Shearing is over for another year

The Alpacazona alpacas are naked once more. Brian and I finished shearing the last of the big boys yesterday. Now I can turn my attention to sorting, skirting and washing fleece. Oh, and I can return to the war against the weeds in the yard. They’ve gotten ahead of us as we’ve been spending most of our free time denuding alpacas.
Plus I won’t feel so guilty when I sit down and work and a project here and there. There’s yarn to be spun, plied and dyed, roving to label, scarves to weave, baskets to shape. The list just goes on and on. At least I’m never bored.

Summer begins

Things are slowly heating up. Literally. We had our first 90 degree day this week. It’s supposed to cool back into the eighties after this weekend, but it’s a temporary reprieve at best. We’ve been busy getting things ready for the long hot summer. The fans have all been cleaned and oiled, the swamp coolers have been checked and reconditioned, and the alpacas are, well, I’m working on getting them sheared. I do my own so it takes a while to get them all done. I’ve got two more girls to go and I did most of Legend. I hope to get the girls finished this weekend and start in on the rest of the boys. Legend will either have to go back to Kathleen looking kind of stupid (I couldn’t get any of his neck or head done) or wait until I either have a team of people to hold him down or a lot of drugs to calm him down. And possibly some drugs to calm me down as well….
Mean while, I’m taking advantage of the rising temps to get back into some solar dying. I did about ten skeins this past weekend. Brian and I took some vacation time and spent the first day and a half just hanging around the house doing chores and generally goofing off. Then we headed up for a couple of nights in the camper. A last little get away before the big shearing push.

Miss B is doing well. She usually spends the twilight hour racing around the fields trying to get Cartigan to play with her. Cartigan seems willing; he just can’t seem to get the rules. Though he spend a great deal of time following her around.

New alpaca fleece rugs

Our rugs have arrived! Whoooohooo!!!
They actually arrived a couple of weeks before I thought they would. The mill had been telling customers the turn around time was 14-16 weeks. So when we brought O out to TX in December, I figured I had until the end of April until I would see the rugs.
I was so excited when I got called from the front office to say I had five HUGE boxes waiting for me. The poor UPS guy looked so crest fallen when I told him I needed them in my van which was around back. In order to ease his aching back, I told him just to get them back to the truck and I would drive over to meet him. It worked out well until I got home and realized I had to get the boxes back out of the van…
Not to be thwarted, I just opened the boxes up and carried the rugs in around ten at a time. Only took me eight trips. Now I have a stack of alpaca rugs (from ours and Linda’s alpacas) three feet high in my loom room. Each rug is unique, no two the same, though some are similar. The mill did an amazing job with styles and colors and I have to say I am very pleased.

Our Easter earthquake Or "Why is our house rocking?"

We got to experience our first, and hopefully only, earthquake Sunday. Brian and I were hanging out at home, relaxing, and watching a movie. Our dog, Molly was sleeping on the floor next to me, when I felt the chair kind of rocking. I assumed Molly was stretching or scratching and hitting the chair. It went on long enough that I finally sat up to see what the heck she was doing only to see she was still sound asleep and not touching the chair at all. Then I noticed Brian was looking at me kind of strange and says, “Why is our house rocking?” The chandlers where rocking, the rod for the blinds where tapping the windows, it was kind of surreal. We thought the wind may have picked up, but it was still outside.
Of course we went next door to see if they felt anything and called a couple of friends. Everybody thought we where nuts.
I knew we had felt something, so, being a good geologist, I logged on to the U.S. Geological Survey website and started poking around. Sure enough, there had been a quake down in Baja California. At that time they said it had a 6.2 magnitude, which is big, but there had been bigger, closer earthquakes that we hadn’t noticed in the past. So I poked around some more.
The epicenter was 32km deep. Ah, there it is, that’s why the waves traveled so far. That’s a pretty deep earthquake and the deeper they are, the farther they tend to travel.
So I guess I get to cross this off the bucket list, not that experience any kind of earthquake was really high on my list of things to do.

A new baby!

The herd has grown by one! Tyche finally had her cria yesterday (361 days of gestation). A little girl weighing in an22.3 lbs. We were expecting white and at first we thought she was white, but after we got her dried off and cleaned some of the mud off of her, we noticed there was a hint of gold to her fleece. You can really see it at her tail. So maybe we’ve got a beige or a really light, light fawn. Brian came up with her name: Alpacazona’s Miss B. Haven.
Little B is doing well and testing out those very, very long legs by racing around her pen while poor Tyche waddles along behind.

Spring Tucson Shearing Festival

The Spring Tucson Shearing Festival was a success! We’re starting to recognizing faces from past events so it’s like a happy family reunion now. And of course I always like meeting new people, like Sara of “Woolies” (woolies.etsy.com) and “Buster and Boo (busterandboo.etsy.com), who has been helping me work though some of the kinks in my Etsy store. I feel very fortunate to have met someone patient enough to walk me through the technical part of on line selling, especially with my unique inability to grasp anything computerish.
I was pleasantly surprised when Kathy, the hostess of the shearing festival, asked me if I would consider teaching a class on making coil baskets. It’s something totally out of my comfort zone, but I think I might take a stab at it. What’s the worst that can happen? The people taking the class tell me I suck and demand their money back? Ok, well that would be bad, but I would live through it. I think.
After the festival, I ran down to Maynard’s Market to drop off more yarn and socks and found out I should have brought more felted soaps. There was only one left! Guess I’ll have to get busy making some more.

Never a dull moment!

March will go down as an eventful month here at the farm. Things got rolling with the arrival of a female from CA, here for breeding. Then it was off to the SWRAS. I love getting to catch up with old friends and meet new people, who will become old friends.

One day to recover, then it’s off to Tucson, where Mom and I set up our vendor space at Maynard’s Market.
No matter how much you set up mock displays, you always end up changing it once you get in to your space. I’ll be heading back down there Saturday with more stuff and to rearrange what I felt didn’t quite work for me.

During this the folks got packed up and headed back home (by way of Vegas, of course). The day they left we had some strange men snooping around the house, up to no good. I called the sheriff’s office just in case other people had similar things happen, just so there would be a record for the police to keep an eye out. Brian added a “No Trespassing” sign to the gate. I hate to make people feel unwelcome, but we’ve been robbed once, I don’t plan to go through that a second time. Fortunately for us, Dot was keeping an eye on the house and she scared the men off by wandering over to see what they where up to. She said what made her suspicious, is that the guys never asked to look at the alpacas. Even the sheriff wanted to go see the alpacas!

That same day I made my report, I had to be home early from work because one of our boys in quarantine from the show (Jack) spiked a 106.5 temperature. Dot and I got him cooled down and I ran up to the vets to get antibiotics for him. By the next morning the fever had gone and he was back to his old happy self. Not that he’s enjoying the week long series of shots.

We also had another female arrive for breeding, which has been, um, challenging. She may have a retained CL, though she isn’t responding overly much to Estrumate. There’s also a possibility of a cyst. Or maybe she just hates boys, who knows. When I have Linda come out to do ultrasounds, I’ll get her done as well and see if there is anything to be gleaned.

Meanwhile, we’ve concluded that Kenisis is not pregnant after all, and have started breeding her. And Tyche is going for a new record on her gestation (353 days today with no sign of even thinking of giving birth!) Though we were hoping the hot air balloon they inflated behind the house would scare the cria out of her. But they must have just been training since both Saturday and Sunday, they came out, inflated the balloon, hung out for a while, then deflated it and packed it all up again without actually going anywhere

Now I need to get packed for the Spring Shearing Festival down at Kathy Wither’s farm in Tucson this Saturday.

I think I’m going to sleep in on Sunday.