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

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.