A quiet weekend

There was quite honestly not a whole lot going on here the past few days, which after an eventful week of ice storms, downed trees, and the seemingly never-ending herd health “day” was really kind of nice. Friday things were so mellow I even made a double batch of chocolate chip cookies for Max’s fourth grade play cast party. Ian baking cookies: chocolaty goodness that melts in your mouth (and they frickin’ better with four sticks of butter in the things) or another sign of the coming apocalypse? Debatable. Yesterday, with the rain finally relenting, I even snuck off with my kids to go skiing at Okemo for what may have been our final time out this season. Though there is still a ton of snow on the ground, for the first time this winter the banks outside of our house and elsewhere on the farm look perceptibly smaller than they did 5 days ago. It’s definitely moving in the right direction.

Kimberly has continued to peck away at training the juvi show animals on non-monsoon days. I imagine by the middle of this week the parade of slightly hesitant and newly trained weaners will begin in earnest up and down the hill. All three of us will be out there, often simultaneously, walking the show critters back and forth, around the parked cars, and even through our kids old swing set. All in an effort to make walking in circles at the upcoming shows seem relatively easy.

Jennifer has been busy over the past days and weeks adding the bells and whistles to our herd database which nowadays runs on AlpacaEase. She was showing off its complete features to me today, the sum of months of scanning and tedious data entry and it’s definitely going to be pretty snazzy. Once it is all complete and linked up the software will have not only a given animal’s genealogy, their most recent health and breeding records but will also have photos, copies of ARI certificates, any histograms (the actual PDFs from YM), as well as scanned images of our older health records, taken both from paper hardcopies (probably from when we had fewer than 30 animals) as well as printouts from our old herd management software from before it crashed and burned in an ugly way. The coolest thing of all of course is that because it is networked we will all (Ian, Jen, Kim) be able to access the database and all of its content simultaneously. From the standpoint of the person that is in charge of writing the marketing copy here, my ability to access information on any given animal (say how many times a given female was bred and when is she due) just got a whole lot easier.