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!