A day on the rez and an escape.

At Nikki's school there is a new heritage language teacher. She is really nice and we have been trying to help her get set up the last few days. She got the job after the semester started and has been playing catch-up. She's basically said that Georgie and I can come up and hang out in her classroom if we help her. We did that a few times earlier and today we spent the entire school day with her.

In the morning she had classes. Nikki helped her and Georgie and I hung out in her empty classroom. I showed her how to work Nikki's digital recorders, which she plans to use for language teaching.

At lunch, she took us to the senior center on the reservation and treated us to lunch. Meatloaf, noodles, and stewed carrots. Nikki and I talked later about how good those institutional kind of meals can be. After lunch, she took us on a little driving tour of the area. She pointed out a lot of stuff that we had wondered about, like how certain places got their names and such.

Also on the lunch hour, Nikki and I went to the trading post and registered to vote in MT. We're excited about that. If we had stayed in DC, we wouldn't have got our say in the presidential election.

After lunch, Nikki sat in on some classes while I drove and walked around with Georgie. Then we drove the new teacher home (her car got wrecked last night) and we headed home.

I hope this coming-to-school-with-mommy gig lasts a while. It makes it easy with Georgie and I like helping out a little with her research.

When we got home, I noticed that the inner gate was shut with the goats inside it. I asked Nikki if she had shut them in and then laughed when I realized that the goats must have shut themselves in. I let them out into the bigger yard and within about 30 seconds Nikki yelled to me that Penny was outside on the street.

But how could that be? The outer gate was shut. We wrangled her back in and put her on a leash and then let her show us. She had figured out a way to squeeze herself under the gate. Wily little thing. As I was wiring down the gate for the night, our neighbor came by and told me that she had been out several times today, including once on the highway (US-89 is the main street of town). Several of our neighbors had gotten together to wrestle them back into our yard. Sorry neighbors. We're likely going to Great Falls tomorrow so I can find a more lasting solution.

This and other episodes are helping us get to know our goats a little better. Sweet little Albert is content to just munch grass all day. He never followed behind Penny in the mischief-making. Penny is the real handful. She's also the one that makes sounds like we are torturing her every time we go in the house and leave her outside. Anyway, we're expecting rain tonight, so hopefully they won't be going anywhere.