Show picking

Hard to believe but it’s that time of year again already. Just 2 months or so after putting the 2011 show season to bed it’s already time to start doing a bit of planning for our first spring shows in April. Admittedly, if we were hardcore we could be heading off on the road in just a couple of weeks but time being what it is — precious — we prefer to keep our powder dry for the springtime. The offseason matters, it builds a reserve of sanity that we can draw from the rest of the year. February in our estimation is for skiing and one final winter getaway before we get down to the serious stuff of walking in circles, breeding, and catching crias later on.

The spring schedule for us is really just two shows: the North American, held in nearby Springfield, MA and the Futurity held in not so nearby Nebraska. Though on the face of it selecting a show string to take out to just two shows shouldn’t be too big of a deal, we are talking about 20 +/- animals for each event. While the yearlings and perhaps even the odd adult animal (Avenger came out to play again last year for instance) more or less pick themselves at this point, the interesting part comes from trying to project which of the juveniles based on what were seeing now in early February will still be looking good in April. In particular there is the small matter of choosing 6 white juveniles (3 male, 3 female) out of a 2011 birth class that was predominantly white. And male. Okay, so maybe choosing the females won’t be quite so tough but you get the idea nonetheless. We have an easy-peasy edition of herd health day tomorrow so I imagine we’ll start to make some unofficial decisions then as we go through the lot of them. It’s of course raining here again today, no doubt setting things up nicely for fleece evaluations!