A Winelover's Wanderings

This is Royal. He belongs to our neighbors, but we kind of pretend he belongs to us too!

Every morning before it even gets light, he is waiting at our back fence for Bill to give him carrots. He does love his carrots! He brings his doggy friends, who also want their fair share. They didn't show up for the picture though.

Our dog Hoochie also tags along to make sure she doesn't miss out on any food.

Royal usually comes back later for his afternoon snack. I watch from my office window for him to show up.

It is the best of all possible worlds - having a horse for just a couple of visits a day!

A year has gone by since I lost my beautiful kitty. Meow was her official name (actually her former owners, my next door neighbors, called her Little Meow because of her small "voice"), but we began calling her Mimmo.

I started the Pets Blog in April 2008 with this post.

Although a year has gone by, I still miss her every day. She was always there for me, my best little friend - a port in the storm that life can be sometime.

I also want to remember another beloved pet who died the same week that Mimmo did - Maria I.'s beautiful Coco. Here was what she wrote about Coco.

Coco Remembered

And here is the beautiful remembrance that Maria I. just posted about her Coco.

Some of you may know that Bill and I had two goats, and we called them The Goatboys. We originally "borrowed" them from a neighbor to eat the fast-growing weeds on our 3/4 acre property.

To make a long story short, they never left. They ate weeds, yes, but they also became very spoiled and waited to be fed vegetable scraps every evening.

They were like our dogs - they would run over when we called (thinking we had food, of course). They played and butted each other, even though one was small and one was large.

Billy was the large goat, as big as a pony. Little kids could have ridden him. He was really thin when we got him (he had been abandoned and our neighbor had taken him in), but he quickly gained weight and ended up being well over 100 lbs. He always acted like he was starving, as though he was remembering his former life.

And he was strong! Too strong for me to control! I was a little worried once when the vet came to treat his infected eye, how we would keep him still enough for an injection. The vet, a slightly built man, tied him by his horns to a fence post and just like that, it was done. Amazing!

I actually had to give injections to both goats for various illnesses thru the years. I have always hated needles, so it was hard for me to do, but I got pretty good at it.

Scooter was the little goatboy. He acted like the little general, kind of ordering Billy around. And Billy was such a kind, gentle goat that he didn't complain. But when "danger" appeared in their field (a dog perhaps), Scooter would hide behind Billy. It was really funny.

On the downside, goats are very destructive. Bill had to fence off part of the property in order to plant a garden. Most of the trees we had in the field died because the goats ate the bark off the trees. But we came to love them, so we put up with it.

Billy died while we were in Italy in 2006, and we lost Scooter last December. Our poor housesitter had to find some guys to help him dig a BIG hole in order to bury Billy on our property. Scooter is there too.

I miss them both every day. They were great garbage disposals for veggies (goats are NOT meat eaters) - now all of the veggies just go in the garbage. They were so fun to watch running around the field, chasing each other and butting heads. Scooter had to get up on his hind legs to be tall enough to butt Billy.

People don't think about having goats as pets, but when you live in the country, anything can be a pet!

Billy Goatboy - 1992 - 5/20/06

Scooter Goatboy - 1992 - 12/6/08

Finally, after a week of rain and snow, the sun is out!

It's a spectacular view now that we can see the snow-covered mountains.

I may not have mentioned yesterday that we live in the foothills of the San Bernardino mountains at about 3500 ft. We get a little snow nearly every year, but for us this was one of the biggest snowfalls we can remember.

Here's what the mountains look like this morning:

Remember our borrowed horse, Royal? I wrote about him here last year. He is out in the sun today just soaking up those rays. We always think about him as being white, but he looks like a pretty dirty white against the snow.

Still in my heart and in my thoughts . . .

Mimmo - 6/1/92 - 3/29/08