Confessions of an Internet Junkie

That would be meeeeeeee! I be very happy.

And very tired. We left the house at 9:30AM, and outside of a brief 20 minute stop by home, we were out running around until after 6PM. We got a ton of errands done, but add that to the stuff that had to be done around here, too, and you end up with a couple of very tired old broads.

Updates, then.

Our brand new mailbox got vandalized about twelve hours after we put it up. When I went out to get the mail the next day, I saw that some kids had played mailbox baseball; one side of it is all smashed in. Nice. Eh, it was a cheap box, but it's the prinicple of the thing. Freakin' idiots.

My hair has grown out a little bit, and I'm liking it a lot more. The color has toned down, too, and I've received a lot of compliments on it, so I guess I'll keep it. I think the trick was washing it twice a day for the past week :) I can't keep that up, because my hair is dry to begin with, but I guess it was successful.

You might have heard that we thought our herd matriarch, Gertie, was about to give birth. Now it looks like it was a bit premature on our parts; she's back to hanging out with the rest of the herd instead of planting herself at the poo pile (which is a sign of impending labor with alpacas.) Dar did some more research and now figures that the cria was moving from the breech position to the pre-birth position, and that's what had Gertie feeling like she was going into labor. So it could be another couple weeks before the cria finally makes an appearance.

We're not locking them in the barn at night anymore now that the weather is better. That's one happy little herdlet out there. We had a lovely day last week when it was warm and sunny; Dar had spread some old hay around part of the paddock, and the guys were all lazing around like a bunch of sun-worshipping slugs. Very cute.

I came up with a make-shift hay feeder that we can hang off the fence posts. We had been using plastic bins and a couple of wheelbarrow bodies, but the alpacas (especially that scamp Adama) would pull all the hay out looking for the little tasty bits at the bottom, leading to lots of waste. I took a cheapo mesh laundry hamper, cut some holes in it, filled it with hay and hung it on the fence. Once they got over their abject fear of the Scary New Object ("What is that? What is that? What the fuck is that?!") they love it. In fact that they love it so much, that they totally destroyed the first one I made. It looks like they tried to eat it :) I'm looking around for something sturdier, but I didn't have any luck today. The search continues.

My biggest accomplishment was moving that big-ass secondary poo pile. (Pics to be posted at pic365.) Hey, cajoje! Your advice about using a tarp to haul the stuff was a godsend. I still had to deal with hoisting everything over the fence, but the tarp saved me a lot of work when it came to hauling it. Thank you!

And it a completely random bit of news: I've discovered Leonard Cohen. Yeah, yeah, I know - they guy's been around since the 60s, but I was never one for his style of music. Or so I thought. It turns out that there are any number of songs that I've liked over the years that had been covered by other singers; I had no idea that they were Cohen songs. Now I'm trying to make up for lost time. In fact, I think that I'm a bit obsessed with him. Last night I was watching the movie, Leondard Cohen: I'm Your Man; it had a number of interviews with him plus a whole slew of his songs that I'd never heard before. The upshot is that I'm very close to stalking the man in the hopes that we could somehow sit and have a conversation about life, fate, God, philosophy, and the power of language. Not gonna happen, I know, but that's my fantasy right now. I have to do some searching to see if I can find any essays by him.

While we were at Best Buy this afternoon picking up my blessed new keyboard, Dar and I went searching for some of his CDs, and she found one that was not only on sale but also had my absolute favorite song of his: If It Be Your Will. I have a whole post inside me about why that song moves me as it does, but that's for another day. For now, I have to catch up on my 365 pics and hopefully get in some much delayed comments.

Ciao, babies.