We're Back!!! And the tornado that wasn't!

Guess what?!?!  WE HAVE INTERNET!!!!!!  Yes, it's true, my lady is back online.  She is so excited she could just about fall off her chair.  But then she would not be able to type, so it's best that she keep her cool and remain seated.  The unfortunate news is that I, Lucky Nickel, goat diva and quite possibly the most famous goat in all of Nova Scotia, am not yet at the farm.  This is because my lady says it is very important that I am safe, and the barn is not safe for me yet because the nasty beasts could still get in there.  She needs to continue fixing it, and she is very busy fixing a great many things right now.  Do you know what....she even has BEARS living near the farm.  When she first told me, I thought she said "bares," which might be naked goats!  I did not want to see any naked goats!  That's rude!!!  But then, she said "Oh Lucky Nickel, not bare, BEAR!"  She told me about these big scary animals with black fur that would eat a goat for breakfast!  Yikes!!!  In case you don't know, this is what a BEAR looks like!  We found a picture on Wikipedia for you!

All goats should "Beware of Bear" if they are smart goats.  So, until my lady fixes the barn, here we have another interesting story for you about tornadoes!  Stay tuned for more frequent blog posts now that we are reconnected!  There are so many things to tell you about....

As you all know, unless you are new to our blog (in which case, welcome!), my lady and I lived in Iowa for nine years prior to moving here to Nova Scotia.  As a result, my lady is very familiar with tornadoes.  She hasn’t actually been in one, but they have been close by to her home.  She’s used to hearing the warnings on the weather radio, watching the radar on the internet, listening intently for further warnings, watching the clouds, and scurrying down to the basement when she thinks it might be necessary, and also making sure that the rest of the goats and sheep and I were all in the barn.  This is really not a big deal for her, since she has been doing it for years, and naturally she still has these things in her head even though Nova Scotia doesn’t get tornadoes.  Recently, my lady had a “not a tornado” experience.  It was before she had the internet and so this is a little bit in the past, but it is still a good story.  I have to tell it to you because she is too embarrassed to do so. 

There had been a thunderstorm in the morning and she was busy inside with the everlasting cleaning and organizing of the new farm house.  The thunder and lightning had been significant, and at one point, it was so dark that she had to put the candles on in the kitchen because the bulbs in the strange and not-very-illuminating kitchen light had bitten the dust the night before.  She says the light fixture came out of the pre-goatian period of history, which was a long time ago, maybe even when there were dinosaurs.  Her man friend had gone into the big city and had a shopping list with him, which included new bulbs.  These are not ordinary bulbs you know.  They are strange tube bulbs that are in a circle shape, so it’s not as if she could just go to the trusty light bulb box and screw in a new one.  No, these are weird bulbs.  Anyway, she put on the candles and watched the weather and said to herself that it was a good thing that the roof didn’t leak.

Later, the sun came out, and it was quite windy, so my lady decided she was going to go outside and tackle a bit of the thing she says used to be a flower bed, although now it is just a huge overgrown patch of forage.  I should be eating it for her, but she says I would eat the flowers too.  So far, she says that she has uncovered a nice large hosta, some daylilies, and a Centaurea (which some of you probably call Basket Flower or Bachelor's Button other common names depending on where you live).  She was finishing vacuuming some dead fly parts where they had gathered in a window sill, and then she realized that it was raining, but it was only raining on one side of the house.  She went to the windows on both sides, but sure enough, only one side had raining happening on it.  This was not because of directional rain, such that there were raindrops on only one window.  No, no, she’s smarter than that.  She noticed that the rain was pinging on the metal roof of the barn on one side of the house, and she went over and looked at the barn roof, which was getting wet.  The car, on the other side of the house, was clearly dry.  This was quite unusual.  In any case, the flower (forage) bed plan was shelved for the time being.

Yet again, the rain (on one side) went away, and the sun came out, and it was windy, so she decided to go out to tackle the flower/forage bed.  She put on her gardening clothes and went outside.  She was out for a brief period when suddenly everything went very still, and the wind stopped, and that meant that she was positively covered in mosquitoes and black flies.  This was a sort of instantaneous effect, based on the weather, which was really irritating.  She says she can only garden when it is raining or windy due to the insect pressures.  She went back inside the house after about five solid minutes of garden clearing.  She went back upstairs to continue vacuuming dead fly parts (not her favourite task, I might add).  Of course, it was predictable that the wind would start up again right after my lady came inside.  She was quite frustrated by this point, so she sat down with a glass of wine at the kitchen table to rest herself.  Then, things got a bit odd with the clouds.  The clouds were moving in two directions at once, and sort of looking swirly, and my lady thought about the sudden stillness, and then the sudden wind, and the weirdness of the weather in general, and she said “Oh dear, I think there must be a tornado warning.”  She said this because she’s used to being proactive about tornadoes, and when the weather does odd things, it’s a good bet that there’s something brewing.  Of course, she didn’t have the internet at that point, so she couldn’t check.  She also didn’t have a radio because she hadn’t unpacked the clock radio yet, so she got a bit flustered.  She wandered from window to window observing the sky, the increasing wind, and the darkening, and she said to herself “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear….” and she noticed a piece of plastic outside was doing a little swirly dance and she got even more flustered and went around closing all the windows and the screened door and she kept looking for funnel clouds. 

In a flash of insight, she said to herself that she would call her parents, who could look on the internet and tell her if Iowa had any tornado warnings.  Satisfied with this clever plan, she walked towards the phone.  On the verge of picking up the telephone, she had an even bigger flash of insight, realizing that in fact her parents were a mere hour and a half away, because she didn’t live in Iowa, and that furthermore, she lived in a place that didn’t get tornadoes.  At this point, she felt quite mortified by the entire tornado business and she sat down again with her glass of wine and tried to console herself that she wasn’t, in fact, losing her mind.  She then watched the blustery, but relatively mild, thunderstorm roll through, after which the sun came out, and it was a bit windy, but she abandoned any thought of continuing with garden clearing and simply played a few rounds of solitaire on her computer and heated up a bowl of soup for supper, because everygoat knows that soup is good for humans who have, even briefly, forgotten where they live.

Thanks for sticking with us through our non-internet-connected period.  We are so excited to be back, and ready to bring you loads of new exciting stories!!!  Love and goat tail-wags to everybody!!!