I’ve let a lot of time pass since my last blog entry! We have been unbelievable busy, partially due to Fred’s frequent business travel. We’ve also both sustained bad colds which hindered our activities. I missed the Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival, and we’ve had to skip several shows. We did qualify several of our llamas for Regionals, including Got My Vote, Sand Pebble Cruz, Luci Lui and Salom Cruz. Got My Vote also earned his ALSA ROM. We said goodbye to Kailua Cruz, Smokin’ Ebony and Lace, Geisha Cruz and Lennie, all of whom have gone to great homes with wonderful people. Keep those updates on our babies coming! We love to hear how our llamas are doing!

We’ve had our first suri baby, a female by Sassfras Lady. She is a precocious child, and wonderfully playful. We are very pleased with her and look forward to showing her next year. Our two other females who we thought were due, have gone well past a year gestation, and I believe they are not pregnant as anticipated. They fooled both us and our vet!

A head’s up for you suri breeders out there: Star Adonis will be at our farm this fall! This is our first chance to use this wonderful, proven suri producer. He will be available for outside breedings, and we will plan to sell a few selected females bred to him. Adonis is a large male by any standards, and has had super nice babies with loads of presence and excellent confirmation. His percentage of suri babies is very high, and he has the beautiful head and ears and strong topline that we look for in all our bloodlines. If you are interested in stud service or a bred female, drop me an email!

Other than a hot Memorial Day weekend, our weather has been tolerable cool. We are trying to stay on top of mowing and weeding, although my garden, once again, got away from me. I think I can save the tomatoes and peppers, but other than that, I will have to wait for next year and assume I will have more time for gardening!

Shearing got completed this year with personal marathon sessions, while my hubby was in Norway. Fortunatley the weather cooperated. The Farmhouse is once again full of fiber, and I am hoping I can get some time to work on sorting and maybe dying some raw fiber later this summer. A couple of you are waiting on roving from me, and I need to get that done as well! How many hours are there in a day again? Not enough, that’s for sure. Even though it is still light at 9:30 pm, I have to find time to work my “paying job” somewhere between all of this!

I know it’s been ages since I’ve posted; and thank you to everyone for urging me to update the blog! I would say it is because I have been so busy, but quite frankly, when I look back on my accomplishments over the last couple of months, I cannot account for my time. Late winter is supposed to be a time of rest, meaning to us that we do the “indoor” things: update the web site, create fancy new brochures, work on knitting and weaving. Maybe even clean the basement. But none of those got done. Sure, I finally got 28 sets of clipper blades cleaned and sent off to be sharpened (yes, that sounds like an awful lot of blades, but we hate to interrupt our marathon shearing sessions once we get started just to send in blades for sharpening.) I got our first entry for our first show of year in the mail this morning, right on deadline as usual (see you in Illinois everyone!) But my Pinata-and-white scarf remains only half done, and the lavender silky llama scarf I promised my mother has not even been officially started yet. I have mailed out several orders of llama yarn, and finally finished the jet black silky llama roving that I promised Lee Ann of FuzzyLogicKnits in Canada. The only problem is, I promised her this last Thanksgiving! Thank heavens for her patience. Actually, I can’t wait to shear some more of this heavenly silky pure black; I can just imagine myself with a ruana out of black, perhaps with a little angelina for good measure, to wear when showing my favorite llamas when the cold permeates the show ring. But that can wait; I have more projects than I can handle right now anyway, and I know Lee Ann will love the black llama and make something marvelous out of it.

I did order my garden seeds, for which I spent extra for expedited postage. The “pea fence” I ordered arrived almost immediately; but the seeds took another two weeks. I won’t waste my money on that option again. I have not gotten the energy to trim the overgrown Concord grape vines, but I did convince my husband to use our one dry weekend to till my garden! It sat ready for potatoes and spring vegetables, which I was stealthily planning to sneak in after the next rain. Last weekend would have been perfect, but…we decided to reseed a couple of the pastures instead. It seems that March was again going to be true to its name of “out like a lion,” as they were predicting snow! There is an urban legend in Indiana that we always have a heavy snow fall during basketball tourney-time. Fred and I can each remember a heavy March snow during our high school years, meaning we get one about every ten years. I don’t see that this constitutes a consistent weather pattern, but everyone is convinced that this is our “tourney-time” blizzard. Whatever you want to call it, I don’t like it. I came to work extra early in blinding snow that was just starting to accumulate. They are predicting 5 or 6 inches here in Indy, and we may get more “on the hill” because we are farther south. So much for the second official day of Spring. The snow will help settle in that new grass seed, but otherwise I have little use for it. My thoughts are turning to outdoor things, including cleaning the trailer…my goodness, that first show is only three weeks away! Let’s hope the weather is more spring-like by then.