Bungees, and "bucklings no more"

First, if you are squeamish or of delicate sensibilities, stop reading now. this is not the post for you.

Ok, non-squeamish friends of my goats, here's last night's tale...I arrived home from work at midnight, but unfortunately I forgot to douse my headlights at the end of the driveway so the goats woke up and knew I was home. (Usually we pull in very quietly, no talking, wait for passing traffic to mask the closing of the car door...) Since it was raining, I decided to coax them away from the gate and back to their warm and dry Tupperware House in the yard. Reaching down to pet Elliot, I discovered he had a bungee cord wrapped around his back. Where this came from I have no idea. When I left for work earlier in the day, the girls had the goats on their collars and leashes eating weeds in the lower fields, but how the bungee cord came into play will remain one of those unsolved mysteries of life. He was very glad to be relieved of it, however.

In the dim moonlight, I could see that the goats had been in their shelter most of the evening as it was quite full of droppings, so I grabbed a handy dustpan and brush (GOAT TIP: Have these everywhere), knelt down, and swept out the house. Toward the back I saw what appeared to be rock of some sort (how on earth did that get in here?) so I reached in to remove it. Lo and behold, it was not a large stone, as I surmised, but rather the answer to a question which has plagued our family for a month or so:

When you take your bucklings to be "banded" (neutered) and a very tight rubber band is stretched around their little-boy sacs, how long does it take for the sac to completely shrivel up and fall off? Well, in Ellie's case, we know know the answer - 43 days, and one night. (Emerson lost his last weekend.) So there I was at midnight, in the dark, in the rain, in my work clothes, holding a dry and shrivelled, fluorescent blue (that's a topic for another day) and finally detached sac of goat testicles.

You know that moment when your child loses their first tooth and you want to save it forever in a little memory box? Yeah, this was not one of those moments.