The weekend, a chance to get away. This can be very important for me, as working on the farm day-in, day-out, can get a bit tiring. (There is no “time off”, as work projects are literally all around me.)

So Saturday we decided to go to the Karori wildlife sancutary, as it was “gold coin” entry this weekend (only $1 or $2 per person). Before we left I quickly popped up into the main paddock to give the girls a check, as we had one animal left on “mommy watch.” Harmony. Fat, fat harmony. She is 5, and has never had a cria (two “false pregnancies- “retained corpus leuteums”- previously). We had become quite convinced she was not pregnant, based on her immense obesity, and the fact that she was not showing at all.

The moment I came over the ridge, I could tell something was up by her body language. A few meters closer and I could see the nose just starting to come out. Here we go! 20 minutes later, we still had just a nose, and it was looking mightly tight. She could not get the head out. Calls were made. Julia, the vet, could not make it for at least 45 minutes. The transport box was not assembled (which takes 10-20 minutes), which meant if we wanted to get her to the vet quickly, it was going to be in the back of the Vitz.

We were just lining up to go in and make one last attempt to pull the baby out by hand, when Angela arrived. Yay! Having the owner there always takes the stress off when things are not going smoothly. Angela also had the smallest hands, and more experience with dystocias like this. She pushed the head back in, got a hand in and and pulled the front legs out, then used them to pull the whole head out. (It really helps to have something to grip onto, you can use the eye-sockets for a skull grip if you need to, but that obviously is not the first choice!) We let Harmony rest for 15 minutes, then pulled the baby the rest of the way out. A baby girl! Angela was very pleased.

An hour or so later the placenta was out, and Angela took them both home. Yay! Less for us to worry about. And the next thing we have to worry about is the storm racing northwards, with heavy rain and wind gusts up to 140 kph predicted. That should be fun. I will be cramming the girls and cria into the shed before I go to bed tonight, so that we can sleep well knowing they are all warm and dry.

Saturday was the solstice, so we had our midwinter party. I won’t say “our usual midwinter party”, because there were some differences. For one, it wasn’t pouring down rain, like it has been every other year. We had archery out in the Gallop paddock, and we set up the ger. A lot of the Usual Suspects were out of town (or on the way out of town, or on the way back into town), and conversely there were a bunch of new people along, so it was a slightly different mix of people. Finally, because we wanted to have stuff happen (like archery and alpaca viewing) that required daylight, but we also didn’t want to have everything wind up at 8, we tried a new two-party format.

The Day Party featured the aforementioned archery. It also featured some alpaca drama (because it had been four weeks, and we were due).

I’d fired all of maybe six arrows when Stephen came over the rise to tell me Tessa is unwell. We chivvied her down to the yards, where she presented with colic. Great. Just like all the other ones that have keeled over. We rang Julia. For better or worse, we’ve gotten to see enough alpacas with gut pain to tell that she’s not actually in as bad a shape as some we’ve seen, and indeed, the diagnosis was “spasmodic colic” — basically, stomach cramps, sort of like indigestion. We gave her some baking soda, upon which she let out a tremendous gurgling belch. Julia gave her a shot of painkillers, and ten minutes later she’s up and eating and back to her old self. whew. Julia hung out at the party for a bit — she had to miss a cat-fancier’s dinner for the call-out, so we plied her with drinks and snacks. I have to say it was a nice change to have one turn out alright. I’m sorry to all the folks who came to the day party that I didn’t get to spend time with, though.

In between the Day Party and the Night Party we had dinner: starting with a lovely light garden vegetable soup from Melanie, and transitioning to a delicious shoulder of venison from Zane, accompanied by roast veggies, potatoes, and an apple-cabbage salad from Helen. There was also a loaf of really yummy home-baked bread from Aidan, but we didn’t actually find it (in plain sight on the counter next to the fridge) until Sunday morning, so we got to eat that all ourselves. (oh, darn)

We got the ger set up for the Night Party:

…with carpets down and the brazier going in the middle. The problem was we wanted the door open so it would be easy to transition between the living room and the ger, but that had the effect of drawing more smoke out the door than through the smoke hole in the roof. Result: very smoky ger. Still, there was hanging out in there. Need to get furniture that lets you sit on the floor, and yet still provides back support. Hmmm…

Tim came down from New Plymouth again, and was an absolute legend. Before the party, while Stephen and I were cleaning and organizing, he vacuumed the house to within an inch of its life. He spent a good chunk of the evening playing Mull-Meister in the kitchen, and then helped me clean up after everyone had left and Stephen had pumpkined. *smooch* Thanks, Tim! The mulled wine was the recipe he served to his theater buddies in Qatar, and it was, indeed, scrummy.

Note: This is about the best photo I managed to get of Tim, and note that that’s actually Traveler on the left there — Tim’s the one on the right:

Overall, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. I’m not sure how I feel about the two-part format, myself. It was nice to get to do stuff in daylight, and it was definitely worth it to get to see people who just couldn’t have made it otherwise, but on the other hand, the sort of continual smear of arrivals and departures meant that there were a bunch of people who came to the party, but all missed each other. Dunno. Will have to get more feedback. If you came, what did you think ?

PS: I tried again on Sunday to get photographic documentation of Tim, and this is about the best of those, in part because Tim is constitutionally incapable of smiling for the camera, and in part because my camera is constitutionally incapable of taking an in-focus photo indoors. Additional note for those who keep track of such things: the cats approve of Tim, even if he doesn’t let them have his biltong:

So, the nasty weather arrived about 8-12 hours later than predicted, and yesterday morning the fun began. Gale force southerly winds and sleeting rain. (Thankfully the rain was never that intense, but our weather station was recording 100kph gusts.) I was glad to have the shed to put Angela’s girls (including the day-old cria) in. You don’t want a new baby outside on a day like that!

So, at 10 AM I went to check on them- only to find head-and-legs sticking out of Cadence! What a day to have a cria! After 25 minutes of watching there had been no progress, and I had no idea how long she had been head-and-legs out (last check had been 2 hours previous), time to lend a hand! With a bit of gentle pulling whenever she had a contraction, we got the baby out over the next 5 minutes- a beautiful little black Suri girl! Needless to say Angela was very excited when I told her.

So the baby got toweled off and had a warm cover put on her. Later in the day, when she was no quick to stand, I decided to bottle feed her some colostrum to make sure she had the energy to get going. All seems to have gone well. She was up and about the morning, and mothers and cria were all happy to be released from their shed-prison back into the paddock. Watching day-old cria trying to figure out how “up” and “down” work on a hillside is comedy gold.

We have more agisted girls on “mommy watch” right now, and yesterday one of them (Mahara, a big black girl) dropped her cria- and adorable black Suri boy. She was very lucky with the weather, as it was still, sunny and warm- quite unusual for mid-June! But a check of the forecast showed rain coming, with predicted cold southerlies and rain overnight, so Mahara, her cria, and Angela’s two other girs all got to spend the night in the shed.

Just before going to bed I popped out to check them, and walked into a spooky world. Thick fog had set in, it was perfectly still, and a near-full moon shown directly overhead. The whole world was suffused with a pale blue light. The fog muffled all sound, except for occasional eirie and unusual bird calls in the darkness. Tam and I walked up into Home paddock to visit our girls. You could barely see the big high voltage tower on the other side of the paddock, and weirdly it was harder to see if you looked directly at it, it came through more clearly out of the corner of the eye. Pretty creepy.

It was the sort of night where you expect werewolves, or shambling zombies, or for all the alpaca to turn around with red glowing eyes. It’s too bad that film cameras could not capture the effect, because words really fail to describe it.

So as some of you may have noticed, petroleum prices have gone up a wee bit. This means that the oil fields in the waters around NZ are actually worth doing something with.

That, in turn, has brought my friend Tim — an old friend from the semester I did at Edinburgh — down to New Plymouth, to teach the people working on the off-shore drilling rigs useful life skills, like how to get out of a helicopter that has just ditched in the sea, without drowning or being decapitated by the rotors. This involves strapping your victims students into a mock-up helicopter chassis and tipping them into a swimming pool. Apparently, the training used to feature a wave machine, a firehose, and a strobe-light as well, but someone decided that much verisimilitude was “mean”.

Anyway, in the course of trying to find something to do with his weekends in New Plymouth, Tim spotted my name on one of the local SCA websites, and got in touch. We finally managed to have him down this past weekend. Yay ! Thanks, Peak Oil !

We lucked out with the weather, so he got to see Wellington in the sun, with the boaties out doing their thing, and when the weather turned horrid Saturday night, we had the usual suspects over board games. We established that despite lots of stuff happening to both of us in the more-than-a-decade it’s been since we saw each other last, neither of us has had any radical shifts in personality or tastes. I’ve been assured that New Plymouth compares favorably to Yemen and Nigeria (although the architecture in Yemen makes up for a lot).

Sunday, Stephen and Tim went to Te Papa, while Emily and I oggled at astrolabes built into finger rings and accoutrements for your stint as Galactic Empress at the jewelry show. (Aside to so-called “avant garde” artists: taking random bits of rubbish and presenting them as “art”, or “a statement” has Been Done. A lot. It’s not clever anymore.)

Yes, I completely failed to get photos. But Tim’s promised to come back down for the mid-winter party next week, so I’ll try to get some then.

While Stephen was in Auckland, I was tasked with managing our very first public appearance as Alpacas Rampant, at the Lifestyle Farmers Field Days in Otaki: lots of stalls aimed at people with small rural blocks, not unlike ourselves. People who might just be interested in buying some of our lovely young boys (and doesn’t that sound dodgy?).

We’d spent the previous week getting stuff ready: me wrangling printers for business cards, stud info sheets, and banners; Stephen painting and assembling the khana for the alpaca pen (”khana” being sort of collapsible trellis, a smaller version of the walls for our ger/yurt).

Kerry and Jenny volunteered to help me out on the day. Friday night, I scrambled to get a barebones version of the website up an running (looks bad to hand out business cards with an address that doesn’t go anywhere) while they and Beth & Geoff played Robo Rally. K&J stayed overnight, so we could all be ready to go at stupid-o’clock Saturday morning.

My victory conditions for the day:
- get the six boys we were planning to take up there loaded safely
- get the ute started
- get up there and set up on time
- not get drenched and miserable and hypothermic in the crap weather
- get packed up and home safely
Bonus: maybe chat to some people and hand out business cards and stuff

All were achieved, with the unexpected plus that the weather turned out to be actually sunny and warm, and the additional bonus of maybe finding an inexpensive carder to send some of our fleeces to. Jenny and Kerry were muy fabulous — Jenny always managed to be the extra pair of hands wherever the extra pair of hands was needed, and Kerry has been doing ‘paca stuff with us for so long that she could run the stand herself if I had to go to the loo. W00t! There was a bit of a glitch when I got the ute stuck going up the driveway when we finally got home, but with Jenny and Kerry telling me which way to steer, we managed to get it unstuck *and* I did a hill-start and got it up into the sideyard instead of having to back all the way down the drive at leave it at the bottom for Stephen to deal with. Go me. Go us!

And the final surprise for the evening: one of the agisted girls had her cria while we were gone. Go her for getting it done without us (not that they usually need us fretting over them, mind).

Note, re: the new website. I’ve tested this out in Firefox and IE6. If you have the time to kick the tires in another browser, let me know how it goes. I had to teach myself CSS to get it going, and I’m still working out some kinks. :^p

This weekend was the annual alpaca association conference up in Auckland, at which I was an invited guest. The guest thing is a great racket where they pay for my transport and board, all I have to do is give some talks, and chair some discussions! Easy!
The conference was pretty good. Some of the talks were quite educational (especially Jane Vaughn talking about Embryo Transfer in Australia, which as really taken off and lots of ET babies are being born). There were also some good talks on marketing, branding and business-development. All very useful, and I plan to apply some of those lessons to our own operation.

The conference was also a great networking opportunity, so I happily schmoozed.

The hotel/conference center was, however, really dry. The AC system constanlty pumped around the de-humidified air, and it was living in an airplane for 3 days. So not surprisingly I have dry sinuses, and sore throat, and now find myself fighting off some illness.

Sadly while I was up there we had yet another alpaca death. Manticore, Cindy’s cria, crashed and died on Sunday, giving Tam a harrowing day. PM on Monday showed it was peritonitis- infection of the gut and abdominal cavity. Had probably been chronic for months. We had noticed he was a bit thin and lagged occasionally, but he would also run and pronk with the other cria, and seem normal.  Lots of second-guessing. Alpaca are too damn stoic, and it makes diagnosis too damn hard. I got home from the conference in time to help Tam and bury him. Really hoping the rain of shoes is done, ’cause it is tiring waiting for yet another to drop.

Stephen threw a surprise birthday party for me, the sneaky weasel. Y’all have heard me moan previously about how it feels weird to have my birthday in the cold rainy autumn instead of bright sunny spring. I’ve made occasional noises about maybe celebrating it in Novemeber instead, but really, I just haven’t gotten up the motivation to organize anything for a few years now.

So Stephen organized on my behalf.

And I didn’t guess, either. In fact, I didn’t even guess when the first people started showing up (”Oh,” I thought to myself. “Stephen must have told folks to come over for videos or something without telling me.” …a much more likely scenario than the “We just happened to be in the neighborhood. With food” that would have been Geoff & Beth’s story (note: Geoff and Beth live on the almost complete other side of town )).

He apparently told everyone that the theme was to be “Spring, and Shiny Things”, so not only did thirty of my bestest friends show up (and it seems like every single one of them brought a different cake — that must have been the secret psychic sub-theme), but I got all sort of pretty shiny and/or floral presents. Flowers (real and “eternal”), pretty scarves, books, seriously yummy chocolate, *two* new knives — an eating knife for SCA feasts and an antique Balinese kris — wacky Japanese tchatchki, five different hairsticks… it was an avalanche of loot. Oh, and one of the cakes was topped with the most mindboggling animatronic pyrotechnic musical candle thing, which I assume Alan must have scored on his last trip to Hong Kong. Plus, there was some home brewed beer leftover from Crown.

I’m not one to go all mushy, especially in a blog post, but it made me feel all warm and happy. Thanks, everybody.

Two unrelated things I felt like posting about.

One, as you all probably know, crows are smart. If you read BoingBoing, you’ll probably have heard about the guy that built a vending machine for crows. Here’s a video of the ten minute little talk he gave about it. Some of the anecdotes in the comments below are nifty, too. The part that I find compelling, though, is the on-the-face-of-it quite simple notion that you don’t have to domesticate a species, or even really communicate with it very well, to work with it productively.

Two, I’m looking for more authors to read (preferably ones my local library has. In the process of searching, I stumbled across Gnooks. It’s an adaptive learning widget that shows you authors that other people who like the authors you like also like. (I’ll give you a second or two to parse that). There are similar tools for music and movies. You can either type in a single name, in which case it will spit out a little cloud of “you might also like” names (with the closer ones supposedly being more likely matches to your tastes), or you can type in three names and it will pop up a single suggestion. At this point, you can tell it if you agree, if you think it’s completely off base, or if you’ve never read its suggested author. That’s how it learns.

I typed in “Robin Hobb”, “Bernard Cornwell”, and “Richard Adams” (in part just to be difficult). It suggested Sharon Penman, an author of thick historical fictions. The Central Library had some of her stuff, so I got out The Sunne in Splendour, a War of the Roses era piece featuring Edward the IV, Richard the III, etc. It’s a bit dry so far — I blame Richard Adams — but we’ll see how it goes.

It was another, average dull weekend here in Wellington. Except for the crown tournament, of course. This has been the albatross hanging about the necks of the Shire for the last few months as they prepared furiously for the big event, and it went very well.

At the event Tam and I met this American couple now living in Australia. In the “small world” department Siobhan was from York PA (which I have visited many times in the past), and her best friend lives in Wilmington DE! Small world indeed! Her partner, Siridean (pronounced “Sheriden” — these are their SCA names), ended up winning the tourney the next day, so he will be the next king of Lochac (Australia/New Zealand).

The Kidnapping occured after the event. Siridean and Siobhan dropped by to see the alpaca. They were just getting ready to leave when Vanessa arrived the with horse truck (we provide crash spaces for both people and equines, which is really convenient). At the top curve of the driveway the back wheels came off the concrete, and promply slipped backwards in the mud (it has been raining quite a bit the last 2 weeks) and into the drain. Stuck! Against the bank! And of course that blocked the ramp, so we had two horses stuck on board too.

Seeing how the truck was completely blocking the drive, we now had the Crown Prince and his Princess captive! Held up by the calvary no less!

We tried pulling them out with our neighbor Steve’s old powerpul Land Cruiser, to no avail. Eventually we managed to get Stuart, and with his mighty big tractor [a Sami –T.] we pulled them clear! Huzzah! The horses were fine after their hours standing at an angle, and the rest of us could start de-stressing about the whole thing. Oh yeah, Siridean and Siobhan could get away too, which was good as they had a rental car to return!