The text message was ominously vague: was I free for a call? My sister had a proposal for me. Luckily, I was free, and my mind flashed through various hypotheticals as I waited for her call.

Would she ask me for a kidney again? That was a touchy subject.

Was she calling from jail, again? I was sick of bailing her out.

Did she want to stay with me for some reason? Luckily, my apartment is small enough to make declining easily.

“Hello?”

Her proposal was simple: Instead of being sad and lonely in Bellingham, I could be sad and slightly less lonely (but significantly more cold) in Montana because she wanted me to house-sit for her, and take care of her (many) animals. For a couple weeks, while they relaxed on a beach or something in South Carolina.

It’s not like you have a lot going on your personal life anyway, they said, more or less.

It was a miserable December day when I set out. Seattle itself was fairly snowy, which is terrible, because nobody in Seattle knows how to drive in the snow. Snoqualmie Pass was reasonably clear, but a blizzard set in shortly afterward, and the next three hours was dodging people driving Toyota Camrys at 25 miles an hour in the right lane along I-90.

I made it to Plains, Montana without too much difficulty, entertaining myself by counting the cars in various ditches and stumbled in the front door, finding them all at dinner. All three niblings looked up balefully. Sometimes there are ecstatic shouts of “Uncle Joe!” and they run to give me a hug and I feel a slight warmth pierce the darkness where my heart should be, other times they just look irritated. This was definitely one of the latter times. Luthien shrunk in her chair and stuffed a bite of pizza in her maw. Jack gave me the slightest of nods from the far end of the table. Eomer, who had positively LOVED me the last time, made eye contact and immediately started to cry.

Luckily, they warmed up pretty quickly, especially once they realised I’d brought some Lego with me and was willing to share it.

“Please tell me you have written instructions or something for all this,” I asked, as my sister and I set out to do the rounds that evening.

She had! And it was legible! We went outside, moseying past the mangled carcase of what had once been a dead deer. You know how when you’re in bear country and they say things like “don’t have food inside your tent” and “don’t leave a dead deer carcase in your back lawn because it might attract predators”? It was like the opposite of that.

In the back corner of the yard are the three female goats, all of which are (probably) with child. I got the first good news when I learned that I would not, in fact, have to milk the large goat.

I’m not sure why the female goats are different sizes. I do know that the largest one is kind of a jerk to the other two and bullies them out of the way when I give them their daily allotment of grain. For that matter, she bullies me as well. I’ve learned to enter the gate backward and basically hip-check her when I walk in the pen, after Day 2 when she nut-tapped me. Luckily, I don’t plan on ever having children.

The female goats are simple enough. Water, hay, and grain. They don’t need walks or attention. If you are careful (and/or wear an athletic cup) it’s a cinch.

The male goats are even easier: they don’t get grain. I’m not sure why. Maybe my sister just hates men, or maybe it’s because they don’t have a goat growing inside of them (that we know about). However, there’s a trade-off. The female goats smell like…well, goat. They don’t smell great, but it’s fine. The male goats smell like Satan’s unwashed asshole. It’s why when you raise male goats – or pigs, or cows, or whatever – for meat, you have to chop those balls off. Or rubber-band-em-off, in the case of goats.

There’s also a whole horde of chickens who do not like me at all. I’m not sure if it’s personal, or a general distrust of humans. My sister (and, I assume, her husband) on the regular march out there, select a chicken by some unexplained method (disloyalty?), wring its neck, pluck it, and devour it, while all the time (I have to assume) making hard eye contact with the rest of the flock. I’ve never done this, so the chickens should like me, especially after I gave them some leftover macaroni and cheese and a slice of bread that fell on the floor. No such luck. The ducks are equally distrusting.

Also, none of them are laying, so my visions of delicious farm-fresh eggs gracing my breakfast plate evaporated. LAME.

There’s a couple of rabbits, and they just kinda do their thing.

Finally, inside there’s two cats – Seamus, who does not like me at all – and Bagheera, who likes me quite a bit. The cats are pretty low-maintenance, they meow for food a lot and occasionally knock things over, typical cat behavior. And finally, there’s Dakota, the high-energy German Shepherd.

I like Dakota. She reminds me of Sherlock a lot. For example, if I’m in the bathroom taking a dump, she’ll take a long, slow sniff under the edge of the door, so she knows what I had to eat a couple days ago, and then flop down against the edge of the door to wait it out. I made the mistake for taking her on three walks the first day instead of her normal two, and now when the mid-afternoon rolls around she comes and stares at my elbow while I’m trying to write and admits a high-pitched whine at the exact decibel to drive someone to the ragged edge of insanity. She also stole my gloves off the kitchen table and left them in the back yard next to the dead deer, probably trying to assert dominance. She enjoys walks and butt scritches and when we ride in the car she puts her front feet up on the center console so her nose is level with my face and stares out the front windshield.

Life has been interesting. They have a wood-burning stove here, so that’s been a delight figuring out. There’s a wood-pile out by the garage and they have a wagon that you can load up with wood and bring it in to unload in the wood-chest that’s next to the stove. Yesterday we ran low so I went out, loaded it up, brought it inside, and unloaded it. I got distracted because my water was boiling on the (kitchen) stove. A minute or so later I heard a thump and saw that Bagheera had climbed inside the wagon. No biggie, cats love climbing inside things. A couple minutes after that, a terrible smell drifted across the kitchen. I went over and realised that Bagheera had just taken an epic, 2.7-Couric, horrendously smelly dump right inside the cloth wagon. What a dick.

Further updates as events warrant.