Posted: December 31st, 2009 | Author: Hellchick | Filed under: Alpacas, Spinning | Tags: Alpacas, Knitting, logos, Spinning | No Comments »
It’s the end of a year and wow, what a year. I started 2009 off in a rocky financial situation, lost my job not once but twice, and yet somehow this has felt like the best year ever for me. I jumped into alpaca ownership after years of dreaming about it and it’s been far more rewarding than I ever thought it could be. And even though I lost my job twice it actually proved to be perfectly timed — I was able to take a job offer at Uber, where I’d wanted to work since they started it about a year ago, and it’s turned out to be the best job I’ve ever had, hands down. So all in all, despite the recession it’s been a pretty up year for me.
The boys circa July 2009. So skinny.
The alpacas don’t seem to get any less cute as time goes by. They’re getting fuzzier by the day and are starting to look more like teddy bears than they did when they arrived. In fact, it’s pretty funny to look at them now and then compare them to the pictures we took the day they got here, when their necks looked so skinny because they’d just been sheared.
They’ve finally acclimated to most of the fauna around our place. During the first few weeks in their new home every little nocturnal sound was a potential threat so we were constantly awakened at night with their alarm call (and one of these days I’m going to record it). Now that they’re more used to the place we actually haven’t heard it in a while…at least until winter changed the landscape a little.
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Posted: December 2nd, 2009 | Author: Hellchick | Filed under: Alpacas | 2 Comments »
When we made our first — and so far only — alpaca buy this past year we started with three, and that’s still all we have right now. We don’t have as much room as the folks we think of who are, well, “real” alpaca farmers. At most we could likely support up to five alpacas comfortably on our little pasture of about three-quarters of an acre; anything more than that and we’re edging into possible dry-lot territory, something we’re not interested in doing since we don’t plan to be what we consider a “real” farm (i.e., one that breeds and sells them or at least has a number more substantial than three). From the start this was an enterprise we embarked on because it would give me a constant source of my own fiber to spin — some of which is certainly selling (sometimes even just the unspun fiber, such as the couple of ounces of combed top from Silverton earlier this year) but none of which will ever likely fully pay for the boys’ room and board, nevermind make us any actual money. And we also embarked on it for fun and for the experience of raising farm animals, both of which we’ve gotten back in spades.
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