The day is all over the shirt...

It's a hand-me-down shirt that I hadn't worn before. Somehow it wound it's way into the back of the work shirt drawer. Long story short, we fell behind on laundry, and guess what I found. Yep, it had it's debut day on the farm. I made sure that the introduction to my life was about as 'real' as it got. What was on the to-do list for the day? Disbudding and tattooing baby goats. But first...

We had an escapee turkey. She flew the coop and made a jail break. So Jake and I rounded her up and enacted the UN no-fly-zone restrictions - we clipped her wing. Somehow I ended up being the one holding the big bird, and she made her displeasure known. She snagged her domesticated poultry talons on my shirt in several places. (Since then, we've had to clip two more birds' wings - I had a better grip that time.)

Finished breakfast and it was time for disbudding. For those of you who aren't familiar with what dehorning is all about, you have a scalding hot iron that you put on the horn bud for about 25 seconds. It stinks, the kid screams, the barn fills with the pungent 'aroma' (thankfully it was breezy, so it cleared out quickly). After the nasty part of the job is done, you apply some blue/purple goo to help keep things from getting infected and what-not. Then it's all done. The kid bounces back to its mama like nothing happened. Well... one of the kiddos decided to smear the purple stuff on me before running back to mom.

But wait! There's more.

We also tattooed the little does that we're planning on selling (once the paper work is all figured out...). One person holds kid goat tight while person #2 tattoos the ear. And we needed to tattoo both ears on three doelings. :does some finger counting: That's six different tattoos. And the wonderful color that's used? Green. New color added to the shirt! While they were at it, they also rubbed the green ink over one side of my neck. It looked like some sort of monochromatic Picasso portrait; it wasn't until after I ran errands that a friend informed me that baby wipes work really well at getting that stuff off. ;) And I got some pretty hilarious expressions from people. I enjoyed myself. Time to play 'Guess that tattoo!'

When all was said and done, I looked down and realized how dirty the goats were - they had been rolling around in the dirt in the side shed.

So between the greens, purples, and dusty hues, I almost had a completely new shirt! ;)