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.