The Goat

Inspirational song: Climb Every Mountain (Sound of Music)

We are still in the getting-to-know-you phase with our large new gentleman. He doesn't know whether he can trust us yet. We haven't tested how well he can be trusted with our kitties. We are moving slowly. However, a few things had to be sped up a bit.

It was sunny but cold when we fed the crew breakfast. The boys ate outside, where Murray always has his meals, and Saoirse was inside for hers. Then I let her out to run around with them. I kept peeking outside to see how they were getting along. New dog jumped over the picket fence into the raised garden bed side like the fence didn't even exist, back and forth a couple times. Then one time I looked out and didn't see him. Like at all. We dashed out and looked all around the back yard, and he just wasn't there. I went out front and had to chip ice off my car windshield before driving around to look for him. Mr S-P went the back way, to look in the alley. I had barely made it out of the driveway when he called to say he was in our neighbors yard, the one I rent out. We thought this meant he can vault our six foot privacy fence. No, more basic than that. We have some sawhorses and stacked flagstone against that fence, hoping to keep Saoirse from barking at neighbor dog Beau (it doesn't work). New dog just climbs up the stack, stands on the boards on the saw horses, and he hopped over the one time. I'm starting to see why the fosters were so desperate to get him adopted out, and said he needs a farm. Good thing we have a mountain.

And that led to the next urgent task--boy needed a collar and tag with our phone number on it. That meant we had to settle on a name right away. We wanted to get a Gaelic name for him, and this morning's excitement had us googling Gaelic words for things like "climber." It occurred to me to look up "mountain." It's spelled "beinn," and the anglicized pronunciation is just "ben." Think the tallest mountain in Scotland, Ben Nevis, or Beinn Nibheis. So there we have it. Beinn. The mountain.

When Saoirse was young, and being naughty, I started referring to her as a name from a well-known SNL skit, a celebrity jeopardy episode with Norm MacDonald as Burt Reynolds. He changed his name on his monitor to read "Turd Ferguson," because it was funny. I called my puppy that so often, her official government name became Saoirse Louise Ferguson. Her bio-father has proved he has the same amount of naughty in him, so he is Beinn Appa Ferguson.