Pictures of "The Flood" and cricket season

Well here are the pics I got on the digital camera of the results of the 7.5" of rain last Saturday (Aug 18th 2007)

This is the car port and it is covered with about 2 inches of water! Below the water is the mud that always seem to come along with the rain!

Now further down this page is a picture that is not for the squeamish! I just want to warn you now in case you don't want to view it. If you have a phobia about bugs then you might want to prepare yourself!

Meanwhile, something that everyone can look at, everyone needs at some time in their life and something I thought I'd NEVER, EVER make. . . . yes I have made my first pair of alpaca socks!

They are hand dyed (no feet included in this) by ME! Yes I dyed the yarn, then I got up the courage to knit with 5, yes I said FIVE, knitting needles, double pointed no less so twice as dangerous. What a challenge this was in the beginning, I was beginning to think that all those sock knitters out there were genius's..... WOW what a challenge it became.

So here we have it. . . my first pair of socks. Jerry is the lucky recipient. Believe it or not he's thrilled as he absolutely loves alpaca socks. Wears the thick terry alpaca socks in the middle of the summer heat. He says because they have this wicking quality he can keep cooler in thick alpaca socks than he can in cotton socks. Go figure!

OK, as warned earlier. . . if you aren't ready for this sickening picture. . . go no further. For those brave enough to continue here it is. . .

This is a picture of the crickets that were on the outside of our window Saturday morning. Because all the ground was covered in water they climbed up the side of the house and were clinging on anything they could find, the window screen being one item they could easily hang onto.

My camera battery decided to quit at this point and I didn't get pics of the side of the house and the back yard fence. They were even more disgusting than this. If you could imagine 2 1/2 feet from the ground up, completely covered with crickets. . . yuck, yuck, yuck. Ooh I hate bugs.

But there is one more thing that's worse (for me) Somehow every evening, while I am sitting watching Law and Order (what else is there on sattelite TV?) knitting my socks every darn evening, at about 10pm a cricket lands on ME. Yes, ME. Did I mention that I absolutely HATE bugs? How they have the audacity to land on ME I don't know but let me tell you what happens next is not what they expect. I scream, jump out of my chair, kind of shaking and hitting myself to get this, this thing off me. Yelling at it to get OUT, get out, get out. It gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Now I have to mention that this was not a single incident. Every evening for about two weeks this happened to me. I swear that they were crawling up into the heater vent during the day and sitting there waiting for an opportune moment to kamakaze drop themselves right onto my right shoulder. Yes they even had a spot picked out for this adventure. I couldn't believe it. Did they "attack" Jerry, oh no. . . only me. How dare they!

Somehow, since the "flood" the cricket olympics have ceased to happen. Why I don't know, but I'm happy.

The other thing I don't think everyone knows about crickets. When they die. . . they stink. I mean sickly stink. I found that out last year when we were inundated inside with them (how dare they) and I spent every morning vacuuming up all of them, dead and alive. After two days of vacuuming I discovered that every time I turned on the vacuum this foul smell came wafting up to my nostrils. I told Jerry I thought it was the crickets, dead in the bag. Oh no, he didn't think so.

Well now that same stink is outside the house, outside the back door, in the back yard, on the side of the house, by the front door. . . . . everywhere! I am about ready to go outside and vacuum around the house.

Well my education has now become your education on crickets. They are immune to insect sprays by the way, don't know why.

Next year we are going to start early and spray indoors and out, and if I have my way I'll make Jerry spray all the heater vents up in the ceiling too! The neighbors told us that each year they always get a plague of something or another. Can't wait for the bol weavils (just kidding!)

We survived!

Well it's Monday morning and we have survived the rain. It all started Friday evening, we were expecting rain, we knew it was coming, "I LOVE the rain", "I miss the rain", "isn't it nice, all the rain we've been having since we moved to Texas?". . . . and it rained, and it rained. . . all night it rained.

We got up about 7am and looked outside. Boy oh boy, had it rained! The rain gauge was full, which means we had AT LEAST 6 inches (it's max). The back garden was soggy lawn, the front yard was soggy grass, the circular driveway was "blocked" at each entrance with a very large puddle and you couldn't see the road in front of our property, it had turned into a stream!

Now we know that our alpacas are housed in some low points of the property so we were dreading what we were going to see. The boys especially when we get a good downpour have a "stream" running through two of the four pens for a day or so. Alpacas are not fond of walking through a stream that is very soggy and unstable at the bottom! It was as we expected, but lots worse. It was still raining when we went out to survey. We had to get the boys moved into the barn. They were so wet and bedraggled but luckily for alpacas their hair is very fine and even though they looked wet through they were completely dry on their insides.

Alpacas are herd animals and it appears the more there are, the happier they are. We separate our herd into three groups, the girls, the teenagers and the adult males. We had three "teenagers" to move in with the other four teenagers and one little girl who cannot go back in with mom for another month (after weaning). The boys all waited at their gate in anticipation of their buddies coming back in with them. They were greeted and then all settled inside the barn out of the rain.

Willy Nelson, our stud, was brought into another section of the barn and Kenny Rogers got the center of the barn to himself. So now all were re-situated to wait it out in comfortable quarters.

Even the barn was soggy on the floor and we put raking out the old straw at the top of our list, once we had the property evaluated. Alpacas are pretty adaptable and were quite happy to be in the barn all together.

We decided to go for a tour of the neighborhood to see if anyone else had a lake in their acreage. We have two county roads for access to the freeway and the rest of the world. Did I mention that we are situated out in the "country" 3 miles from the city (population 350)? We are actually 30 miles from Abilene and 15 miles from Sweetwater, the two metropolises that we do our business. Well the first county road had pretty fast flowing water and we were on the edge of it and the water was flowing over the base of the tire. Jerry decided to try the other county road and see if it was as "bad". So we backed up about 1/2 mile and off we went in the opposite direction. It really wasn't any better but our neighbor had decided to check it out too and was in front of us so we could see what we were in for. We got through, although it was no better than the other county road we took the plunge (no pun intended!).

Well we discovered that in our community water, in large amounts, flows north, right to our property. Not to say that there weren't properties that were as water logged as ours, or worse in some cases! We drove back home and decided to wait it out. It finally stopped raining around 2pm. It's amazing, in about an hour you could see how the water was soaking into the ground and the roadway started to appear once again.

Sunday was spent cleaning out the barn. We took advantage of the opportunity of wet feet by trimming toenails on all the alpacas. Yes alpacas have padded feet with two toes. Very much like us they have toenails that grow and since we moved to Texas on lovely soft soil, their toenails grow, and grow, and grow. They don't like their legs being touched so it's quite an effort on some of them to stand still while we do it. It was quite a workout doing about 15 sets of feet!

We were expecting more rain Sunday but were lucky enough to be spared a couple of days, the weather reports kept putting the next storm back a few days. Now they are saying late Monday or Tuesday. At least this deluge can soak down before the next one.

All I can say is that I am thankful we live far enough from the gulf coast not to be worried about hurricanes, but we do get some of the backlash!

Well that's it for the great rain of 2007. We are way, way above our national average for this year, the farmers are happy and I have enjoyed the rain. It might have been a bit better if it had been spread out a litte more! All in all we "reckon" we got about 7 1/2 inches of rain!

My First Day as a Blogger

Well here I am in the land of Blogs! I said I wouldn't do it but everyone else is!

I will share some of the fun side of my life (of which there's lots) showing you what I'm up to, at least on a weekly basis but hopefully more regularly than that! I'll share stories about my alpacas, my cats, life on the farm, my projects and designs, and my hopes for the future near and far.

It's mid August, we've had a wonderfully wet summer, but that has put the cabosh on a lot of outdoor projects. Working full time and coming home to take care of the fuzzy critters (once it cools down a bit from the high 90's) takes us to about 8pm each evening. Since I don't like to cook any more (retired myself about 20 years ago but it's more like a semi-retirement!) I hope that Jerry, my partner, is not in a hungry mood and takes care of himself. Bless his little heart, he's more than happy to do that, or have a "hydraulic sandwich". Me? Well I'd prefer sitting and getting working on one of my many projects.

To back track for those of you that don't know us and what we are doing. Five years ago, when the stock market stunk and I lost a lot of my pension, I decided to "re-invest". From suggestions and seeing the TV ads I decided to look into alpacas. Now we're talking about someone who didn't own a pair of tennis shoes and had barely purchased her first pair of jeans. Long fingernails and high heels were my wardrobe and I loved it!

Anyway, we found that there was two alpaca farms in our little community and off we went to visit them. Well if that is not the dumbest thing for an impulse shopper to do! Guess how long it took to decide to buy alpacas? One week........ we purchased two females and a gelding.

Over the past five years we've had our share of "bad luck". In this business the females are worth a lot more than the males, of course we've had all males but one. Since one of the first girls we bought was named Wynonna I decided to go with a C&W theme for naming my animals. I thought I'd never get my Reba! Well finally she arrived, July 2006. Gretchen Wilson arrived on October 31st last year to make our total girls up to 2, woohoo! All in all we've had a wonderful string of wonderfully healthy boys and we're hoping that next year our luck will change.

With all this happening to us, we've not had the growth in our herd as planned on in the beginning. We have spent a lot of time purchasing females to get our herd going and to date we're up to 8. They will all be bred this fall to give us late summer babies next year.

Meanwhile I have revamped our business plan. We are now working more diligently on the fleece side of our business and as I love to knit, crochet and do all sorts of fiber arts my next natural progression was to learn to spin.

I live in the middle of nowhere Texas and it's not like I can sign up at the local yarn store and get going on what I want to learn, oh no, not that easy for me! So, I got my spinning wheel out and sat down in May and taught myself to spin. Believe me it wasn't that easy, I spun, and spun, and spun, and spun and thought I was never going to "get it". Then one evening it happened, I got it! Then I was off, spinning and spinning and spinning. . . I love it!

Well that's it for my first post. You will learn lots more about me and my life as I progress from here. Please visit often, send responses if you'd like, share with me. That's what life's about, giving and sharing.