Confessions of an Internet Junkie

I've been hella busy, and I can't say that I'm loving it. Mostly I'm doing a lot of running around, because my car has been off the road for about five days now. (I need new brakes. Not sure when that's actually going to happen.) I drive Mark into work in Waterloo so we can have the Jeep, and then I run errands - including some that take me back to Waterloo/Kitchener - and then I drive back into Waterloo in the evening and pick Mark up again. I figured that on three days this week, I'll be putting in 200 miles a day behind the wheel. It's gonna be a long week, and next week we have shearing Mon-Wed. Plus Dar has to travel into Toronto for that meeting. By next Thursday you'll find me curled up in a fetal position. Or else clutching a bazooka. It's a crapshoot.

I'm just tired, you know? And bitchy and cranky :) Dar sent me to the internet to look up Post Concussion Syndrome, knowing that if I read it on the internet then I'll believe that it must be true. Heh. And yeah, that's what I have. Headaches. Fatigue. The usual stuff. Joy. Apparently it can last for three months, and for some very unlucky individuals it can go on like that for years. Sigh. All from a stupid crack on the head.

So. Gertie still hasn't cranked out the cria yet. Although it's looking more and more imminent. This evening when I was feeding the guys, she went into the barn instead of jostling with the others for the fresh grain. That's very unGertie-like. Dar said that she noticed that Gertie's udders are swollen, too. All the signs are pointing to a criation (no really, that's what they call it), but then Gertie is a stubborn old broad; she just may hold onto that little cria for another month. Just to watch us go batshit :)

I got out to the barn later than usual tonight (Dar was going to do it, but then her ulcer really kicked in), and the sun was setting before I was finished. The good thing about that is that I got some decent photos, and I got to watch bunnies frolicking. Frolicking, I say. Two of them right outside the fence to the paddock. They were jumping over each other in a game of bunny leapfrog and scampering around each other like they were playing tag. Absolutely freakin' adorable. Did I have my camera at the ready? I did not. By the time I retrieved it from the barn, the games were over, but I did catch one of the bunnies anyway. It's not a great shot because the sun was going down, but there you have it. Or you will have it under the cut *g*.
( Twilight around here. And some mutant tulips. )

Happy Easter, Happy Spring (sort of), Happy Chocolate Day to you all.

A snowy, blowy gray Easter around here but Easter nevertheless. I was thinking of bringing some fake bunny ears out to the barn this morning and trying to get one of the alpacas to wear them for an Easter pic, but then I remembered that alpacas already have bunny ears.

It's been a busy couple of days as well as being cold, windy, and snowy. After prolonged periods of weather like this, I start believing that this is the way it will always be so I might as well just get used to it. Even the long range forecast isn't all that comforting; we'll still be well below average temps for this time of year, but at least we'll finally get above freezing. Yeah, I figure I'll feel optimistic enough to pack away the winter gear sometime around the end of May.

Dar and I had a cleaning fest yesterday; it's not a barrel of laughs to be doing it, but the results always make us happy. I went to town on the barn, too, a few days ago; I spent several hours out there cleaning and re-arranging, not that the alpacas cared one way or the other. It drove me crazy, though, so that was motivation enough. We need storage. I have plans to fence off the small area directly behind the barn and install some storage shelters for our shovels and rakes and hoses and used feed bags and cria coats and all the other paraphenalia that we've acquired. We'll need some place to put the new farm equipment we're hoping to get before summer, too. A compact tractor with a front loader! And a trailer! And a heavy duty brush cutter! Keep your Lexus, make mine Kubota. (This farm stuff can get very addictive.)

So. In case you didn't know, we're taking part in the Alpaca Ontario Full Fleece Halter Show this coming week. We'll definitely be showing Hannibal, and we're hoping to be able to show Delilah and Adama; I'm not sure we'll be able to pull that off, though. They still need to be halter trained, and we're still waiting on their test results for BVDV to come back. (BVDV is a highly contagious disease among cattle and camelids; no camelid is allowed into any show or public alpaca forum without being tested and cleared.)

In addition to the alpacas, our collective will have an information booth; we'll be selling socks and insoles from the mill and premiering Dar's alpaca chocolates. She's been busy like an elf making with the chocolate moulds, and she has almost a hundred of them made so far. ( Wanna see? ) They've been individually packaged and wrapped with a bow and a sticker with our collective's logo. I'd have posted a picture of the finished product, but I couldn't figure out where she's squirreled them all away :)

Mark's been toiling away making informational brochures and business cards and signage for us all. Wait until you see our Serenity Suris logo! It's brilliant. He's so very talented. We're also having the collective's logo put on denim shirts that we'll all be wearing at the expo; that's taken more effort than we'd figured it would have, but we should have all of that done by Thursday.

It's going to be a very busy week; we have loads of things to see to before we actually do the set-up on Friday. Wish us luck with it all, eh.

And in closing, ( I think I found the Easter Bunny's trail. )

( Satine and Delilah )

Now I'm going to bed. Really.