Shearing scenes

Shearing scenes

We just got through the first 2 of 3 days of shearing here. All told, we sheared some 140+ animals Wednesday and Thursday and we’ve got the usual aches and pains to show for it. Because of a slight scheduling oddity that might have had us headed to a show today, day #3 isn’t scheduled…

Tree dodging

Some parts of each year are just like this. We of course try to be as proactive as possible about things both in our family life as well as with stuff pertaining to the animals in the herd (as if that were really separate) but ultimately there come moments — and suspiciously they seem to…

It’s the fleece, stupid!

It’s the fleece, stupid!

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there! Three quarters of the Lutz family (though oddly enough not the mother) at CCNF are spending the day recovering from the 3 day shearing juggernaut that finally came to a merciful conclusion around 5:30 yesterday afternoon. We ended up doing 66 critters on the final day,…

Elixir gets naked!

Day 1 of shearing 2012 is in the books and we ended up doing a nice round 70 alpacas today. Only 137 to go! Below is the video I shot this morning of Futurity Judges’ Choice winner, CCNF Elixir, getting shorn. Minus a blip just before the blanket gets finished it’s pretty much start to…

Catching a break…

Funny isn’t it how back in early April we were so desperate for rain and it wouldn’t come, yet with two days to go before shearing we just got over 1.5″. To put that in perspective, had it been cold out that would have been the largest single snow fall of the winter of 2011/2012!…

Shearing prep

The really good news around here is that the cycle of seemingly endless dry weather finally went on hiatus while we were away at the Futurity a couple of weeks ago. The bad news though is that now that spring has decided to act like itself again, it is insisting on raining in the days…