Posted: July 24th, 2010 | Author: Hellchick | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alpacas | 2 Comments »
Back when we were shopping around for our alpacas and visiting nearby farms to get to know them and their routines, we visited Tiger Mountain Alpacas, a little home farm literally just up the road from us. While we were there she pointed to her neighbor nearby and explained that he had a small pasture and that she kept some of her alpacas on it.
We got a visit from that neighbor last weekend. We were dismayed to learn from him that Tiger Mountain Alpacas had to sell their animals, which for him meant that his pasture was empty and had been for nearly a year now and the grasses and weeds were getting out of control. He stopped by to ask if we were interested in putting our boys on it — free grass for us, free pasture mowing for him.
After some questions and a quick walk up the road to check out the pasture we decided it was a great idea. Our summer here in the northwest has been terrible for growing anything so our pasture is growing pretty slowly. We figured this was a great way to extend our pasture’s viability a little bit and maybe allow us to give our boys just a little less hay this year. We’ll only be doing it through July and August — after that the bears start hanging around our neighbor’s area for berries and get a little unpredictable, he says.
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Posted: December 31st, 2009 | Author: Hellchick | Filed under: Alpacas, Spinning | Tags: Alpacas, Knitting, logos, Spinning | Comments Off
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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