Heaps going on. Took some alpacas to our first ever show & had fun; went to the big annual SCA event in Christchurch & had fun there, too. Recovering now, before more on this weekend. Oof.
Occasionally, the accent still trips me up. One of the questions in today’s 5 minute quiz featured a song with a gal whose “eyes sparkled like the Jew.”
???
Bemused by mental images of stereotypical JAPs dripping with bling and glittery mascara, I had to ask him to repeat it, like, three times before I figured out the word was “dew”.
This after not that long ago being informed that another co-worker’s favorite book was “June”. You know, by Frank Herbert.
Oy vey.
The “festive season” saw a great deal of camelid-related activities.
We took the opportunity to take animals walkies on two occasions, once to Battle Hill Farm Forest Park on Boxing Day (the park is about 20 minutes from here- and a good choice as troublesome dogs are forbidden- and shot on site by the ranger!), and on New Year’s Day along the beach at QE Park at Mackay’s Crossing.
For the Boxing Day trip the extra excitement came form the fact that we tried on Hob’s saddle and bags- he did quite well, only occasionally forgetting he was extra-wide and scraping them on bushes and gates. Tam decided to experiment and hooked Opa’s lead to the back of Hob’s saddle, and he followed in train with narry a complaint (well, at the very end they got a bit stroppy when they were tired, could see the trailer, and wanted to eat grass and/or go home).
On New Years day we took 5 of our boys, including the llamas, and met up with a bunch of other camelid owner/breeders at the beach. Two other llamas were there, as were two baby (4 and 6 month) old Suris. Very cute little lads, and so tiny next to the llamas! It seems everyone enjoyed the beach walk very much. Next time I willl give more than 24 hours notice, and hopefully we will have plenty more people along. My goal is 20 camelids for the next beach walk.
We have also had our final two cria for the “first wave.” Jasmine dropped a nice little fawn boy (Copperplate) on December 30th, and then Concetta gave us another boy (5 in a row!) on January 4th (Bookman). We now have about 6 weeks until our second wave of cria is due. If I weren’t still bottle-feeding Marlett, I could relax a bit…
We also sent off three more boys as pets. Jasper, Gungnir and Clarent will now be living in the home-paddock of a 1200 acre S&B farm up in Taihape. I look forward to visiting them at some point in the future.
So, the crazy-time is upon us. Cria are dropping. Dams are being re-mated. And shearing! Yes, we are doing some of our own shearing, so when the weather is fine (which seems a rare occurrence these last few weeks) we try to shear a couple of animals.
On top of this we are also selling animals- using Trade Me once again. You can definitely see that the market has slowed considerably since last year. When we put the advert up last time, we had multiple calls within 24 hours. This time it is days or weeks before calls, and we are getting many more tire-kickers.
That being said, we have sold 3 boys to a couple up the road in Pukerua bay. Contract has been signed, and delivery is just waiting for them to do a bit more work on their place (removing a few ornamental plants that are known to be or might be toxic). We also sold our first female! We delivered Topsy to a lovely woman over in Mangaroa on Tuesday night. And then yesterday Topsy dropped a beautiful little brown girl. Lucky purchaser! She instantly gets a female cria- and a Pinocchio offspring to boot! (His first one! We have 5 more due to him this year, hopefully we will get a few girls, too.)
We also sold some stud services (with Hyouki) to the woman who purchased Topsy. This is also nice new business.
Once we finish shearing our own animals we will probably do some hearing around the district. There used to be 3 local alpaca-shearers. One moved away. Another is not shearing this year, as she is super-busy launching a new business. That leaves Brent, and he is booked solid. Shearing might be a great way to get to know other local breeders, and maybe sell a few stud services, females, or more pet-boys along the way.
Did the Thanksgiving shindig again this year, last Sunday. (We pick a weekend over Thursday, as an entire day is really required to reach the maximal gluttony threshold.)
Locals have certainly gotten into the spirit of the holiday, stuffing themselves with Turkey, the trimmings, and pie, pie, pie!
We had 19 people in total this year (3 had to drop at the last minute), and if we keep growing at this rate we will need the (hopefully soon to be built) barn just to hold the event.
I am glad Kerry brought her experimental beer-basted chicken, as the two Turkeys (one from me, the other from Alan) would not have been sufficient otherwise.
We had 5 pies for 19 people. Desert ended up being a multi-course meal all its own.
My mothers “candied sweet potatoes” were, as always, a great hit. I changed the butter with Canola spread, which made them dairy safe. They were, however, very *not* pancreas safe, so diabetics beware. Best description of them was “it tastes just like warm sweet-potato ice cream.”
And the weather-gods were even nice enough to give us a fabulous day for it, a nice break in otherwise quite grey and rainy weather.
In Maori lore, the Pipiwharauroa, or Shining Cuckoo, is a harbinger of Spring. Technically, it’s almost summer, but the weather has been dodgy enough that it’s hard to tell for sure without looking at the calendar. Just to reinforce the point, here is the cuckoo that concussed itself against our sunroom window the other night:
It’s kinda hard to tell from the photo, but the gray-brownish parts have a coppery sheen in the right light, and the back is iridescent green. We shut the sliding doors so the cats wouldn’t go mess with it, and after about a half an hour it got itself collected enough to fly away.
And that is just to generate enough paper to file the consent!
For those of you that are curious, the process of designing our own barn- and then filing a complete building consent application, is still ongoing. About 10 days ago I had another meeting with someone at BCLS (building consents and licensing services). All in all it was an encouraging and productive meeting. He was impressed by the plans I had generated. He wanted a few more figures, and he wanted some of the figures I had done rendered differently, but that is easy enough with a computer.
We will need an engineer to come and look at our slab. Why? Well, all structural components must meet a durability requirement of at least 50 years. Concrete slabs meet that requirement. The problem is, our slab is about 20 years old. So we just need a structural engineer to sign off that it has at least 50 more years of life in it.
But… when going over our plan he noted we had a load-bearing wall without sufficient support beneath. By code, to put serious weight onto concrete it must be at least 200mm thick and have 2x 12mm reinforcing rods in it. That portion of the slab, while plenty thick, didn’t have reinforcing rods. Now, I could juggle the design to move the load-bearing wall 1.5 meters onto a reinforcing “beam” built into the slab (which is extra thick and has the 2 x 12mm rods). But that got us thinking, why not approach the problem with a blank sheet of paper.
All along our designs have looked at the barn as a 3 bay structure, along the lines of the so-called “American Style” barn (http://www.fairdinkumsheds.co.nz/store.php?cPath=1).
But our reinforcing beam runes right down the middle of the slab, so now we are looking at design options that treat it as two halves, rather than 3 thirds. Hopefully we can get a design we like done and approved soon. I am getting better and faster at generating barn designs using sketchup, with all this practice.
Last weekend our friend Dayna had a birthday party. She wanted something new and exciting, so had her party at the zoo.
As an overnight sleep-over!
I get the impression that 99% of the groups that do the zoo sleep over experience are grade-schoolers. I think leading a bunch of adults around for the night tour was extra amusing for our guide, Dion. I think our rather twisted humour broke his brain at times.
My favorite moment was standing 2 meters from the tiger enclosure watching them pace about by the light of our flashlights. Eyes in the darkness. Seeing tigers under those conditions at quite close range certainly twigs the monkey brain to shout “You are a prey animal! Those are tigers! What are you doing, idiot!”
After the tour the birthday party began. While alcohol was forbidden, there was no rule against excessive sugar and caffine. The birthday girl and about a half dozen others were up all night, the remaining 30 (or so) of us managed a few hours of sleep. Considering the all-nighters were in the room with us loudly and spaztically playing board games, I am surprised we got any sleep at all!
The next morning I added a new term to my lexicon, the “un-asleep”. Much like the undead are not truely alive, the “un-alseep” are not truely awake. Like zombies, they also tend to stagger about with glassy-eyed looks.
I’ve just upgraded the software the blog runs on (Wordpress), and I’m playing around with different looks. If something is broken, let me know — I haven’t had the chance to poke everything yet.
Thanks !
So, a standard Thursday morning.
Get up. Eat breakfast. Read email. Surf inter-tubes a bit. Put on gum-boots and get to work.
Except there was a stick or stone in my gum boot. Pulled my foot out, checked my sock. No twig. A little shake produced nothing. Walked out into the side yard, and there was definietly something jabbing my toe in there. Take of boot and shake… a piece of hay drops out. Shake harder… and a startled forrest Weta drops out!
So, it was either a spiny leg or his little mandibles that were poking my toes. Thankfully the weta was unharmed, and was released back into the wild.
A rather startling start to the day for the both of us, I figure. His “safe little cave” turned out to have a giant sock-wearing monster living in it.