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

The books on training Llamas and Alpacas talk about building trust- you take the animals through a series of challenges and with each success the animal learns that things will not go wrong (no Pumas eat them), and they gain confidence in you and themselves.

The last two weeks I have been working with Jim. The more I do, the more he trusts me, and the easier it gets to raise the bar. Ideally I would like to see if he can be trained to the point where he would work for nursing-home or pediatric cancer-ward visits, as from all I have heard the appearance of a cute fuzzy animal can provide a really magical solace to people suffering in such places. I don’t know if Jim has the personality for it (he is currently not so keen on cuddles), but it is good training work for me. If not him, perhaps one of the ‘paca might be appropriate.

It is fun work, and the training and confidence building will give us a llama very well suited for trekking either way. Here are some shots of Jim out and about the last few days.

And here is a shot of the cute (and rapidly growing) cria. You can never have too many cute animal photos, right?

And finally the shed, which is very nearly done. We just need to get the gutters hung, and then we can get it signed-off as DONE!

[posted by Stephen] This Saturday we held our (second) annual Darkest Day party. Mother Nature obliged and provided the grey rainy weather one would expect at this time of year. At least this time we did not try to go and burn anything in the rain, and wisely stayed indoors. Thus we all stayed warm, dry and happy. All told about 15 people showed up, which made for a nice cozy house. The roaring fire was also a nice touch. (We have discovered that Elm burns quite nicely, and produces a lot of heat. It burns much more slowly than pine, and leaves a lot more ash. Last winter we went 4 months without having to shovel out the stove, now we will have to every few weeks.)

As near as we can tell nearly everyone brought at least 2 L of Coke (or variants) to the party, so we are left with a pantry full of the black-blood-of-life.. We also managed to end the party with more wine than we started with, score!

One of the most beneficial aspects of such parties is the cleaning that goes on before hand. We managed to finally hang some more art on the walls, furniture got shifted around, and generally the condition of the house was improved. We have to remember to plan more such parties, so as to keep up the momentum.

Meanwhile in the strange camelid behavior category- many people wanted to go see the new cria. It was getting dark when half dozen of us trooped up to say hi. Concetta, who is normally stand-offish like the other girls (looking is fine, but no touching!) came over and gave everyone a sniff, then happily stodd in the middle of the mob of humans while people poked and prodded her. Weird! Later we moved about 30 meters to go look at the boys- and she followed us, nuzzling Alastairs’ hand to demand a head-scrooch! Very, very weird! I have never seen her act this way before. Sunday morning when I went out to check her she was back to normal, meaning if I got closer than 1.5 meters, she moved away. The next time we have a big mob of guests over we will have to give her another visit and see what happens.