Officially Ours

We just did it.  We are officially alpaca farmers, in the most limited sense of the term.  This last Sunday we signed papers and gave our first check to SuperSuris to lease our girl you see on the left, Sweet 16.  She truly lives up to her name as she's sweet and lovey.  On top of that she's a truly great mother and has terrific fiber qualities and body shape.  She's currently pregnant and will deliver towards the end of August next year.  That baby will be ours free and clear and we have every intention to purchase Sweet 16 at the end of the lease.

We are now officially in the business.  We have our first dam, soon to have our first baby.  The search for the right property continues, as does the search for a farm truck to replace my commuter-mobile.  More posts as things develop.

Soccer and Alpacas

Finally, verifiable proof that alpacas are no good at soccer.

Turkey Day, Here We Come

On that cold December morning in 1941, President Roosevelt put aside years of useless squabbling and set the date of Thanksgiving in this country as the fourth Thursday of November.  Far be it for me to argue with the wisdom of a President of this country, but I have to disagree on this one point.  Thanksgiving is first and foremost about thanks, but that thanks started and ended with thanks for a bountiful harvest (or in the case of the Pilgrims, much wheeling and dealing with the indigenous population).  Why is it, then, that we are celebrating the harvest on a day that dawned clear and cold and exactly 0 degrees Fahrenheit?  Our harvest did not occur in November.  We have long since put up or eaten everything that came out of the ground, back in October.

I have to agree with the Canadians on this one.  October is a much more realistic month to hold a harvest thanks holiday. 

That being said, we will be making the most of this year’s Thanksgiving by accepting the gracious invitation of our friends and neighbors down the street.  Much turkey and potatoes and green bean casserole will be had by all.  I plan to spend the evening semi-comatose before the fire, watching Pumpkin Chunkin’ on the Science Channel, and furiously trying to finish a scarf I am making for someone very special to me (out of alpaca wool, no less).  It’s hard to feel “farmerly” when the temperatures are below zero, the snow has a healthy frozen crust on it, and the chickens are bedded down in their fresh straw, their little bellies swelled with warm water and grain.  Bring on the pumpkin decimation and imbibement of two days’ worth of calories.

I hope you and yours have a pleasant day.  Eat more than you should, do less work than you usually do, and enjoy the simple things in life – friends, food, laughter, and a firm roof over your head, be it yours or someone else’s.

It's Coming

I was raised well beyond the chance for flurries and blizzards, in the depths of the hell that is the hot valley east of Los Angeles.  Thus, my education in weather was limited to mysterious words and terms that had no real meaning to me – smog, visibility index, heat inversion.  It wasn’t until we moved to Arizona that my real education in weather began, at the desk of many a flight instructor as I worked towards a degree as a professional pilot (a degree which I never did finish, but that is a story for another time). 

The weather in Arizona was so unlike the weather in Los Angeles that I often found myself watching it just because I could.  Weather in LA simply arrives through the smog and haze.  In the mountains of Arizona we would watch the thunderstorms move in, towers of roiling power that evinced the shape of massive sailing ships gliding slowly but inexorably towards us from the desert in the lowlands below us.  It was there I learned that clouds were not white but were in fact made of every color of the rainbow.  The reds and oranges of a broken overcast would give way to the steel blue and putrid green of a good supercell about to dump it’s fury on us.  I learned the static feeling in the air and the pressure on your chest that signals that it’s time to stop watching the storm like a fool and get inside under shelter before the hail falls.

But now that we are settled here in Spokane I have learned yet another form of weather.  Today we woke to find a couple inches of fresh snow had fallen in the night.  It wasn’t quite three inches, but it was enough to create that silent hush that I love so much in the early morning.  During the day, the sun nearly peeked through the clouds, though with our 20 degree temperatures it would not have done much good.  I cleared the sidewalks and went inside to await the real storm.

I type this while an honest-to-God blizzard blows outside my office window.  I have known this was coming all day, as did everyone else on the block.  It seems that no matter how many winters pass in this place, none of us seems to be truly ready when it finally decides to shove autumn out of the way.  True, it’s two weeks earlier than usual this year, but that is hardly an excuse.  We all scurried like squirrels burying our nuts before the frost, only our nuts were garden hoses and rakes and shovels, not to mention a few potted plants.

All day I could sense the storm building, but in an entirely different way than either LA or Arizona.  It came in insidious degrees, minute changes over the whole day that added up over time to something you could taste, something you could feel, but at such a slow rate that any one change was too small to notice.  Even the dogs and the chickens felt it.  The chickens never came outside today, preferring to huddle on their roost and drink the warm water I gave them now and then.  The dogs, rambunctious this morning in the delight at the fresh snow, slowly quieted down and settled, until by this afternoon they no longer sought to go out.  They are not huddled together on their bed by the heater, noses to tails, snoring in their lassitude.

The whole world outside seemed to inhale slowly all day, taking a deep breath before we plunge into the storm.  Now that the storm is here, that breath is still held, waiting for the rude splash of nature’s fury on our faces.  It won’t be expelled until the sun breaks through tomorrow.

I wait to exhale myself.

A Trouncing On the Way

I just checked the forecast.  7-10 inches of snow over three days, followed by sub-zero temperatures.  We're in for it now.

Sweet Sixteen

We are recently returned from a tip up to see our girl at SuperSuris in Green Bluff.  Sweet Sixteen will officially be ours (via lease) on December 1 – something about which we are beside ourselves with excitement.  We are taking part in a lease agreement with our friends at SuperSuris which will allow us to begin to build our herd without the six-figure investment typically required.   We will lease her for a year, during which she is expected to deliver a cria some time in August. 

I like to refer to this as rent-a-womb. 

We’re leasing her long enough for her to produce offspring, which will belong to us free and clear at the termination of the lease.  Better than that, at the end of the lease we have the option to purchase the mother and apply our lease payments to date to the price.  At the end of this, we plan to own one adult Suri alpaca and her baby.  If there is a better way to get into the field of alpaca farming, I don’t know it.

Sweet Sixteen is the girl we’ve selected out of the nearly two hundred at SuperSuris.  She’s a sweetheart with good lineage and a family history of easy-going alpacas with good fiber qualities.  And she’s a good mom too.

Oddly enough, it seems that Sweet Sixteen has figured out this relationship.  Yesterday I came out into her field (with all the other new mothers) to say hello.  After she got used to me, she walked calmly over and placed her head on my shoulder.  I rubbed her neck and she made happy noises and pushed into me.  Today she walked right up to me and let me put a halter on her, no protest.  She then stood still, leaning into me again, while Dick, one of the owners of SuperSuris, trimmed her toenails. 

She definitely seems to know something’s up and that it relates to us.  She hums contentedly whenever any of us is around, and she always has a kiss ready for our kids when they visit.  It will be one short year before the relationship that she already senses is completely settled, but in the mean time we continue to think of her as “our” girl.

Sick, and Yet, Some Snow

Allow me to apologize for the dearth of posts of late.  We have all been sick and trying in vain to get ready for winter.  We woke this morning to a light dusting of snow on the ground, more snow in the forecast, and some very perturbed chickens.  More to come soon as we get back up and about.

Fall Shearing

No, not the sheep.  Me.  And the kids.  My wife has been cutting our hair for over a year now, and besides a few odd cuts due to my son's near constant movement, she's gotten quite good at it.  With the current economic situation (not to mention various pay cuts by our respective employers) the theme of our year has been "do for ourselves what we can do for ourselves."  This includes hair. 

It doesn't take much as far as equipment goes - no Flobee involved.  A good beard trimmer or hair trimmer can be purchased from Costco for less than the cost of one round of haircuts at a salon, and some of them (especially the Wahl brand) are quite effective.  The kids get their trims in the bath, a nice way to make their unruly hair lie flat and also a handy way to wash off the trimmings.  For myself, my wife sits me in a chair in the kitchen (a wood floor is key here) and shears me short.  Thankfully, I have little left to trim, but even so she does a great job.  In a world where a man's haircut costs $20 and a kid's costs $10 or more, this has been a great money saver for us.  That, and my wife simply enjoys doing it.

Where to Buy, Where to Buy

The search continues for our ideal landing place, an eventual home for our burgeoning herd of alpaca, chickens, dogs, cat, and children.  We have looked all over and back again around the city, but we haven't yet landed on that perfect piece of heaven in the country.

Part of the difficulty comes from having to balance any number of variables - amount of land, topography, soil conditions, zoning, the house and any outbuildings, as well as proximity to our friends and potential sales locations for produce and fiber products.  To find a place where every one of those things, as well as a hundred nameless others, is perfect is simply not going to happen.  With each property we look at we have to decide if the unique mix of characteristics equals a good place to be.

There is the added uncertainty of selling our current property in an unsure market.  We're keeping our fingers crossed that the perfect set of circumstances will present itself, but our hope in providence is not enough to keep us from working our butts off in the search.

And the Cold Descends

We have been spending more and more time at our friends' farm and less and less at home, thus the thin news of our doings on our own farm.  Today I hope to make up for that.  It's bread baking time again.  I have been using Jenna's recipe (from Cold Antler Farm) to great results in past months.  I have, sadly, given up hand mixing everything, but I still knead by hand - a necessary release of tension in a stressful world.

This weekend, we're making candles for my daughter's school project.  I was glad to see so many supplies still available at the local craft store, but the price of wax has simply gone through the roof.  I imagine it has something to do with the bee die-off happening around the country.  Next spring I definitely plan to put in our fist hives.  I'm tired of paying for something my bees would give me for free.

In the mean time, our wet but mostly pleasant fall has moved on and the deep cold grey of winter is nearly upon us.  The forecast has little gray flecks of snow in it rather than the slanted rain we have been seeing.  I doubt we'll get any accumulation, but it's cold enough outside and the air has that peculiar feel to it that means that winter's blanket is not far from descending on the city.  I hope the chickens are ready.  Come to think of it, I better get raking - the leaves are still on the grass.

A Candle in the Dark

The nights have grown dark, soon to be even darker when the infernal timekeepers tell us to wind our clocks back an hour, and the cold wind rattles the storm windows every night as we snuggle far beneath the lip of our comforters.  It is the perfect time for candlelight and wood smoke.  I find myself working late tonight, on something for someone else for which I will receive little credit, and yet I am surrounded by the warm glow of several candles and the comforts of a gently steaming cup of tea.  If you have to work late, and it happens to be the early dark of a burgeoning winter, candlelight is an effective poultice for the poisoning gloom.  Light a candle.  You don't have to work, I promise.

All Hallows Eve

Halloween is many things to many people.  To our kids, it is a chance to pretend to be anything they can dream up while simultaneously receiving the gold coins of childhood – heaps of candy.  For the parents it’s a time of buying way more candy than one would normally allow in the house while simultaneously searching near and far for the “perfect” wig and small tubes of white cream make-up. 

For the local farmers it’s easily one of the busiest times of the year.  We spent the day up at Green Bluff, once again enjoying the company of over 100 alpacas, plus two llamas and a slightly cantankerous barn cat.  The air was crisp, the breeze just enough to keep us cool while we tended the pastures, and the roiling clouds were just getting ready for the night’s trick-or-treating.

As in years past, it was cold that night, leading some to hide their costumes with thick coats (mostly the very young and very old).  And yet, it didn’t stop most from coming out and walking the neighborhoods in search of sugary goodness.  We love fall in Spokane and Halloween is an integral part of that.  Yay for the ghosts and ghouls and pumpkins.