goat breeding
Got my exercise in this morning as my partner and I pretty much ran a goat rodeo to separate my herd into two for breeding.
The older does were extremely excited to have Durian, their buck, back.
The younger does were not super impressed with Cybertruck, their buck. We'll see how it goes...
Today is a particularly hilarious mix of everything I do. Next is a live radio interview by phone for the Sask-wide not-CBC radio station about auroras, then a Canadian Astronomical Society Board meeting (via Zoom).
Then I need to hit the feed store in the city, and I'll roll into the university award ceremony with a trunk full of chicken feed.
goat breeding
Got my exercise in this morning as my partner and I pretty much ran a goat rodeo to separate my herd into two for breeding.
The older does were extremely excited to have Durian, their buck, back.
The younger does were not super impressed with Cybertruck, their buck. We'll see how it goes...
The Sask small town mayor who came up with this idea to sell naming rights to his town to the highest corporate bidder (apparently without consulting anyone in his community) was right that it would get Duck Lake into the news... but I'm guessing that his time as mayor is not going to be a long one. https://theflatlander.ca/duck-lake-mayor-responds-to-critics-of-plan-to-sell-naming-rights/
(And yes, I see the crumbling infrastructure in small towns. Maybe that's something the provincial gov't should help with? Not a giant corporation buying naming rights?)
food, dairy
Ok, it looks absolutely disgusting. But it smells and tastes amazing after draining off the whey and salting it! Like caramelized chevre! Maybe I should make a cheesecake with it?
I added some of the yummy-smelling caramelized whey to sourdough pancake batter for dinner (yes dinner, I already know that today is going to be Quite A Day so we're having pancakes for dinner. Sidenote: I almost never plan dinner at the beginning of the day, hoping this will make everything go better)
food, dairy
Ended up making waffles with the sourdough/caramelized whey batter instead, and DAMN those were amazing waffles!
(I meant to put some of the caramelized chevre on, too but totally forgot. Now I am too full.)
((Yes... my kids and I had waffles for dinner at like 5pm. I have orchestra rehearsal after animal chores, and my partner has parent-teacher conferences until late, so that was the only way tonight was going to work))
Ok the #page42 exercise is going to make me cry.
I picked up "Losing the Sky" by Andy Lawrence, because it's been sitting on my desk as I slowly force myself to read this book about the environmental crisis happening in orbit, but written 5 years ago before it was really bad. Perfect example of how painful this is:
"Satellite pass within a few km of each other every day."
...it's actually more like every few minutes now.
Remember kids, always check for planets before taking a 5 minute exposure with a 4 meter telescope to look for Kuiper Belt Objects!
Background: My collaborator running the processing for our survey is now wading through that hilarious/super annoying mistake I made, but was able to be utilized by other members of my team to add to another ongoing survey and help find even more moons of Saturn https://news.ubc.ca/2025/03/saturn-128-new-moons/
And here's the real downer... AST SpaceMobile plans to launch a few hundred satellites that are as bright as Saturn when sunlit. So. A lot more research images will look like this in the near future.
Thanks, direct-to-cell gigantic satellites.
Remember kids, always check for planets before taking a 5 minute exposure with a 4 meter telescope to look for Kuiper Belt Objects!
Background: My collaborator running the processing for our survey is now wading through that hilarious/super annoying mistake I made, but was able to be utilized by other members of my team to add to another ongoing survey and help find even more moons of Saturn https://news.ubc.ca/2025/03/saturn-128-new-moons/
Hilariously, I found out about the #Cloudflare outage by trying to use a goat gestation calculator from the American Goat Society after breeding the first goat of the year this morning.
I don't know why it's so funny to me that the American Goat Society website is down but Overleaf and Zoom are still up, so my workday can pretty much continue as planned, but I'm not 100% sure when my goat babies are coming next spring.
(Ok that last part is totally an exaggeration, it's not that hard math, just nice to have a double check on it)
Hilariously, I found out about the #Cloudflare outage by trying to use a goat gestation calculator from the American Goat Society after breeding the first goat of the year this morning.
food, dairy
The curds and whey never really went back together (maybe I was supposed to stir it more thoroughly after adding culture?) After sitting in a warm place for a few hours, I decided to put the curd into a cheesecloth and hang it for a while to turn it into a yogurt cheese kind of thing. It smells amazing! Like a toasted caramel dessert of some kind!
food, dairy
Ok, it looks absolutely disgusting. But it smells and tastes amazing after draining off the whey and salting it! Like caramelized chevre! Maybe I should make a cheesecake with it?
I added some of the yummy-smelling caramelized whey to sourdough pancake batter for dinner (yes dinner, I already know that today is going to be Quite A Day so we're having pancakes for dinner. Sidenote: I almost never plan dinner at the beginning of the day, hoping this will make everything go better)
Prof. Sam Lawler