Last night at dusk I noticed the girl goats acting alarmed and staring intently towards the front yard. I kept checking and could find nothing, but kept my eye on the girls just the same.

Then I saw a fox! A full grown adult on the hunt, inside the electric lower part of the doe fence. I have a rooster and a couple of hens in the lower house, and the door was still open. I quickly stepped outside-no, not with a gun or camera, but with a loud, "what are you doing down there?" and several loud claps, and the fox vanished quickly.

This morning after the usual computer rituals, and having a small chuckle at Mouse's sharing of a muddy adventure, I did the regular goat chores, and spent some extra time combing the does. I was getting ready to move over to the bucklings, when I realized it was after 10, the sun was getting high, and I had not yet turned the car.

My turnaround has been a challenge for the last few weeks with the freezing and thawing, and I have nearly gotten stuck several times with cave ins from melting ice below. Things did seem a bit soft, but I decided not to wait, and the results are the photo you see above, after I had dug about 45 minutes around the wheel and making a ditch to drain it all away.

There was lots of bird song to keep me company, to my delight the Phoebes returned this am, and stared in at me through the window while I whistled welcome in Phoebe. LOL>

I was so intent on digging the wheel out I was too late to grab a shot of migrating canadian geese- at least 20 headed due North about 11 am.

Then I thought to take a picture of my misadventure. Things don't look too bad from this pic, but if you look closely you can see that the whole nose of the car is resting on the upper part-"Hung-up".

Any friends that could come to aid were sensibly working, so that left it up to me to get it out. A helper might have been able to push it clear at this point...

I tore the back of the car apart to get at the jack, and found a bit of wood without a nail to rest it on. Oh, how fun, what a cheesy piece of crap! My experience with jacks comes mainly from watching my mechanic run a wheeled pump hydraulic--this little rascal required being positioned perfectly into a little slot, and then you hand to wind and flip the little cheesy bar, the result of which that every-other time around, I had to drag my hand through the muck to return it to crank position.

Somewhere in here I took off six layers of clothes and reduced myself to a pair of cutoff jeans and a white tank top, because the sun was beating down something fierce.

Once the front end was jacked free of the ground, I scouted for a suitable rock, which I tried to slip under the tire. Tight squeeze, I got an old ax and used the back to drive the stone under the tire-the resulting mud spatters from high velocity tools impacting wet goo I will leave to your own imagination.

Several times the muck pulled my rubber boots right off my feet...

Rock in place, I scrounged smaller rocks and packed around the front, and then a load of sand and gravel I swiped off down by the road...

Lowered the jack, took away the blocks, and managed to get out of it and turned around. When I did leave the drive later, the bottom part by the culvert collapsed, leaving me no choice but to park the car on the road and hike the groceries in....with a nice cold ale and a half hour on the computer as a reward..but now back to outside chores, and may your days be sunny and dry...LOL