Here we are, another Friday, and it’s been a BUSY week as usual! With school, work, farm and household chores, who has time for photography?

Okay, I confess, I just about always carry my camera with me when I go out to do morning chores. So here’s a few of this week’s snapshots from the farm.

I’d never seen such red wasps until I moved to the south. I think they blend in better with all the red soil, ha! (As opposed to Iowa or Canada, which both have some of the blackest soil I’ve ever seen!)

This is our male llama, Samson, before getting up in the morning. He has a couple of hitchhikers…

It’s bad enough they think the llama is their own personal roosting place, but then the rooster has just got to crow about it…

At least one of the sheep thinks he’s really baaaaad.

Later that afternoon he figured a nice fluffy sheep in the shade made a good roosting place.

Our female llama doesn’t care how many chickens sit on Samson or the sheep, as long as she gets her afternoon session in the sprinkler.

To really get the full effect of that picture, be sure to click on it so it enlarges and you can see the drops of water more clearly!

We have some new guinea babies running around the farm.

I’m not sure why it takes half a dozen adult guineas to take care of four little keets! Last year they were having 12-14 keets hatching at a time.

And lastly, I just know you’ve been wondering what I did with all the scrap wool I skirted off all those fleeces. Well, here’s your answer:

Bet you didn’t know we grow wool in our flowerbeds here in the south!

And there you have it, a glimpse of life this past week on the farm.

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I may feel human again, oh say, in another century or so.

Well, when you consider in the last week, mostly the last 4 days, I got 100 bags of fiber ready for sale, I guess it’s no wonder I’m a bit done in.

Wednesday I worked on wool.
Thursday The Farmer and I both worked on wool.
Friday morning I worked on wool.
Saturday I worked on wool.

I was sooooo thrilled when I threw the final bag of skirted wool onto the pile yesterday! And then took down the skirting table, swept up the bits of fleece scattered all over the floor, mopped the kitchen floor and otherwise got rid of the mess I’d made.

Of course, the den is now full of fiber. One couch is buried, with wool up the sides of the wall, and piled in front of the couch.

There are bags of wool, bags of alpaca fiber, bags of llama fiber, and even a bag of mohair. There are bags of trash wool, bags of scrap wool, and old bags from previous storage.

At least the smell is better with the wool bagged up, but it

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Things are wooly bad around here.

Why do I say that? Well, there are bags of wool all over the house right now. I had them stored in the basement, but then I made the mistake of putting an ad for the fleeces at a greatly reduced price on an elist. I just wanted to clear a few out of the way.

Over 45 inquiries later, and I’ve probably got more requests than I’ve got wool.

At first I figured I’d just work on it whenever I had some extra time, and sent out an email telling people it would take a while before I got through all of the wool, and please be patient, I’ll get to them as quickly as I can.

But then I realized that wasn’t going to get it. The wool gets everywhere, and it’s too big a hassle to clean it up every time I get a fleece ready. My living room and den have been taken over and I can’t stand the mess or the smell… time to finish this up.

So tomorrow The Farmer and I are going to have a Wool Work Day. I hope we can get through all the bags of wool, then I can clean up most of the mess and start packing up orders.

That’s going to take a wooly long time. (I know, I’m really baaaaaad.)

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We’ve been working on several different projects here on the farm. Here’s an update on what’s happening:

Bathroom remodeling. We’ve got geared back up with that. We’ve got the trim stained and a couple coats of polyacrylic on them. The Farmer put part of the trim up today, but discovered we need one more corner (some funny jigs & jags in there). So it didn’t get finished today but we’re making progress.

Orchard: The apple and pear trees are loaded down.  I’m going to have to decide what to do with all that fruit soon.

Starking Delicious Pear

Moonglow Pear

Red Rome AppleRed Delicious Apple

 Peafowl Eggs: I still have 3 incubators pretty well filled up. I’m disappointed with the hatch rate, and worse, the ones that did hatch didn’t fare too well when I put them outside. They seemed fine for a week or two, then all of a sudden, I found dead bodies, and now there is only 1 peachick left out with the chicken chicks, and two younger peachicks in a bird cage on the porch.

“School” – I’m working hard and just about ready to switch from learning to doing. Which is one of the things keeping me super busy these days.

Weather: Affecting everything is the weather. It’s hot. It’s humid. There are air quality warnings because of high ozone and high particulate levels. It’s summer in the south. Break out the super-sweet iced tea and endure.

Wool: I put an ad on an egroup list for selling fleece yesterday evening and wowsers! Within an hour I had 20 responses. I never expected so many responses so quickly. The emails are still coming in this morning. Last I looked I had over 35 people wanting wool. Guess in all my “spare” time I’ll be pulling out bags of wool and getting them mailed off.

So, my friends…. 

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