Today's Scavenger Hunt

This Saturday, Justina will be getting her goat for the Fair. And that means we need to get ready for it. The pen it will be kept in needs some work. There are drainage issues and there is currently no shelter. And the walls need to be strengthened and built higher. (A goat can clear a 4 foot fence with ease and they are amazing climbers. So today, I went on a little shopping trip combined with a scavenger hunt. I got a galvanized mesh panel, some plywood, two-by-fours, and some pallets. I got the pallets from businesses that were throwing them out. So tomorrow afternoon, when James gets off work, we will go down to the pen and work on it. A friend of his will also be helping us out.

Unfortunately, we cannot keep the goat or lamb in our backyard due to an obnoxious neighbor who found a loophole in our deed. Last year, they turned us in one week before Fair, not because of flies, smell, or anything like that, but because it just irked them to see the animals in our back yard. (We are not the only neighbors they pick on.) The county code for our particular neighborhood states that we need to have at least 10,000 square foot to keep one hooved animal for a junior livestock Fair project (e.g. 4-H, FFA, Junior Grange). Our deed says that we have .22 acre (that's twenty-two hundredths of an acre), which calculates out to be 9,583.2 square feet. That means we are 416.8 square feet short to keep the one animal here. A friend of mine in real estate has pulled our parcel map and the measurements are not stated on there. And our mortgage paperwork says that it is "10,000 square feet or .22 acre."

So at some point we need to get a survey of our lot to determine the actual square footage. The county inspector even suggested that we have it done because the acreage on the deed may be an assessor's figure. And we should, not just because of the 4-H animal project situation, but because we really should have a definitive measurement of the lot and know our actual square footage, especially given the adversarial situation with the people next door. (I would use the word neighbors but I don't want to turn it into a four-letter word.) But that will cost several hundred dollars and will just have to wait.