oh. that's interesting. the one they got is actually more skittish and wild than the other ones even though it is stronger and bigger. she is still alive and i am glad. tonight when i got home from work and had changed, i went outside. some of them were waiting inside the tool shed. so that is good. they get the idea of this is our house now at night. the only thing i dont like is this shed shares walls with my house on three sides. so although it is very protected from the elements, i dont' want the odors eventually coming inside. but it seems liek the best place for htem now. there are two outbuildings on the property, but they were largely destroyed by vandals before i moved in. the kind of neighborhood where if it's being lived in, it's okay but once it's empty, kabooom. one reason i got it so cheap, basically to keep it from being burned down. anyway, the goats themselves pulled down some of hte repairs i made and really nothing will get done to them of consequence til next season. i couldnt' see her face tonight well enough to know if she still looked so much in shock, but she was definitely just in hang out mode in the shed. my friend says if she was going to have died, she would have by now. i amazed that she lived and very grateful.

I'm surprised to read all these postings talking about rain. It's been bone dry where I'm at--my yard (grass) is brown and crispy and even with faithful watering (as much as I can afford-I'm afraid to see what my water bill is going to be) on my part, all of my plants/shrubs/trees are showing signs of stress from the heat and lack of rain. I've been getting up early (like 5 am) on the weekends to try to beat the heat and work out in my garden--by 11 am, it's too hot to do anything. What I can't figure out is with the lack of water (everything is drying up), just where the heck are all these mosquitoes coming from? And slugs....I've never had problems with slugs before...jiminey crickets!-I'd figure with the heat and lack of moisture they'd just shrivel and dry up. We actually got some rain this morning, but I fear it may be too little too late.... It's depressing, I live all year for summer and my garden, and after enduring months of snow and cold only to have a summer so hot and so dry that it makes me sad to look out and see how bad and unhappy my plants/shrubs/trees are...and there's so little I can do about it.

Jeannie, I used his books (Roadside Fruits of Oklahoma and Roadside Trees and Shrubs of Oklahoma) to help me figure out what a lot of our understory plants were in the woodlands. It took me ages and ages and lots of other books too to get a good understanding of the diverse group of plants found in different places on our property. Every now and then I see a Rayless Gaillardia on our property, but it isn't terribly common. It usually is in a pasture that also has lots of clasping coneflower, which tends to be more aggressive and crowd it out. With wildflowers, you never know what you'll have in any given year because they ebb and flow naturally depending on what the weather was like in the previous year and depending on how well they survived or reseeded or the seed germinated or whatever. This has been a good year for regular gaillardia but I don't think I've seen any rayless ones yet. I usually see them later in the year, but with early heat this year, who knows when they'll appear? Because rainfall was so heavy in the autumn through spring, we had huge amounts of cool-season grasses and forbs. However, that presents a problem in and of itself because when the cool-season plants are that abundant and tall and thick, they can shade out the warm-season ones and keep them from growing much and getting established. Then you have a poorer stand of warm-season plants as long as the cool-season vegetation is still standing. This morning I was outside early with the string trimmer cutting back a large area we have not mowed at all this year because it had gotten too tall to cut with the riding mower. We left that field standing with no mowing so the cool-season flowers could disperse their seeds. Now that the seeds have been dispersed naturally, I cut back all the dormant, standing vegetation and am hoping that we'll get a good stand of warm-season stuff. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we don't. It kinda depends on whether enough rain falls soon to help the young warm-season plants establish. In an area where I haven't cut yet, the warm-season plants are only about 2" tall. I'll just cut the cool-season vegetation a tiny bit taller than the warm-season stuff so I'm not chopping off the tops of the warm-season plants. I only cut back about a quarter-acre. There's a couple more acres to cut, but I think they still are short enough that we can cut them with the riding mower. I hate to cut the tall grasses in May because it leaves the bunnies much more exposed. They put their nests closer to our yard full of dogs and cats than they should for their own sake. With the current dryness and having already had a big grassfire across the road from us, I want to cut everything possible down as short as we reasonably can without cutting it so short that the plants won't come back. It seems like a really good wildflower year so far, but only time will tell if that continues to be true under the current drought conditions. Last May, with abundant rainfall, many wildflowers germinated in May and into June, and then promptly dried up/burnt up in July before they even bloomed. I don't know that's there's been enough May rainfall to get much of anything growing if it already wasn't up when what little rain we have had was falling. Another grass fire here today....and it is much, much too early for that. Our area seems about as dry right now as it was around the first of July last year and that makes me incredibly uneasy. Dawn

maggie I wouldn't stop the treadmill completely but I would make sure you use the settings that change it up so that you are not going the same pace all the time. Go up hill and fast and slow etc. Also I would vary your workout and use other machines. Stair steppers seem to have gotten a lot better and appear to be real climbers now . Also elliptical is another choice and the cycling classes. Variety is the spice of life. But...most important do not leave off weight training ! Make sure you lift weights. That is the key to no injuries. c