Did someone moo?

Unfortunately, they sound like lunch for the full-size coyotes living in our north field:

It’s the little cow with a big future. Rising supermarket prices are persuading hundreds of families to turn their back gardens into mini-ranches stocked with miniature cattle.

Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”.

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

Just right for the garden: a mini-cow – Times Online.

A couple of years ago, two guys in a beat-up pickup truck showed up wanting to sell us steaks, which they were evidently transporting in two large coolers in the bed of the truck. I explained that I don’t eat beef, and they acted like they’d never heard of such a thing.

Last week a guy in a pickup truck shows up and explains that he happens to have a whole truckload of hot asphalt with nowhere to go, and asks would we like him to pave our driveway, cheap. I demurred, explaining that we liked the driveway as it is, two long ruts decorated with a strip of crabgrass.

I’m hoping that if these folks are keeping a map (or chalking symbols on the road like the hobos used to), we’re now marked as “hopelessly insane.”