LOL!!! Great post, Bee-dub. ;-) What a lucky man you are to have such "interesting" neighbours nearby.

Regarding the goat: It's probably a billy goat. ALL billy goats have Tourette's Syndrome. They're vile creatures.

As for the roosters, one gets used to it eventually. I stayed in Trinidad for awhile, and the night is clamarous there with the sounds of hundreds of crowing roosters and literally thousands of barking and howling dogs. At first it's maddening, and it keeps you awake. Presently your mind and body get so exhausted from resisting the inevitable that your mind just shuts down, and from then on you sleep right through it...a good spiritual exercise in learning to surrender to what cannot be changed. It's not actually the noise that keeps us awake, you see...it's our resistance to the noise that keeps us awake.

Similarly, it's people's resistance to the divergent opinions of other people that keeps contentious political and religious threads boiling interminably on Mudcat Cafe. All this mental resistance accomplishes nothing but to keep people upset with each other and wasting their time vainly attacking each other and attempting to change the other guy...a quest as fruitless as attempting to empty the sea with a bucket. What the mind won't let go of...it is imprisoned and tortured by.