(real) first blog post

Hello friends and followers of the goat house! Welcome to our first (real) blog post (the one that says “I’m Tanya and this is where I talk about rap music” is a practical joke courtesy of Jim from Inbound Found, thanks dude). I am writing from a window seat on a Frontier flight headed from Providence, RI, back to Spokane. I’ll throw this up during the intermission in Denver. The “tray table” is absurdly small, so I’m typing with the computer on my lap. For a $140 flight between two nationally irrelevant airports, this seems a reasonable tradeoff.

I spent the last two weeks away from the goat house in New England visiting with friends and family. While I’ve been away, I’ve had two different sets of neighbors on goat duty in Spokane.

When I first got John and David, my mother did a lot of squawking about goat-sitters. “You travel all the time, who is going to take care of them?!” she queried in high-pitched tones. The underlying sentiment, I determined, was that mother did not want to get stuck holding the metaphorical — or literal — wheelbarrow of goat turds. “Mother,” I patiently explained, “these are the only grand-“kids” you’re going to get. You should be excited to watch them!”

While I maintain that my argument held weight, it did nothing to sway mother into a volunteering mood. I promptly moved along to what I believed might be my next-best option for securing on-call goat-sitters on the cheap: Nextdoor.

This neighborhood website provides me with unending entertainment. I’ve very infrequently used Nextdoor for practical matters, but posts such as the one pictured below keep me coming back for more.

Nextdoor has not helped me sell my KitchenAid washer and dryer during the calendar year they’ve been advertised (I did have one person come by to look, but the sale never materialized), nor did it yield a single lead when I posted a want-ad for an experienced bnb housekeeper. However, I thought, perhaps the neighbors would have more interest in caring for GOATS!

A quick summary is that I proposed a modest stipend of $50/week to any responsible humans willing to stop by once a day to feed, water, and socialize with John and David during my stints away. Also included in expectations was a once-a-week stall mucking.

With little hope of success, I set the post on the virtual bulletin board and prepared to forget about it for all eternity. I imagined that in a month or so, I’d be frantically dangling carrots of compensation over the heads of busy friends, desperate for goat-sitters before an impending excursion……

A few hours after posting my advertisement on Nextdoor, I noticed some new email notifications on my phone. Clicking open the gmail app, I observed not one but several email alerts from Nextdoor. Neighbors from my immediate area were flocking at the chance to goat-sit!

Over the next few days, a handful of adults came by to interview for the position. The competition was stiff, as I’d had a pool of qualified applicants. The final decisions were made based on proximity and competence, and the remaining candidates were notified that their information would be kept on file for future opportunities.

I was exuberant to find that my theoretical inclinations about goats were substantiated with real-world data. Whereas I am paid $40/night to dog-sit through Rover, goats are thrilling enough to motivate people to caretake based practically on cuteness and novelty alone!

So, while I’ve been off having fun, John and David have been getting pampered with neighborhood snuggles, organic baked Cheetos, and kid frolic time (the boys love to run around and chase my neighbors’ children)! Best of all, my neighbors have kept a stream of goat photographs incoming to my devices, helping to quell how much I’ve missed them.

Although I had a marvelous time visiting home, it’s always nice to get back to my own space (even if that space is in Spokane, WA! More about my travels back East in future posts) — even more so now that I have GOATS! I can’t wait to see John, David, and Petunia this evening!!!

I hope you’ve enjoyed our first blog post, and I beseech you to tune in for more exposition on the life of a modern urban goat wrangler and bnb host!

Until next time,

Tanya