HISTORY 22

June 19, 2003

On Tuesday we took Molly to Double "O" Good and brought Sarai home. Sarai is a gentle, quiet alpaca, not nearly as skittish as she was when she left. I guess being handled and attended to many times a day has that effect, and since Double "O" Good has a nice, large staff to do that, they actually have the time. In any event, she's not exactly tame... won't just stand there and let you come up to her... but once you put a hand on her, she's quiet and submissive. Very nice indeed!

Then last night we discovered that Sarai has cut her left front foot right on the pad. Something is protruding from the pad itself - it looks like flesh from inside the foot. It wasn't bleeding heavily, but there was enough blood so that we couldn't see exactly what the problem was, and I was dumb enough to not take out water to wash the wound before applying an antibiotic to it. She was clearly favoring it last night, so I know it has to hurt her a lot. Alpacas don't make a habit of letting their aches and pains show in any way.

Today it doesn't look any better, except that it has stopped bleeding and there seems to be some scabbing. I don't know whether that's good or bad, given that I wasn't smart enough soon enough to wash the wound out properly before treating it. I guess we'll see.

June 20, 2003

Now Kirby has something wrong with his left front foot. He won't put any weight on it at all. We didn't give him the last dose of Tribrissen because I wouldn't let Rick chase him around the pasture to catch him. I tried to convince Rick to feed the 'pacas in the barn instead of in the shed, but he thinks they're happier in the shed, so he fed them up there. So we didn't have Kirby in a small enough space to catch him. Well, Dr. Hott gets back from vacation on Monday... maybe he'll have time to come out and look at it, or for us to come by if we can catch Kirby on Tuesday.

One of our neighbors brought over half a dozen guinea fowl keets today, and we put them in a box on top of one of the dog crates in my room. After a couple of weeks, we'll put them IN the dog crate and put them outside in the barn, where they'll live until they fly away. We're hoping they'll keep the tick, flea, lice, and fly population down. That's what they're supposed to do, anyway.

June 21, 2003

Rick has gone to North Carolina for the weekend. His mother has recently been diagnosed with brain and lung cancer, and apparently has only a short time to live. Rick's dad is just devastated, as you can imagine. Rick, his brother, and his sister are all rallying around their parents this weekend, just to help comfort them. It has to be a terrible, terrible thing to have to go through, whether you're the one with the cancer or the one with a loved one who has cancer. I wouldn't wish either role on anyone.

Today the goats got out of their pasture and into the alpaca pasture. I discovered this when I went out to feed everyone this evening. Kirby still won't put weight on his left front foot, Sarai still favors her left front foot, and both Jasper and Buddy were racing around the pasture like they'd never been there before. Luckily, Randy appeared just as I was beginning to despair of ever getting the goats to stay in their pasture again. I had put them back twice, and as soon as my back was turned, they'd get out again. They're getting out over the fence that Rick hasn't had time to fix.

So this has not been a good week either, what with Sarai's foot and Kirby's foot and Rick's mom. And to make matters even more gloomy, I heard on the television that we've had 14 days of rain so far in June...and this is the 21st. And it's gonna rain again tomorrow and Sunday.

Oh, well. I guess I'm just still feeling a bit discouraged. I'll probably perk right up if we ever see the sun again! *grin*

June 24, 2003

Well, I really goofed up. I closed the door to my room while I was in there checking my email, and opened the door to the back porch. When I was through checking my email, I went back into the living room, carefully closing my bedroom door and forgetting all about the outside door being open. An hour or so later, Rick let Greta out onto the back porch, and she made a beeline for the bird box. Fortunately, I heard her just as she started scrabbling to get into the box, and raced in to try to pull her out of the box. She went right through the screening! I yelled at the top of my lungs for Rick, and even the two of us couldn't pull her out of the box before she got to the birds. I tried to get a pinch collar on her, to no avail. Finally, I held her while Rick was able to move the bird box, and then we were able to get Greta out of the room. We locked her in the back room while we assessed the damage and cleaned up the mess.

To make a long story short, Greta killed one of the birds and injured another. We don't know how badly the wounded bird is hurt, though... no way to tell. But we fixed up Greta's dog crate, which she abhors, with chicken wire all around the outside and a tarp over 3/4 of the top and all of two sides and halfway down the third side, and put the whole thing in the alpaca pasture behind the gates so there's no chance the dogs will get in there. No chance the cats will get in there, either. We let Greta out of the back room when we got everything done and cleaned up, and Greta went straight to the place where the bird box had been, even though we had scolded her soundly for bothering the birds!

If it isn't one thing, it's another. This one was my fault, though. Sigh.

June 27, 2003

We got word yesterday that Rick's mom has died. I'm so glad he got to go down and say Goodbye to her! There will be a family memorial on July 12, and she'll be buried (or rather, her ashes will) alongside her parents.

While I was fighting with Greta, I broke my right thumb and my glasses frames. Spent the day going to doctors and optometrists and got everything more or less taken care of. The injured bird is still hanging in there and seems to be recovering, thank goodness! And Greta STILL wants to get at the keets! It was a beautiful day today, though, so we let the pacas out into the "driveway" so they could munch on the grass that grows there. Grass won't grow in the fields where we scattered seed, mind you, but it grows like gangbusters on the berm beside the driveway!

Rick and Bob Ciszewski brought Solomon over to breed with Clovelly, but she ran from him and spit him off. She cannot possibly be pregnant because her cria Kirby is the only male alpaca on the farm. But she would have nothing to do with Solomon, so I guess we'll wait 'til fall to breed her. It's a little late in the season to start making arrangements now.

September 9, 2003

To bring you up to date: The second keet that Greta injured did die, so we have four left: three males and one female. They come running when we call "guinea, guinea, guinea" because they know it's food time! Other than that, though, they're pretty wild birds.

We had the vet out in June to look at Sarai's and Kirby's left front legs and feet, and he put copper-tox on Sarai and said they'd both be fine in a few days, and sure enough, they were!

Yesterday we took Clovelly back to the folks we bought her from (Brookmere Farms) to be bred, and took Sarai and Kirby along with her. We couldn't keep Sarai here as an only alpaca, and Kirby, although he weighs more than 45 pounds, is only 3 months old and is still nursing, so he went, too. This means that at the moment, we have no alpacas on our farm at all! We do have the two goat wethers and the four keets, the two dogs and (now) three cats. Rick named the porch cat "Buster" so I guess he's officially a member of the household now.

The folks at Brookmere told us that Kirby is a rose-grey color! I registered him as brown with grey, black, and white markings, but they tell me he is rose-grey. When I described him to Barbara Bramlett of Double "O" Good, where Molly is being bred, she said it sounded to her like he was rose-grey, too! He looks brown to me, with a grey neck and head, white face, apron, and belly, black upper legs, grey lower legs, and black ears. How do they get "rose grey" out of all that? I dunno, but that's what they tell me, so I am going to call ARI and talk to them about it.

My thumb and shoulder are healing, but they aren't there yet. I still have a lot of pain in both shoulder and thumb, but the doctor said I can expect that for quite awhile to come. Sigh.

I think that's about all. It's been a relatively peaceful summer, thank goodness! We've had lots of rain, so our pastures are brimming over with weeds - no grass at all anywhere now - and Rick has been out a time or two with a weedwhacker to try to bring them under control. But other than having to fight the weeds, we're pretty sure we'll have a nice, uneventful fall, too!

More Later...

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