Medium Dawn Felagund of the Fountain

This morning, at 8:30 AM, Bobby woke me from a dead sleep by calling my name: "Dawn!"

My first thought: Oh shit, I overslept. I was interviewed for the Tolkien Experiences podcast and was doing a live premier with my interviewer, Luke Shelton, at 9:30 this morning. I'd been up late the night before due to a combination of 1) drinking a beverage that consisted of the day-old coffee and amaretto at about 9 PM, 2) getting hooked into research lately, late at night, huddled up in the corner of the couch under my blanket, and last night no exception, and 3) Hermione pooping the bed last night and so changing her bedding and wiping down her crate at 1 AM.

Then: "Come outside, quick!"

Which at that point I thought: Denali's out. Or something got eaten. Or Denali got eaten.

(This is not as randomly morbid as perhaps it seems. Guinevere was very keyed up last night and kept going out onto the deck to bark at the darkness. Then we heard a single gunshot, which in the country, at night, usually means that some animal has gotten into someone's livestock.)

Then: "We have goat babies!"

So despite my brain rushing to all manner of tragedies great and small, it turned out to be a good thing. In thirty seconds, I was running down the steps of my front porch, pulling on my coat, to the barn. They had just been born. One hadn't even stood up yet, and they were both still wet. If Bobby was five minutes earlier, he would have seen it happen. The doe was Elanor, which is not surprising: She is the youngest but also the daughter of a champion milker, and she is ambitious. Always shoving to the front for everything, the biggest, the pushiest, the loudest. Even her hooves grow faster than the others. While I am fond of Lobelia, and Bobby prefers Estella, a.k.a., Brother Silly, Elanor is hard to like because she's so intense. Naturally, she'd be the first to freshen.

We had begun preparations for freshening, but we didn't think it'd happen till mid-May based on our math. We brought home our buck, Denali, in mid-November. His owner didn't have him on grain, so he was tiny, and ... how do I put this politely? ... he frankly couldn't reach our does, who have been on grain since they were little and were large animals by this point. We started him on grain, and he grew fast after that, and we figured he could reach by mid-December, giving us till mid-May. Well! It seems where there is a will, there is a way, and Denali and Elanor figured something out because, by the math, she got pregnant in mid- to late November, shortly after we brought Denali home. Anyway, Bobby had a birthing kit set up, and thank goodness he'd gotten Denali moved out into his own bachelor pad a few days prior, but we weren't expecting to need any of this stuff for a few weeks yet, so there was much scrambling around to get it and the usual miasma of nerves that attends doing anything like this for the first time. But we did it. We got the kids dried off and dipped their navels; they wouldn't nurse right away, so we milked out colostrum from Elanor and bottle-fed enough to them according to their weight.

I missed my podcast premier.

I reached a point where I thought, if I make it, I hope this not on video: I was in my pajamas with unbrushed hair, literally covered in wood shavings and straw, dabbed here and there with blood, iodine, and goat colostrum. But I didn't make it, so it didn't matter. There is the truism that goats freshen at the worst possible time, and this was probably the worst possible time for me all week because this was something I was really looking forward to.

Elanor, true to character, did not seem enthralled with motherhood. So we milked her and, when the time came, dutifully heated up bottles ... and discovered that they had already been nursing! So, so far, no bottle feeding. No bottle feeding. If we had to bottle feed, of course, I'd deal with it. We bottle-fed all three does. Which is why it's not something I find enchanting anymore. We bottle-fed all three does, for months. It was cute and fun when they were little and got old fast after that. I'd much rather leave this work to Elanor.

And the stats: We had one little doeling--about 1 lb.--and a little buckling at about 3 lbs. We won't name them--their eventual owners can do that--but I've given then placeholder names of Stoicism (the buckling) and Persistence (the doeling), based on their personalities.

So. This is another huge step for our enterprise (which we have named Forn Rhûn Farm) as homesteaders and maybe someday small business owners. We now have our own source of milk and all the wonderful things that come with that. We were down to see the babies about an hour ago, and all are doing well. Elanor has settled in; the kids are content and either toddling around or nestled in the straw.

Lobelia and Brother Silly are next. Brother Silly is huge; it would not surprise me if she has triplets. Lobelia, on the other hand, is the smallest, and it would not surprise me if she singled for her first. At this point, we have to expect that they could arrive any day now because who knows when Denali managed his magic. Keeping with the freshen-at-the-worst-possible-time trend, I fully expect Brother Silly to freshen during the SWG book club on Sunday.

Naturally, I could not ask y'all to sit through all this and then not post pictures of the kids.

( Goat Kids )

The other major thing that happened toward the end of the school year/beginning of summer break is that we welcomed our miniature donkey, Luna, into our farm family. This means that our farm family is complete. No more animals! (Well, except for the constant rotation of various poultry, but that doesn't count.)

A miniature donkey has been on my wish list for a while, just because. Ostensibly, Luna is a companion for the goats. In reality, she is a pet.

Omg I freaking love her.

We weren't supposed to end up with Luna. Bobby put in a deposit on a miniature donkey foal this spring, and we were supposed to pick her up in August. Midway through June, the owner contacted us: Their young daughter was attached to the foal and they had decided, as a result, not to sell her. They were apologetic and even offered us money in excess of the return of our deposit. (To which we said no; we are not the types of people to get pissy because a kid becomes attached to an animal. I was happy to let her go to a loving home. I hope they are lifelong friends.) But this did leave us without our hoped-for mini donkey. Bobby went back to Craig's List, and lo and behold, Luna had just been posted. She came from a miniature horse farm where they were downsizing by rehoming their donkeys. (They'd hoped to breed them, but their jack wasn't interested.)

This meant that we ended up with Luna more than a month before we'd planned. I posted to Twitter at the time, so I'm going to let that thread speak for itself.



It was a unique experience, driving a cargo van with a miniature donkey in it. Lots more Luna pictures are below the jump, if you're interested.

( More Luna Pictures )

She is a very chill, low-key animal. She basically does three things: She eats, she sleeps (including taking afternoon naps, which is super cute), and she stands. She is now pastured with the goats; she's very sociable and was visibly lonely when she was by herself, even though the goats push her boundaries from time to time and she has to snap at them. (That's goats for you.)

We did have one exciting incident when we'd had Luna about two weeks. We were often grazing her in the backyard because the electric fencing wasn't set up yet, and Bobby was leading her from the barn to the yard when my young neighbor and her friend happened by on bikes. They were very excited to see Luna--and Luna was very terrified of the bikes! She broke free of Bobby and galloped full-send down the road to the cornfield at the end of the road. (I-91 is past the cornfield, so this was pretty scary for us too!) She galloped up and down the corn for a few minutes before slowing, stopping, and letting me approach, but the poor love was terrified when I led her back. It took her several days to settle down after that.

She's very affectionate, though a little shy. Bobby calls her spookyhorse because she is easily frightened of things. She likes to be approached on her terms, not ours. Bobby and I will sit in her paddock, and within a minute, she is pushed up right next to us with her head over our shoulder for scratches. She loves "donkey hugs" when I drape my arm around her neck and stand leaning on her.

She can be loud and lets us know when we are not meeting her expectations. One of her biggest expectations concerns what we have termed "scarytime." Scarytime is when the sun descends behind the trees. Now Luna has access to her stall at all times, so she could put herself in at scarytime, but the scary things that come with scarytime are only fully banished if Bobby or I walk with her into the barn.

(Actually, she gets oats at that time, and I think the oats more so than Bobby and me dispel scarytime.)

So if scarytime happens, and we don't come down, she brays to let us know, "Hey! It's fucking scary down here!" She's going to be in for a rude awakening come winter when scarytime happens at 4 o'clock and neither of us are generally even home yet!

The rest of the homestead is doing pretty well. The goats are almost full-grown; we'll know soon if they'll reach breeding weight and if we'll have kids next year. We have entirely too much poultry right now (and ducks still on the way, jeezum ...). I don't even know how many chickens we have. Twenty-two chicks, I think, still under a heat lamp in the shed, plus about eight layers and the two roosters, and four turkeys, out in the coop. But 'tis the season. This is our meat for next year. We are still eating last year's poultry, and this year we are raising more chickens (but growing the turkeys smaller because 45lb/20kg per bird was too much last year).

We had a groundhog family move in destroy a good bit of our garden. Mama had moved out, leaving the two younglings behind. Bobby trapped and relocated one, but after researching more and learning that one has to practically drive across the state to keep them from coming back, when he caught the second one ... well, let's just say that one is nibbling lettuces in God's garden now.

The bees are doing great, but we won't get honey this year.

But the moral of this story is that Luna is awesome and, even if the least productive, the best addition to our farm family ever.

Bobby and I left on Monday to spend a few days on the coast of Maine. It was his agreement, when we moved here, that he would take his Elven wife at least once per year to see the ocean. In reality, we are not any farther from the sea than when we lived in Maryland, and the drive is a good bit shorter, because Maryland traffic.

This will mostly be a picture post because we didn't do a whole lot that was exciting. (I lied. I wrote more than expected. Oops.) We ate some wonderful seafood and spent a lot of time on the beach. We took the Goldens with us, but I want to round up a bunch of Golden photos and do a separate post for Rhapsody. <3

( Pictures Below the Cut )

Bobby and I went to the climate rally today that was held in Vermont's capital city of Montpelier. Oh, it was tempting to try to go to DC again! But I decided against it. I have a lot going on right now, and I always try to remember the advice I read when reigniting my political activism that one has to take care of oneself ... so I kept it local this time.

( Pictures below the Cut )

Well, we got the big snow as promised. I don't know how much we got, but it was a lot. There was a lot of blowing and drifting last night, so it'd be hard to tell, even if I was willing to venture outside, which I have not so far. Schools were closed today after an early dismissal yesterday.

This was our back deck this morning. It's still snowing lightly, but we're not supposed to get more than a few more inches today.



Bobby took these pictures of the Wilds last night; he took them out to play in the snow. They are both like little children and get giddy when we have fresh snow falling.

Lancelot.





Guineweird.





On a completely unrelated note, I have enough fannish stuff to report that I'm actually going to use a bulleted list. Whoa.

• I wrote an essay for the B2MeM prompt "Analyze a Chapter or Passage." I chose to compare the death scenes of Fëanor and Fingolfin, looking particularly at the evidence those passages provide for historical bias. The result: The Deaths of Kings: Historical Bias in the Death Scenes of Fëanor and Fingolfin.



• For the personal essay B2MeM prompt, I wrote a personal essay (duh) called Mountains between the Light and the World: On Walls and Greed and the Privilege of Isolation. Warning: It gets into my personal politics, particularly my musings on why I've always been so bothered by the hoarding of light in The Silmarillion and how contrary to my political and personal values that idea is.



• There's a new SWG challenge up. We're explicitly encouraging participants to combine our prompt with one of the other challenges going on. There's lots of challenges going on in the next month.



• Last week, I almost died when I was Googling for a link to Attainable Vistas and, in the process, stumbled on this review of the issue of JTR and my essay in particular. The review called it "one of the best -- if not the best -- article on Tolkien written this year." What?! The writer is a Tolkien scholar, so he liked the first half--about historical bias--more than the second about fandom. Which I'd agree: the historical bias stuff is more generally interesting and relevant to an audience familiar with Tolkien. The fandom stuff is more for the connoisseurs, as it were. :D One of the things I found about traditional publication versus fannish publication is that the relative silence that meets a traditionally published work makes me wonder sometimes if what I wrote is even being read. (There wasn't absolute silence around "Attainable Vistas," but the chatter all came from fandom--go figure!) I was pleased to know that my work was not only read but clearly appreciated. It was a really pleasant surprise.



• Speaking of "Attainable Vistas," I will be presenting the unpublished parts of that paper at the Vermont Tolkien Conference in just a few weeks. I received official registration information a few days ago, so it's really happening. No fandom stuff this time--just historical bias!



• I have most of the rest of my B2MeM path planned out or underway. Let me say again how nice it has been to participate in B2MeM this year. I almost never get to participate outside of volunteering. But I get to listen to people participating complain about participating, feeling like the kid whose family never goes on vacation listening to her friends gripe about having to spend a week in Paris. I've really enjoyed getting to focus on my research and writing; I usually need an excuse to do this, and B2MeM has been a great excuse. It's improved my mood toward B2MeM immensely as well. I will confess that this is the fandom project where I am always the closest to burning out--thank goodness for Indy taking the reins these past few years!



• Not really related to fandom, but while Googling my article the other night, I found that my university has also published my thesis. So you can read it if you want to. Some people said they wanted to! It's been downloaded 21 times, which is pretty amazing in itself.

Well, report card grades are due today, and I still have a little left to do to make that happen, so off I go!

I have been promising Bobby that I would learn to snowboard for a couple of years now. Of course, until last year, I was working on my MA as well as teaching full-time (and commuting two hours a day and trying to have a social life and taking care of multiple fandom projects ...) So it just wasn't in the cards.

But this year, I had no further excuses reasons not to learn. I have enough time, and since Bobby works at Jay Peak and I am his lawfully wedded wife, then I even get my season pass for free, so it's not like I'm even taking a financial risk in investing in a pass for a sport that I might hate or that might kill me or both.

Well, I had my first lesson today and 1) I did not die. 2) I did not hurt myself. 3) I actually had fun!

Bobby taught me himself, going through some basics on flat ground, then climbing about 20 feet up a tiny slight incline with me and running beside me holding my hands while I slid down. On my last run, I slid down entirely by myself, with no hand-holding needed (although he still jogged alongside me). I did not even fall (which I was a little worried about because I did not want to go back to work tomorrow injured in any way).

I have all of my equipment except for my own board, which I rented for this first outing, because Bobby gets super pro discounts on stuff now. Here I am with my first stick:





We are at Burke Mountain, by the way, which is Jay Peak's sister mountain in the southern NEK. My next lesson will be at Jay Peak, in Bobby's familiar realm.

I've also written a story for this year's MPTT Yule Fic Exchange. I know that was a 180 there. The story is called "The Ship of Light" and was written for Talullah Red, who asked for, "Elwing and Eärendil's first Yule in Sirion. I'd like something light and dark, please. Given the circumstances they would be traumatized, but the people around them would be making efforts for them and the other children. If you're one of the Nimloth-survives type, it's fine by me."

Here is the Official Story Summary^TM:

Elwing is a troubled child, acting out to avoid facing the trauma of her past. During the survivors' first Yule at Sirion, mariners from Balar bring gifts to the refugees, and inspired by their benevolence, Elwing and Eärendil remake an old tradition into a new symbol of hope.

The story can be read on the SWG, MPTT, AO3, or LiveJournal.

I took a photo for yesterday but didn't post it, so today I have two (okay, actually three) photos, plus a very annoying unsolved mystery.

Last night, we went out for dinner at the Thai restaurant in Newport. They also have sushi--and a phenomenal sushi chef--and I have been fiending for sushi something fierce. Twice, I have gone to places with great sushi, and they haven't had it at that particular moment for whatever reason. Thankfully, as the saying goes, three is a charm, and I succeeded in getting my sushi! At last!

Dusit Thai is a beautiful restaurant in addition to having incredible food. It's my favorite restaurant in Vermont, hands down, and there is some pretty steep competition for that title.





Their portions are huge, so Bobby and I shared a spicy eggplant stirfry that we'd never tried before and will definitely have again. I've never tried anything off of their stirfry menu because I tend to hear "stirfry" and think "boring," but this was far from boring. Then we shared three sushi rolls.

Bobby had rented a movie for us for the night, and this is where the annoying unsolved mystery comes in. When he picked me up from school, he told me that he rented a DVD, and I saw it on the floor behind my feet, sitting on a pile of bungee cords. Somewhere between that time and our return from the Thai restaurant, the DVD disappeared.

In between, we went to the Thai restaurant and, after that, shopping at the natural market, so I got out of the car just once after he picked me up from school. All the same, given where it was placed--behind my feet--and how high off the ground our car is, it is unlikely that it fell out of the car. We tore apart the house and car--looking in and under things, including many places where it could not possibly be--and even drove back to Newport and checked where we parked the car, in case it had fallen out. NOTHING. We came up with multiple theories that were shot down one by one. It's so frustrating! Our house is small, and it's pretty impossible to lose things here. I am hoping that when we return to the video store to cop to losing the movie that the owner will tell us that someone found it in Newport and turned it in. But I highly doubt that it could have fallen out of the car.

My best theory at this point? That there was some kind of anomaly in the universe and it simply disappeared!

Today, Bobby went to Jay Peak to snowboard. Since the Yaris isn't appropriate for driving in the snow--we intend to replace it as soon as we can sell our house in Maryland--then we are sharing the Subaru, so I went with him, had breakfast with him, then drove back to Newport to run errands. One of which was getting my library card at the Newport Library! An actual library that is open every day except Sunday and has a lot of books for all audiences! Maybe because I look like someone who would avail herself of this or maybe because she tells everyone, the young woman who helped me informed me without my asking that I would be able to use interlibrary loan after three months in good standing.

I of course visited the fantasy section and was delighted to find a pretty nice selection. I was amused by the arrangement of genres, however.




It seems like this would be controversial in a lot of places in the U.S. to have these two side by side! I imagine little church ladies glowering at ... well, people like me!

Then I went back to Jay Peak to meet Bobby for lunch and wait for him to go home. Jay Peak has received four feet of snow so far this year. It has received more snow than Breckenridge in Colorado and Jackson Hole in Wyoming. According to Bobby, "The goods are in the woods," and it was a very good day. The mountain will be all open very soon; the only reason it is not already (with four feet of snow!) is that the famed tramway needed a special part for a repair, which has arrived and was being done this weekend. Parts of the mountain are only accessible via the tramway, so they have been unable to get all open because of that.





All of this snow is much needed. Jay Peak (and Burke Mountain in the southern NEK) became embroiled last year in a financial scandal due to the crooked dealings of their owner, who is now under federal investigation. It's a long and convoluted story, but the gist was that major expansions at Jay Peak that were done using local labor and businesses went unpaid-for. And this is not, as anyone who reads here knows, a wealthy area. The Northeast Kingdom is very low-income. These were contractors and workers who did work on the resort and were never paid for it. The threat that the resort would close (or be temporarily shut down) added an element of distress because so many people depend on the resort for their employment. And again, this is not an area that can weather a lot of economic distress.

To add insult to injury, last year, the snowfall in Vermont was exceedingly low--the NEK didn't even have a white Christmas--and the resort suffered even further from that. So the snowfall this year--among the best the resort has ever had--could not come at a better, more-needed time.

Earlier this week, we took a walk down my road, in the valley along the Barton River. These pictures, which we taken the day after the walk down my road, couldn't be more different. Instead of the valley, this walk was along the ridgeline of Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain. Instead of soft meadows, a gently coursing river, and a palette of colored trees in the distance, the landscape here is ragged rock and plants tough and strange enough to survive in such an unforgiving climate.

The only similarity was the weather: It was borderline unpleasant on both days. This was the weather on the drive down to Stowe. It was supposed to clear up but really didn't.



(As always, click for full-size!)

We ostensibly opted to do the Mansfield hike because of the views, but there weren't many views to be had: We were above the clouds for most of the walk, which only added to the strangeness of the scenery. The temperature on the ridgeline hovered right around freezing with wind chills dipping to the mid-20s F when the wind would kick up. Those were moments of ambivalence: They often swept away enough of the clouds to get a glimpse of the view, but they also tended to occur at moments when I was making crossings on rocks where I was not fully comfortable. I felt like the Fellowship on Caradhras, with the sense that the mountain was mocking me!

The ecosystem is alpine tundra, which exists in isolated pockets atop the highest peaks in New England. The linked Times article describes the alpine tundra as such:

Such is the weird world of alpine tundra, where life adapts to cold stone and thin soil, and snow, ice, wind, water and sunlight mix in rare and intense proportions to mimic conditions not widely seen since the end of the last ice age. Hike uphill high enough in parts of New England and you might as well be trekking in far northern Canada. Save for polar bears and permafrost, the look and feel of places like Mount Mansfield’s summit — a bald schist knob at 4,393 feet — mimic the arctic no-man’s land east of Hudson Bay.

We had originally planned to take the gondola from the resort and hike the Cliff Trail to the summit (called the Chin because the profile of Mansfield looks like a face in repose), but the poor weather made this unwise, so we took the Auto Toll Road to the end and hiked out from there instead. ( Take a walk above the clouds )

Our primary source of heating in our new house is a wood pellet stove. Back in Maryland, we had a woodstove in the basement and electric baseboard heat upstairs that we resisted turning on as long as possible because it was so expensive. The woodstove, on the other hand, was wonderful, and we used it as much as we could. However, it took a while to start it, and it was messy, producing a lot of brown ash that would cover everything in the house.

The pellet stove, on the other hand, starts with the push of a button and does not seem to be nearly as messy. We've had it on three times now--temperatures were in the upper 20sF/-3C a couple nights this week--and it made the house a little TOO hot! But since we live in an area where it is not uncommon to have temperatures as low as -30F/-34C, then we will be grateful for it in short order, I suspect!

Midway through the summer, Tractor Supply Company had a great pre-sale on wood pellets, so based on the usage of the previous owners (who used the pellet stove as their primary heating source as we intend to do; we have a kerosene backup), we ordered three tons (2.7 metric tons). This weekend, they were delivered, and the entire weekend was blocked off on our calendar for transporting them from the TSC in Derby--which is about twenty minutes away--to our house.

We have a little cart for our Subaru, and using that, it took three trips and about three hours to move all three tons of wood pellets. We put about 2.5 tons in our new barn and about a half ton in the log cabin shed alongside our house. Let me tell you, moving three tons of wood pellets is hard work! They come in 40 lb/18 kg bags. A 40-lb bag is not difficult for me to lift and carry, but repeated 150 times with much bending and lifting was rough! By the end of the third round, my poor little forearms were DONE. Bobby drove the Subaru down to the barn and was carrying the bags from the cart to the barn, where I waited with outstretched arms for him to dump the bag onto them, which I would carry into the barn and add to the pile. One of the last ones he plopped entirely on my forearms, and I barely made it! He was complaining of fatigue, and I wanted to say, "Imagine how I feel!" I have above average upper-body strength for a woman, but really.

Well, it's done now. My upper arms and shoulders ached something fierce this morning, so we went hiking on Mount Hor to keep me from stiffening up and so I could enjoy a dose of pain-fighting endorphins. Also because the views were going to be amazingly gorgeous.

I have a ton of photos to post from a stroll along River Road last week for the peak leaf weekend, and a hike along the ridge at Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest mountain. Honestly, I have been completely lost in this story I am writing based on the Scottish folk song "Tamlin." I am hoping to have it done in time to post it for Halloween at this point; it is much longer than I expected, in a large part because my first attempt at it was not as character-based as I like my writing to be, and characterization eats a lot of pages, at least how I do it. But when I'm on the computer, I don't want to be doing anything but working on this story. I stayed up till 1:30 last night with it.

I'll try to get those other pictures posted soon, but Mount Hor is going to jump to the head of the line. It was a gorgeous day: sunny and mild. Last weekend was the peak for the leaves, but as you will see, the leaves are still pretty spectacular!

( Willoughby Gap Just after Peak Weekend )

Autumn is still descending in its multi-hued glory to Northern Vermont. Yesterday was a grumpy, gray, rather miserable day: 55F/13C, damp, with those drifting, misty showers that seem to ooze out of the air itself. Nonetheless, Bobby and I decided to take a couple-hours kayak jaunt out on Holland Pond, about a half-hour northeast of us. It had been recommended to him as a rather remote and especially beautiful site among the Northeast Kingdom's myriad ponds and lakes.

The rain thankfully held off for the duration of our paddle, and there was enough wind to ensure that we were kept quite warm as we fought to keep our kayaks on course. It was a really fun pond--definitely one of my favorites--with a handful of cabins on its western shore but otherwise surrounded by a wildlife management area and very remote. It was unusual in the large, gray boulders that lined its edges. There were quite a few little coves to explore, one of the things I love best about kayaking. While hiking, of course, leaving the trail is verboten. On the water, one can duck into a little cove or start down a creek to see where it leads, worrying at most about getting stuck and having to make an undignified exit. (Not a problem once yesterday, despite putting myself into some tight spots; I am getting good at navigating the new kayak like I once was with the cantankerous bastard.) When I was a kid, there was nothing better than opening a novel with a map on the first few pages, and even now, I can read a road atlas for hours if left to my own devices. Kayaking scratches that itch to explore very, very well.

Of course, I took pictures. They are cell phone photos taken on a gloomy day, mostly from a kayak being tossed lightly in the wind so not the best quality, but I hope they give some sense of Holland Pond and the day! ( Click for photos )