Gathering Wool

Wow! Do I have stuff to share!!

My very good friend and savior Shepherdess, Laura, was to send some tunis roving that I had inadvertantly left at her house last year when I was there for BSG. She told me that there would be a suprise in with it! I was excited to play in it, so I waited about 3 days and started checking my mail box everyday! I would leave work, drive all the way out to my house to check my mail at lunch. She called me that Friday night to BS and tell me she hadn't mailed it yet because she was shearing a very nice little ewe that weekend and she was going to put some of her wool into the package. Yay! I thought that was to be my suprise, but no! She says there is something else, and that she will put it in the mail on Monday. I put it off as long as I could, but on Wednesday, even though chances were that it would take four days, I was out at the house checking my mail. Thursday... Friday.... Saturday......
Monday comes I get to work and check my email. There is a msg from Laura saying she promises it will be in the mail today! OK, at this point I'm thinking when I see the parcel box key in my mail box I will get excited. Then I tell her in a reply that she is horrible! Making me wait and wait and wait because she doesnt want to go to the post office! But then I thought about the parcel I had sitting in my car that had been there for over a month. I mailed it Monday ;-)

This was totally worth the wait :)

Forgive me Laura, but I can't remeber what breed this is...
And a bunch of roving that I balled to take a picture of it. Oh boy! This stuff is soft!!!

So I'm typing this post and Laura calls, said her ears were burning :) The roving was blended from the fleeces of two romeldale rams; hogget fleece!

And here is the tunis roving, donated by my ram Lazurus and processed by Morro Fleece Works in California.

On another note... I have had these white tulips for ever, but they never get very big. I have had to move them several times and thought I only had two or three of them but they are spreading. I should probably dig them up and spread them out a bit...
Here is that very sweet smelling daff I was trying to tell all of you about, for some reason they are all droopy, hence the sky shot :)

And one more, a book. I saw this book on eBay and for some reason I had to buy it. It is in good shape, the pages are yellowed as is to be expected as the only date I can find in it is 1899. I paid $32 with shipping. There are adds from businesses in the last few pages from companies that sponsered the printing by advertising in it, some of those are dated 1898. Too cool!

Dont you wish we could go back with the knowledge we have now and enough money to buy this guy out!?!?

Clean Living?

How did that song go? Green Acres is the place for me.... something about open country side and fresh air... HA

Yes, that is dirt. We have had some nasty wind storms here in the past week. This one was on Friday, the last one was a week ago today and looked just as bad. The first picture is of my neighbors house, we are on 5 acre, long parcels. The second one is to the East of the house, they ain't nothin' out there! But there is really, houses gallor. The third is towards the sheep pens of course, and there is a house back there also, if you look close on the left. Poor sheepies, and horses, and people of course. You would think by now all our dirt would be in Utah.

It was uggggly!

Jeepers Creepers!

Here are a few pictures of the lambs enjoying thier 'space', not having to fight with their mothers for solid food must be wonderful!



This ram lamb is the cream of the crop to my eyes; he is stout and beefy, the only problem is he may have a white spot too low on his forhead, if it doesnt go away, he will not be registerable. He also has a very fat tail, something I would like to propogate in my flock.




Here is that fat tail! Anyone else that raises tunis sheep, let me know what you think about this; should I cut that tail off or not? I was thinking of taking at least the last two or three inches off, but I am leaning toward keeping most of it...

Dumb and Dumberer

I am a computer tech.
At least I have been in the recent past, that is what I went to school for, two associates degrees in computer technology; apparently, that doesn't extend to digital cameras.

I was at Mim's yesterday, she laughingly said "You don't have to tell anyone..." well, no, I don't, but I will anyway just because I don't actually have to face anyone to do it.
After my camera mysteriously froze day before yesterday, I poked and prodded it, worried it and wrestled with it, thinking I had really broken the darn thing. The reason I thought it was broken is because usually if I try to use it cold (and it was a very cool picture I was trying to take on a very cool morning!) it opens up the lens, the scene shows on the viewer and then "low battery" pops up, it closes the lens and shuts off! Well, it didn't shut the lens and it didn't shut off on that morning, so I figure I've done it! I broke it trying to use it when it was cold.
When the camera first comes on you get a message saying something about customer service and an 800 number, I wrote it down and on my way to Winnemucca to work for the day, I called. I waited on hold for I don't know how long, maybe 15 minutes, before some very nice lady with a slight Asian accent asks me "How can I help you?" I told her what the camera had done and all my subsequent efforts to 'undo' it, and in a quiet, patient voice this woman says to me, a computer tech mind you! "Did you plug the camera in to recharge the battery?"

...in the seconds of silence that followed, I wondered how many years of college it would take to figure that one out.

....

My camera broke.
I went to try to take a picture this morning, it was cold, and it just froze up, literaly. I am waiting for it to decide to work again, but it doesnt look good.
If it is truely broken, I dont know when I will be able to get another.
I feel like Eeyore when his house falls down...

Nice Weekend!

My first sunburn of the year! It was a very nice weekend with temps in the high 70s on Saturday to the low 80s on Sunday. We finally, after all my procrastinations for the last 3 years, went out and built a creep feeder on Saturday! And no it didn't occur to me that sun causes sunburns! I've been in the dark for so long, the thought just didn't cross my mind.
It isn't that bad really, I had sunglasses on so I look a bit like a hairless (on my face anyway), sunburned raccoon, but I don't think it will peel.
The lambs are using the creep, something I had doubts about, but they are getting it, I will try to take some pictures today (no I didn't have my camera with me when we built it, dang it!).

My DD went AWOL on Saturday night and scared the wits out of me. Teens will be teens, I just wish I wasn't carrying around so much baggage, maybe it would be a bit easier on her. Maybe any mother would have reacted like I did? I panicked, not bad (I don't think...) but of course I had all the wonderful thoughts of bodies lying beside roads and in ditches and cell phones ringing desolately into the night with no living person nearby to hear them; horrible thoughts I know. But thoughts I cant seem to stem when she isn't where she is supposed to be when she is supposed to be there. So Sunday was spent trying to recoup what sleep I could. Which wasn't much, I can't seem to sleep during the day no matter how tired I am, and I didn't get anything done that I had been planning on doing, such as finishing the tagging and banding. So today after work I'm going to try to get at least some of them done, the older they get, the harder banding is on them. I've decided not to cut any of the locker lambs this year, so I wont have to worry about them, but the two bottle babies both need to be cut; I am keeping George, and Paco and his sister are going to be pets to a young boy in Henderson, NV.
I did get to watch a good movie yesterday though; The Guardian, very good movie, I thought. I was so tired I cried through about half of it, I wouldn't have normally I don't think, but I enjoyed the movie very much. I also got some spinning in, I am going to cable some of my dark romeldale/romney wool; I was thinking of taking two skeins and dying them different colors, maybe a yellow and a blue or something, then cabling them together... we'll see.

I have a problem, we have 3 lambs that have gotten hung up in something out there and pulled their ranch tags out of their ears! We have had sheep lose tags before just not like this. Course we haven't ever had that many sheep out there before. I cant figure out what they are catching them on as I haven't found one of the missing tags yet. Its such a pain (in my arse as well as their ears, I'm sure) as I only have one set of tags with that unique number on it, so when they lose their tags I have to change their tag number in my records, that throws off the number sequence so when I look back I wont be able to tell who was born first, second, third and so on; even sisters/brothers wont match up for later comparison. Not like I have so many I shouldn't be able to remember all of them lol
I use the small two piece tags from Premier, they seemed the safest because they have such a low profile...

I gotta get up and do something, sitting here at work and cant keep my mouth shut, yawning so hard my jaw cracked. Pictures tomorrow!

Bottle Babies

I had to go home at lunch to take a bag of dog food home, and of course while I was there, was compelled to feed the bottle lambs; DH was still in bed, and although he doesn't until tomorrow, he thought he started night shift tonight :)

How cute is this? This is (now) George; as in "I will love him, and hug him, and squeeze him and call him George!" And for some strange reason, Jari named the tunis 'Paco'. They are of a size now, even though George weighed 7 lbs more than Paco did when they were born. And though Paco, since his first bottle, has nursed with gusto, Geoge couldnt seem to get used to this manner of eating; this is due to George's inability to accept that he was no longer going to get to nurse a ewe. This problem kept him from taking total advantage of a bottle because every time we would try to feed him, he would try to get to the closest ewe. It was amusing... for a minute. The unfortunate ewe would buck, jump, spin and otherwise try to disengage the tenacious little tyke, but when he latches on, he ain't lettin' go! Hence the fact that he and his bottle partner are still living it up in the garage. If I were to put him in community right now, every ewe in there would be so jumpy, not even their own lambs would get a break. In fact, he is a bit confused about the fact that those hangy-downy things on Paco don't seem to yield any food. He is doing much better now, drinking between 12 and 16 oz per feeding. They both nibble on hay and grain pellets, and chew cud.
This is our first time attempting to graft a bummer, it didn't go too awful well, but I think we will try it again if the right situation presents itself.

Is it Real?

...Or is it Spin Off? I had so much fun with this! I have been wanting to do a cable yarn for a long time, but it never quite worked out, never looked like a cable! After reading this article, I realized what I had been doing wrong, had in fact done wrong even with the first skein I did this week; I was over plying it! The first picture here is of the first skein, you can see, it doesn't quite look right, and if you cant see it, you just cant see enough of the skein to tell. The second picture is a close up of the skein in the third picture... I hate my camera... I want one like Amy's, this one just doesnt cut it. Both skeins are out of the fleece in the last post, all the same color. The color in the first picture is probably the closest to the real thing... or just a little darker than the picture of the skein in the magazine, more brown.
If you click for big, I think you will be able to see the patern of the cable in this skein better. When I got it done last night I was almost giddy! I dont get giddy, I'm just not a giddy kinda person. This ones going to Ohio with me to the Great Lakes Fiber Show and then on to the NV State Fair!

This is actually the first time I have read a Spin-Off and really got something out of it!

Wow! What a rush ;-)

Here are some random pictures of lambs...

Wheres my Mommy!?!?!

The littlest Babie (weighed 4lbs!)

Little Chunk!

The Three Stooges

Twin Bricks, these girls are well built! Very nice lambs for 4-H