My friend from Illinois drove to my house this weekend

I have a friend named Marcee. She writes a blog called Fancyin' the Farm Life. Two years ago, we became friends through our blogs and, after a whirlwind courtship, we became friends who fly back and forth to see each other. Well, mostly she flies back and forth. I flew to her once. In my defense, though, I live on property and have a lot of animals - it's just not that easy to leave for extended periods of time. Anyway, anyway...I'm getting off track.

So, when I say "my friend from Illinois drove to my house this weekend", this is a really monumental thing. At the beginning of this month, she and her family left Illinois and moved to Washington state. Where we were once over two thousand miles apart, we are now a little more than two hundred miles apart. This is the kind of move that suddenly makes travelling to each other's houses in cars rather than airplanes completely possible. And this is what happened this weekend.

Roxy, my farm pup, was the first to greet her as she got out of her car. It was, shall we say, an extremely warm greeting:

And don't think for a moment that all of us on Critter Farm didn't go out of our way to show Marcee a really good time.

Kai was kind enough to eat treats out of Marcee's hand:

Pete and Reggie, my goat boys, wasted no time in muddying up Marcee's pants:

Pete thought Marcee smelled a little bit like carrots, his favorite treat, and stuck particularly close:

The weather even smiled while she was here, allowing the two of us to sit in the sun and brush the shedding winter hair out of the goats' coats:

We pondered briefly whether we could use this to knit a sweater or stuff a pillow:

We went to my nephew's birthday party and enjoyed "The Reptile Man":

This was a really big snake:

We shared our rhubarb wine made with rhubarb from our garden:

Don't let her face fool you - she LOVED it:

We went to our local track and watched really noisy cars drive in circles:

It was funny, but she didn't seem to mind standing in the pasture with the llamas one bit. Here she is letting Dolly llama eat the special hay seed from the bottom of the bucket:

The chickens were so thrilled to see her, they raced out of their run:

Or maybe they were just thrilled to get out into the pasture:

It was the perfect weekend to take everything out of the chicken coop and give it a good scrubbing:

The coop needed a thorough spring cleaning:

As Marcee rolled load after load of chicken shavings down the hill, she received extensive moral support from the Critter Farm crew:

She's a natural at this farm stuff, don't you think?

The weekend went by really fast and, suddenly, it was time for her to head back home. At this point, Roxy totally thought she was going home with her:

Now I get to refer to my friend from Illinois as my friend from Washington. And we can drive to each other's houses.