Good bye Miss B

Sometimes you need a little time and space away from and event to gain some prospective on it. We lost Miss B a couple of weeks ago and I only now feel up to writing about it. It happened suddenly, she was sick when I got up on a Saturday morning and by Sunday afternoon she was gone.
I could shake my fist at the universe and rally about how unfair life is, and in truth, I did indulge in some of that, but it neither made me feel better nor brought Miss B back. And I’m not one to waste a lot of time on fruitless endeavors. I’ve been engaging in alpaca therapy instead. The herd still wants to be fed and the poo still needs to be cleaned up, and spending time amongst the animals with their calming influence has help considerably. I still miss B terribly, but now I can honestly be thankful for the six weeks we got enjoy her. And what a joy she was, that little girl never stopped moving and would often leap into the air just for the sheer joy of doing it.
Rest in peace Miss B, and thank you for your gift.

Seriously, Monday again???!!!

Monday; day three: toasted another fan. Had a rock hit the wind sheild on the van on my way to Maynard's Market in Tucson. I now have a big 2' crack across the passenger side.

It's not all bad, this morning my mother-in-law let me know that my FIL has repaired the two fans. Any bets on how long it will take for me to kill them again?

And we did ultra sounds on the girls yesterday. Three out of four confirmed pregnant. The fourth is still determined to keep us guessing.

Monday... again

Do you ever get the feeling every day is Monday? I seem to be in a groundhog loop of Mondays. Yesterday (which actually was Monday) I got home to find that the second swamp cooler had once again blown a motor. I got a fan out of the shop so the boys could at least have some air circulating, which they managed to knock over through the gate and the motor on that heated up and stopped working by the time I found it.
This morning, as I was headed out for work, the sensor in my van said “check right front tire, pressure 25) Well ok, I drove over to the shop took about fifteen minutes to figure out how to work the air compressor and then started filling the tire. The sensor never moved from 25 psi. What the heck? So I put more air in the tire (you can probably see where this is going). I finally said the heck with this the sensor is bad, got in my van and headed into work.
About thirty miles from anywhere, the oil light came on. Ugh! Well all right, not much I can do about it now. When I get to the next gas station I’ll get a quart of oil and add it in. Ironically, I have an appointment to change the oil first thing in the morning.
Now I start mess with the sensors and scrolling through to see what else is falling apart. Right front tire still says 25 psi. Rear right tire now says 83 psi. WTF!!!!!! A sneaking suspicion starts to come over me. When I finally get to the office (with my newly acquired quart of oil) I start digging around the van for a tire gauge. Why I didn’t use the tire gauge in the first place and relied on those stupid sensors is beyond me, won’t make that mistake again. I check the pressure of the rear tire; sure enough: 25 psi. I check the front, and the tire gauge maxes out (its limit is 75 psi, so what do you think the pressure was? Anyone want to guess 83 psi???!!!) The sensor on the tire is reversed. The front is actually the rear and vice verse.
So it’s seven a.m., I’ve got the front tire pressure back down, the back will just have to wait until I get home, and I’m just waiting to see what else can go wrong this morning…..

Happy May!

Wednesday tends to be fiber day at Alpacazona Farm. Linda comes out if she is available and we spend the entire morning washing, picking, tumbling and carding fiber. After she leaves I usually try to keep at one fiber project or another. Last Wednesday was a dying fiesta. I hand painted over a dozen skeins of yarn, some hand spun some commercial. I love to just see the wild tumble of colors.
On other news, we’ve been really working with Kinesis. Back in January her demeanor changed, which we were expecting because we thought she was pregnant and due soon. Well she wasn’t and we should have seen the change for the warning sign that it was. She started to get pretty skinny and when she was shorn, we were shocked at the extent of the weight loss. I spent a good deal of time beating myself up for having let it get as bad as it has. But self recrimination does little to fix a problem so I went to work getting weight back on that poor girl. After week of paying very close attention the amount and verity of food Kinesis is taking in, I’m beginning to see progress. I haven’t weighed her in a week (another Wednesday chore) but I am beginning to see a marked improvement in her activity level. The guys at work have joined the “Feed Kinesis” band wagon have been bring in veggies and greens from their gardens to give her to keep enticing her to eat. Of course this may all back fire as she gets use to eating treats and will decide she doesn’t need hay anymore!
We had a horrible wind storm over the weekend. I hate wind. I really, really, really hate wind. I’ll be spending the next two evenings picking up all the trash that has blown into the yard and been caught up in the fences. I hate wind.
In the middle of the wind storm, we dragged out the old swamp cooler and started getting it cleaned up. We’re going to replace the smaller dead cooler with this big old monster. The thin has been sitting out in back of Brian’s folk’s property for years and is ugly as hell, but to my surprise the motor started right up when we plugged it in (ok, not right up, the capacitor needs to be replaced, but the motor still runs!) We’ll seal the bottom up; add a new water pump and presto! Cool air for the alpacas. And just in the nick of time, we’re headed for the nineties this week and I’ve a feeling they may be here for awhile.
Finally, we have three boarders arriving this week. We’ll be moving animals around once we see how personalities mesh. It’s always exciting for the first couple of days as pecking orders need to be re-worked.
Well that’s it for now.