today's chore.... I am going to go stare at josie's belly for an hour..... and decide if there is actually a foal in there..i know the vet ( brian) said he felt one, but i am losing faith pretty soon we will have had her a year...and the gestation for a donkey is 12 months...i think...i did hear someone lately say something about ocasionally 14 months... but that is new to me.. to be honest we kept the stud with all the herd so i never knew what was happening when.... is not alot different now..... the complication with josie is that she has milk-- probably due to teh fact that she let them nurse which might have happened in the kill pens if she got separated from her own foal and one of the others in janine's trailer just started nursing from her. in all the confusion...
donkeys are the most maligned animal ever... rumored stubborn for only being careful you see millions of them piled high with all sorts of baggage following -- or leading- their owners for miles without any halter or or rope-- you would not see a horse doing that...
donkeys are so much more agreeable than horses... i have done things with donkeys you never could do with horses...
like drive the hitch of 8 around a rack of strawberry shortcakes in the holding area of a hotel ballroom with santa on the seat with me. i could have done many more/ bigger national parades but they would not maintain 3-4 mph - they were slow-- but oh so steady !! the worst situation i ever had was in haverhill mass... where i harnessed out of sight behind some fire station and the police had a cruiser lead me into the square with santa on the seat with me... we got into the square and got so packed in that santa couold not even get off the wagon-- the crowd continued to press in til we had kids... small kids between all the donkeys and a few dashed under the wagon between the wheels.. they stood rock still... or they would have killed someone.. the police cruiser was useless-- we just sat--- until they broke thru with a line to get santa over to his "throne" and the crowd followed him so i could leave.
or the time janine and i ran the 8 of them them thru the boston traffic- if we had any ropes and halters, i don't remembrr them-- between taxi's stopped at a red light we ran on- to get them in the frieght elevator of the prudential tower for some party int he bar at the top... janine went up with all 8.. loose in the bar...as planned..... i had to go back and deal with the wagon and harness we had left at the ?westin? from the santa job there... we had 30 minutes between jobs-- and we did them both.. only because the second job did not involve the harness and wagon... just loose donkeys in the bar.. the rest was also as colorful... because i had to load teh trailer ( i had a creew of college kids helping ) and get the trailer parked at the bottom of the pru so when janine came down the frieght elevator we had a place to put the donkeys...
the big problem there was--- hotels have a lovely loading dock-- and a bunch of those 53' trailers all carefully backed in place by professional drivers... and then there was me.... i wasn't too bad-- but the problem was all those "big rigs" had flat nosed trucks-- i was pulling my trailer with a pick up- and swinging the front of that pickup was an awful lot harder than a snub nosed normal tractor trailer...and all the other drivers were... men....
that reminds me of the day..... i was under some other hotel unloading a bunch of farm animals for a display in the 4th floor ballroom-- cow calf goats hens-- a bunch.. and we had a baby chicken setup -- a big tray of 100 baby chicks only a few days old...( you get them from the big hattcheries by mail) in a cardboard box... with holes- i did get backed in to the loading dock amid snears and jeers of the 4-5 tough men who drove the other trucks....and the guy carryong the baby chicks had cardboard failure...and the 100 tiny little fluffy yellow chickes fluttered to the ground and ran around... at which point these tough drivers were down on their knees "here chicky chicky chicky" we got them all back... we counted !!
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now as for my stats....
someone was careful to point out that lainie and jasper had only 4 black pups... not the 3 harls... = the other correction luna and thump also had only black pups,, which makes the chart agree with our stats 100%
Iit was very hard to count all these... but any one or two errors do not change the result of... our pups match the researched list
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here is ila-- and her association with cakes and her fire department... she has a good thing going...
A few moments ago, there was tapping at the front door and who do you think was there, but three of my firemen with their big red fire truck on the street. They were returning my container I used for the cream cheese pie. I tell you, these guys are the best. They even came in and visited for a brief time.
