When I first went out today, it was late morning.  The heat was mounting and the animals were in a sedentary state.  The goats rested in a thoroughly shady spot under a cluster of trees in the yard.
The sheep have decided that one of their favorite cool spots is on the cement under the back porch. [...]

A year ago, prior to putting up a wooden privacy fence, we hired a small company to take down a dead tree, but not to haul it away.  Heavy as they were, the remains of that tree were not moved for some time.  It was like a funeral that never ended, a community of bereaved logs dressed as stumps paying [...]

Another case of a pet potbellied pig (arthritic, no less) being put out to pasture and not in a good way because of needless interference of official and non-official busybodies .   You can see from the photograph how happy this pig is with his 78 year old owner and he isn’t disrupting his neighborhood in any consequential way whatsoever: 
He spends his days [...]

Worlds apart, but in the same room. The pig spread out on his billowy, alpaca-fiber filled luxury bed just across from his silver dinnerware. The chick living in the congested feces-filled confines of a slum, under the sweltering heat of unnatural light, devil-red luminosity, scrounging for food on the floor.
Neither are aware of the other [...]

I’ve already told you about the pigs’ inclination towards food, the blissful state of being it puts them in and of the great lengths that Finn will go to break into stock piles of it.  Well, they’re at it again.
The sheep food sat high up, stacked upon another feed bucket.  Both buckets sat meticulously in [...]

Sometimes the pigs like to use the chicken water fountain as a scratching post:

It is not entirely stable:
Poor, poor Finn.

Rare is the war story whose target audience is children.  Rarer still is the children’s war story that is told effectively.  From the get-go, such stories provide so many inherent challenges that writers have a lot of reasons to avoid writing them.  War stories for children run the risk of being too sugarcoated to be [...]

During the Cold War, there was this arms race.  The United States and the Soviet Union both wanted superpower status and they thought they could get it by each amassing more and more weapons.  Each country had to work to be a step ahead of the other lest the other overtake it in world dominance.
Living [...]

Go to the blog Pink Peppers to see the incredible: potbellied pigs being recognized officially as pets on the same level as dogs and cats.  Given that the state of Maryland as well as my local county still pigeonhole all pigs in the narrow, yet broad, label of “livestock,” this is an exciting development.

The last few days have been sunny and warmer than average.  Today we hit 60 degrees.  After such a long, cold, and snowy winter, all of the animals (including me) are happy to get a glimmer of warm hope.  Spring is coming and you can already see the hyacinth and daffodil stalks emerge from the [...]