When we opened up the website and the blog a couple of months ago, I reactivated my old Google Adsense account as a matter of course.  I have never and will never generate enough traffic to make a living off of internet ads, but it was nice back in the day to pick up enough money to buy popsicles for the kids or something out of basically nowhere.

I thought it was pretty cool that everything at Adsense is automated now.  No more fiddling around with scripts for ad placement - Google promised to just insert ads in suitable places on the website automatically.  I signed up with the new website, clicked the 'auto ads' button, and.... nothing happened.​  

Hmmm...  I assumed I missed a step in the setup process and decided to just leave it all as is because the extra work wasn't worth a couple of popsicles per year.

A few days later I noticed a couple little ads showing up in the sidebar of the blog. Okay.  There was a delay, I see.  Cool.​  And then I forgot about it all for real.

Having been busy with putting the new online store together, it has been quite a while since I have personally taken a look at the content pages of the rest of the website.  I mean, I have seen it all before... It would be really weird to look at our own website every day.  Maybe.  As a matter of fact, my husband does not even read my blog posts.  I am talking to you, Dave.

On a complete whim (and also because I was procrastinating about going to bed), I started clicking through the navigation menu on the website tonight.  And that's when I saw them:  IRRITATING BLINKING GAUDY IRRELEVANT ADS EVERYWHERE.  Everywhere.  They were crammed between pictures... between paragraphs... at the top of the pages... at the bottom...  There were five or six of them per page.  

And I have no idea how long it has been like that.  Apparently, once our website traffic started to go up a little bit, the Google bots went into full berserker mode and populated every blank space which I had wanted to remain blank with some annoying ad.  

I am pretty old-school and remember a time when the internet was more than click-bait and pop-up ads.  I remember actual content and actual people and actual information.  It is a shame that it seems to have gone the way of the print magazine -- 50 pages of glossy full-page ads to get to a ten paragraph article.

If you had been subjected to any of this before tonight on our website, please accept my sincerest apologies.  I have disabled auto ads.  Or.. I think I have... In the same way that turning auto ads on did nothing for a few days, turning auto ads off does not seem to do much either.  Soon... hopefully very soon... they should go back to wherever they came from.

Now to actually go to bed... 

Our sudden and somewhat impulsive move to Oklahoma in December of 2013 was tumultuous and it took several months to even begin to be in a position to start acquiring poultry and livestock.  Having said that, I realize that we were not entirely ready then and had we been more reasonable people we would have given ourselves a year or more to get settled in before throwing live animals into the mix.  But with experience comes such wisdom - and we lacked both.

We also lacked patience.  We had gone through a lot to get here and time was passing.  Back then, we still worked on suburban time -- expecting things to happen in hours and days rather than months and even years like it does out here.

I had done my research.  Long before the move I had poured over every goat book I could get my hands on.  I spent hours watching YouTube videos and reading the best and worst blogs that offered goat advice and information.  I had decided that we wanted to raise Kinder goats.  They were a newly recognized breed - a hybrid of a Pygmy and Nubian - which promised to offer all the good things you get from a meat goat and a milk goat in a moderately-sized package.  There was also the advantage of these goats being a fairly rare breed which would mean that we would be forced to take our time finding exactly the right goats at exactly the right time.

Or at least until May of 2014 - which was probably not exactly the right time.  There happened to be a Craigslist ad for registered Kinder goats for sale within driving distance of us.   What are the chances?  It was like destiny.  We made arrangements with the seller and rented a horse trailer to go pick up our goats of destiny.

At this point, even in retrospect, I cannot say with certainty that we had done anything regrettable regarding the purchase of our first livestock animals.  We had: 1) Done our research,  2) Decided on a breed which would be well-suited to our needs and resources, 3) Committed to that breed, and 4) Decided to buy registered stock from a registered breeder.