s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

If we don’t report on Friday, it’s because it’s usually anime. We finished Captain Tylor and moved on, in a near-complete change of pace, to Hellsing.

Saturday we shooped up to the Manakau Medieval Market, where I fulfilled my karmic assignment of showing Sybille which stall had the painted paper parasols. That and saying hi to various merchants, musicians, and travelling folk we’ve come to know was pretty much the total of the experience. Oh, and we had hot dogs (normal American-style ones, not sausages or brats), and ice cream, and marvelled at the Ubiquity of Morris Dancers. On the way home, we on a lark decided to try and get into the foothills of the Tararuas and ended up discovering Otaki Gorge. We’ve got tentative plans to go back there next weekend and do a bit of hiking, weather permitting (the Tararuas regularly have the Unwary rescued out of them, mostly on account of the changeable Weather.)

Sunday was The Big Day at last — shearing day. Here is Dianne, our shearer, and the table. Dianne is one of those Energizer Bunny types — she also runs an alpaca shop in a local tourist center (Just Alpacas in the Lindale Centre, for Mom, Joel, and anyone else who’s been there), plus her own alpaca farm, plus a boutique B&B, “Huntaway Lodge”.

Here are a couple “before” shots:

A “during” shot — we’d have gotten more of these, but it really is a three-person job: Dianne running the shears, one person holding the head on the unfortunate victim, and one person running around like a crazy person trying to catch the fleece and stuff it into the correct of three sorting bags (neck, belly, and blanket, with the blanket being the best) before a gust of wind sent it halfway across the farm. It really does look like she’s shoving poor Oak’s foot through a hand-held chipper-shredder, doesn’t it ? Wait ’til you see how Jim turned out — you’ll be convinced you’re right.

And now, the after photos. Please, please, if you happen to know any of Jim’s former owners, or indeed anyone who owns llamas at all, don’t show them this photo. Poor, poor Jim. So dignified. He was too big for the table, so we had to do him standing up, with me holding his halter. We’d got him about half done when Dianne made the mistake of observing how good he was being — then he decided he’d had enough & tried to make a break for it. Several breaks for it, in fact, knocking me on my ass at least once. It took all three of us pinning him against the table to get under his chest. Unfortunately, the halter meant she couldn’t get all the way up his neck, so he has this dorky ruff, and he kept cow-kicking whenever she tried for his back legs, so he’s got poodle-panniers. He now looks like Jim’s head stuck on some kind of alien muppet body. Oh, the shame.

Oak and Pointer are the funniest pair — while one of them was getting done, the other one would stand concerned vigil, then as soon as the procedure was complete it was back to their usual wrestling and gargling. The two of them forming Jim’s “posse” is a hoot, too.

The latter half of Sunday was more Chinese New Year festivities — this time a Kite Festival in Johnsonville, just down the road from us. It was unfortunately too windy for the big spectacular kites, but a bunch of us plebes who were determined to fly anyway turned out — I’d guess there were maybe 20 or 30 kites in the air at any one time, not counting the dozens of sweet little swallows and beetles and jellyfish that few only a couple meters up. There was a guy there with a stack of five stunt kites that roared across the sky in that wow-that-would-really-put-someone’s-eye-out-if-it-hit-them kind of way. Do ya’ll remember how my kite roars in a high wind, right before it goes into a death-spin and rams into the ground at high speed ? His was like that, only without the death-spin and the ramming. He was a good flyer. It was really too much wind, but I was determined to fly my kite a bit anyway, so with Stephen’s help, I did. I kept it on short lines and only crashed it twice ! Go me !

Finally, a couple scenes from just this evening. A Fierce Puma, helping me out with my Ragwort Patrol, a summer pastoral scene at Elmwood, and our lovely Galadriel, after an Altercation with Concetta (hard to say who won — they were both drooling green slime by the time I got out there).