Doing some mop up

Bits and pieces from the brain of the CCNF blogger:

The partially failed Turkey brining experiment nothwithstanding, I think it means that the just completed extended Thanksgiving weekend was a smashing success when the only thing I can complain about today is that my quads are still sore from hiking up to the top of Mt. Ascutney on Friday morning. Seems that even I who do some form of regular daily exercise was not above getting my ass kicked by our sedate little 3,000′ mountain. This whole middle age business may be a touch overrated as well. All whining aside though, we had a great time with the extended Lutz clan (my parents, my sister, her husband and their two girls) and though they say that fish and house guests both wear out their welcomes after three days, there were lots of moist eyes yesterday as we parted ways for what may be months without seeing each other again. I feel really lucky to count all of the people that were here not just as family but as dear, dear friends. And, no, that doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes want to wring their necks and visa-versa. It’s all really good though. From the time I was quite little I always remember my mom telling me that you knew you loved someone if your heart rate elevated just thinking about them. That’s a truism that we’ll be making sure stays in circulation going forward in the years ahead.

Back in the land of CCNF there are all sorts shenanigans afoot. As we enter the final month of the calendar year, yours truly has been spending many a shivery hour supervising what we hope to be some of the final breedings of the season. Every year we try to push our births back away from the fall and further and further towards mid summer.  Unlike those breeders even just 5 or 6 hours south of us, we rather like July and August births, yet every year there are inevitably some females who end up getting bred much closer to the winter solstice than to its summertime counterpart. Some times we are forced to happily make late December or even early January exceptions (talkin’ ’bout you Ms. Cadenza…again). The philosophy in question generally boils down to the fact that if one really must be doing 6 AM baby checks in mid November, there is no difference between checking on a solitary due female or checking on 5 so if you’re going to breed one female in December knucklehead (Ian), you might as well breed the others too.

In the mean time I am personally facing a 2012 cria list of some 60+ little buggers with perhaps only 10 or so of them already named. At moments like this, anointing myself the namer-of-record doesn’t always seem like it was such a great idea, though if I can just get the right stream of consciousness to flow a bit it can be great fun. The big challenge here in 2012 will quite honestly be how many ways I can riff on the word “Majesty.” I will happily grant, by the way, that this is completely a 1st world/uptown problem. Oh, woe is me. Not.

Last but certainly not least: though there have already been some significant additions to our sales listings in recent weeks, there are several others to come as we get everyone confirmed pregnant and plot a strategy for the year ahead. Amongst those new listings will be the first ever sons of Snowmass Elite Legend that we have ever formally listed for sale as well as several foundation quality females that are bred to the reigning Futurity Herdsire of the Year. We are striving as always to adapt to the realities of the changing alpaca market with our ultimate goal to produce a sales list that while admittedly focused on high end breeding stock, does nonetheless have a little bit of everything from show Champions to more entry-level stuff. In all cases we stand behind the breeding animals we sell with full guarantees, regardless of whether they are priced at $3,000 or $30,000. For those of you that have recently perused the sales listings on our home web site, you may have noticed that we have synced that page specifically (the rest of our site remains unchanged so long as you use the navigation menu on the left hand side) with our farm account on Open Herd. After years of having to make changes in three different places on the web whenever I amended our sales lists, I finally cried uncle. Sort of…now I only have to make changes in two places. In addition to saving me a fair bit of time, it also allows us to have several more pictures for each animal listed on our site, something which I think is visually more pleasing and definitely a big plus. More information is always better with such things. In any case, check it out! I hope everyone had a great time with family and friends over the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s hard to believe that the next round of craziness is really just a month away…

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