iconic Coconut Grove club in L.A. in black and white (this remastered version was not colorized, but after about 3 minutes you forget it's in B&W). Appearing with him are a very young Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, k d lang, and Bonnie Raitt.
It was outstanding. There's even a Wikipedia article about the concert ("Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night") because it became something of classic. While we watched it I read the Wiki article on Orbison and learned stuff that was new and surprising. I've always liked his music, but after learning more about it my appreciation has increased. And it turns out he was humble to the point that he couldn't understand his own success.
Keep an eye on your PBS schedule. If they run this special you'll want to watch it, whether you know Orbison's music or not. (You at least know "Pretty Woman.")

Not the brightest animals in God's barn:
Because of Sundae's jaw deformity she has trouble chewing hay sufficiently and so spits out these disgusting strings of slimy half-chewed alfalfa she can't get masticated enough to swallow. To make sure she gets enough nutrition we soak about 1/4 cup of beet pulp pellets, which are very high in protein, in warm water until it's a bit like mash (with about a 400% increase in volume). To entice her to eat it I mix in some grain, which is like candy to a goat.
All the goats get a cup or so of grain a.m. and p.m., each in their own feeder. Itzhak and Asante share a feeder in their sub-pen, Stella has a dish pan in a stand, and Sundae has a feeder attached to the wall big enough for her mash/grain mix.
This morning Sundae decided that whatever Stella had in her dishpan was better than her mixture, so she butted Stella out of the way and began eating that. That is NOT acceptable b/c she needs the beet pulp mash. So I man-handled (person-handled?) Sundae, who weights over 100 lbs., back to her feeder. Stella, who is terrified of our new resident, decided she was NOT going back to her dishpan and risking the wrath of THE BEAST again, so she figured it was time to break through the partition and get to what the kids were eating.
Drag her back to the dishpan to find that Sundae is back there eating Stella's grain - the SAME grain she has mixed in with her beet mash (which she's supposed to also like).
AAARGH.
I keep reminding myself that Sundae is pregnant and hormonal. Yeah, that explains it.

Once the sun came up I went back down to change out their water bucket. How does a goat back up to a bucket that's right against the wall in order to fill it with poop pellets. And why???

There are three kinds of people in the world. Those that never need an alarm set (me), those that set it and get up when it goes off, and those that intentionally set it for 30 minutes prior to the time they need to get up so they can hit snooze 14 times. (Pam)
Makes NO sense.

Again this morning we went through our normal routine, which includes a stop at the Starbucks inside Fred Meyer before we head to church. I have coffee - usually an Americano - Pam has a mint green tea, and we use their internet.
See, we don't have high speed internet at home, something I'm reminded of every time we use wifi somewhere else. What we have via a DishTV satellite connection is maybe a bit better than dialup of days past, but only marginally.
In a week or so we should find out if the county approved Verizon's application for a cell tower 1/4 mile from our house. If they did we will be getting rid of our land line the day that tower is operational. Our land line hasn't worked since last Thursday and Comcast can't get out to fix it until Tuesday, so we have no phone service at home.
And I *think* that if we could get a cell signal through a new tower we could use our phones as a mobile hotspot and have real high speed internet. That would allow us to ditch the land line ($50 per month) AND the internet portion of our DishTV bundle, all while simplifying and generally improving life.

Two guys meet in the lobby at a conference for church workers.
#1: "What do you do at your church?"
#2: "I work with our youth, Sr. and Jr. Hi. How 'bout you? What do you do?"
#1: "I'm a worship leader. I'm a worship leader. I'm a worship leader. I'm a worship leader."