This is not a drill…

I love the idea of being one of those people who is always getting their work done in a timely manner and not pressing up against any deadlines. Yeah, well…it’s something to aspire to anyway, right? As it is, I’m sitting here in my office on Tuesday night printing out marketing materials for our females, Honeysuckle and Fortuna, that are in the Priority auction this upcoming weekend in Las Vegas. All of this less than 24 hours before Jen and I head out there ourselves. C’est la vie…

This week has been a crazy one here on the farm. First off, we’ve been having the January thaw/psych!-it’s-really-winter-you-morons-what-the-hell-were-you-thinking/thaw cycle in its full-born glory. As I write this, it has now been raining for almost 24 hours straight here. Oh, joy. Guess who’s happy that we didn’t spend the money on season passes at the local ski mountain this year? Back on Saturday though, your’s truly stepped out of the house and headed down the hill in one of our vehicles to help with morning chores, only to come within probably 3 feet or so of not just going off of our road and over a bank but also rolling our small SUV too. That certainly got the cobwebs out of my head in a hurry! Seems that the brown colored dirt road was also covered in a near perfect layer of ice. I can still remember the look on Jason’s face as I was coming towards him at the Stud Barn, not sure if the the Acadia was going to stop or not. Almost as it happened, this little ditty came into my head (hat tip to you Patrick Badger) and I hummed it pretty much for the rest of the morning too. It’s catchy, what can I say? Needless to say, the animals stayed locked off of the hillsides that morning (and for several days afterward) and we walked carefully and deliberately up and down the length of the entire farm for the first part of the day between the three barns until the cavalry arrived in the form of a sand-spreading truck. For the record: in spite of coming close on several occasions, none of us actually fell on our asses that morning which given the conditions has to count as some sort of minor victory!

We’ve also been a bit shorthanded of late on the farm, which was the whole reason I had reverted to playing the role of chore-boy in the first place. Granted if the farm is to be temporarily short-staffed, then this is probably the best time of year for that to be the case. What’s not so cool though is that both our handy farm tractor (a 54 HP John Deere) and our ToolCat, which is the workhorse when it comes to plowing this time of year, both chose to have rather major breakdowns recently. Both are in farm equipment ICU right now, though if all goes well — he whistles by the graveyard — we will at least have the tractor back by the end of this week and before any significant precipitation of the white and fluffy variety is in the forecast. In the mean time we have all discovered that the Arena, for instance, takes some 6 to 8 gigantic wheelbarrows full of poop and soiled bedding during morning cleanup. That’s significant because in the absence of the farm tractor to haul our spreader/manure cart up to our windrows where we compost all of that good stuff, each of those wheelbarrows has to get loaded into our relatively ancient and rickety skid steer and driven up there instead one at a time. Like I said, it’s a good thing it’s the off season.

For the next 5 days or so my better half and I will head out to the Priority sale and put all most of the day-to-day chaos out of our minds, at least somewhat. We do feel slightly guilty leaving our elder child here at home as Sammy battles his way through his first set of high school mid-term exams, though he seems to be holding up just fine so far, almost halfway through them. Because of the aforementioned mid-terms as well as the small matter of Las Vegas not exactly being the most kid-friendly venue in the world, the boys in any case will be staying back here on the farm itself with a good friend of ours. Of course while we are at the Priority talking shop with other alpaca folks, we will  remain connected with the home/farmfront nonetheless. Yeah, it may all be a little bit crazy and manic at times right now but for the most part, it’s the kind of crazy we love. We hope to see many of you in the next few days, be well…

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