Shearing Day & a Sad Weekend

Friday was shearing day, and I got home from work in time to video Spirit getting his hair did. In case you don't recall, Spirit has been featured in this here bloggie before. Remember this post? Anyway, he's a bit of a drama queen about getting shorn, as you'll see.



I wasn't around to see the sheepies get clipped, since they were done first thing that morning, but I did catch up with them to get their thoughts on it all. It's funny to see how much more forward Angus is than Shaun-Fergus these days, when the reverse was true before I castrated them.



Unfortunately, the weekend ended on a sad note. Mizzen, one of Paula & Wendy's maiden girls, died rather unexpectedly Sunday noon. She was bloated and colicky on Saturday but had seemed to improve. Then yesterday morning she deteriorated rapidly. We were concerned that perhaps she had suffered a fluke bowel torsion during shearing, but the post-mortem exam, I'm told, showed no such thing and no explanatory lesions.

Then tonight our friends Kit & Sue called me about their dog Alex, who we knew had terminal cancer of the liver. He was going downhill rapidly, so I headed over to their house near midnight to help him on his way. Mercifully, he passed on his own. Also mercifully, I managed not to hit any of the two porcupines, one raccoon, one opossum, and one deer who were in or alongside the road on the short drive to their house and back.

And with that, I think it's about time for bed.

Baby Names

David tells me this one's name is Cougar. His left leg appears ready to have the splint off, and I'm thinking to bring him home with me this weekend.



He didn't tell me that this one (born last week) is Haylex. I had to find out from Val.



And I decided that this one is Lakshmi. That's her half-sister Sibri behind her (Haylex is their first cousin). We're going to try for a full sister for next year.

In the Full of the Moon

Technically last night was still waxing gibbous at 98% of full that's apparently close enough for jazz. Last spring (maybe summer, actually, but you get the general idea), some folks at Colorado State's vet school had a study published showing a small but significant uptick in visits to their emergency service during the full moon, and that certainly seemed to be the case here last night. I'm exhausted and ate far too much chocolate in an effort to retain my sanity. A nap before driving home is going to be in order.

This, of course, was after waking up earlier than planned and getting a call from the ladies as soon as I rolled out of bed to come look at their old mama goat, who wasn't doing well. So I went over to examine her and determined that she needed to go see their regular large animal person, who has the facilities to hospitalize, then gave her some Banamine to make her more comfortable in the meantime.

And then David was having fits because Earthlink decided he'd used his allotted bandwidth for the next month and shut his business site down - for the next three weeks. I'd gently told him before that he really needed to find a better hosting option, but tech things scare him and he's had more pressing matters. His office manager is equally tech-phobic and was all ready to go with bundled service through Comcast at a ridiculous cost. Thanks to knitnzu (who blogged about it) and Steph (whom I e-mailed), they're exploring considerably saner and cheaper options and will hopefully get something resolved quickly.

Note to Elizabeth: Yes, we do still have some herd yarn, but your comment didn't give me an e-mail address to respond to and your profile isn't public. Um, scratch that, as I seem to be able to access it now. Anyone else who might be interested, though, can e-mail me at mel dot vassey at gmail dot com.

Whoosh!

That's pretty much how the weekend went by, with David's Wednesday night ER visit only being one in a string of goings-on. Just as I was on my way out of the clinic Thursday morning, David called to tell me he'd gotten a call that Madelyn had gone into labor. It wasn't until I got home that we learned that she'd had a female cria who looked fairly normal but was being very slow to get up and nurse/walk/play - all the things a healthy baby should be doing within a couple of hours.

So that meant making a trip out to check on baby and pretty much dashed any plans I'd had for getting a nap while David picked up his cousin Greg and ran some errands. As we were getting ready to do that, I got another call about a bit of a family crisis which, while not involving me directly at all, is somewhat worrisome, which is about all I can say about it at this point.

Anyway, I got myself cleaned up and we headed off to the bus station to meet Greg, who had flown into Boston a few hours previously. As I mentioned on my last post, this visit was a very big deal - even more so because Greg is the first member of David's family I've met aside from his parents. So documenting his arrival was essential.



Then we quickly hopped in David's truck and made off for the new RedMaple warehouse, both to show the place off and to pick out some sweaters for later. And then we again hopped into the truck and sped off to Val's to see the new baby.



Another adorable baby, and with grey eyes like her sister Juliette. She was, however, not nearly as far along she should have been, acting at 5 hours like a 1-2 hours old cria. A bit of Karo syrup seemed to help, though, and she quickly got up to speed over the rest of the afternoon and so far doesn't seem to be looking back. No name yet, as I haven't had a real chance to think about it, but I'll be working on coming up with something fitting soon.

I had originally planned on making dinner that evening, but by the time we were getting back into town and given my lack of sleep, it was clear that I wasn't really going to be able to throw something together in a reasonable timeframe. Since we had discussed going Indian for dinner, we stopped by Divine Cuisines to see what they had available.

Since their business has been primarily catering and selling at the farmer's market, they don't do a lot of takeout business, but they're preparing to expand and do regular restaurant business, which I'm really looking forward to. The food is very good, and Raj is a nice guy (and very cute). Anyway, they did have enough for us to make a decent meal from, but they were out of naan (recipe below), so I made that when we got home and we had a nice dinner and visit before turning in to rest up for our weekend adventures.

Friday we got up and headed up to Fryeburg for the fair. We got a late start and ran into a horrendous traffic jam of leaf peepers going through Conway, New Hampshire, so we didn't get to Fryeburg until very late in the afternoon, but we still had a fun time eating fair food and looking at the livestock and exhibit halls. I took a few livestock photos, but I figure fiber folks always like the jacob sheep (who can resist all those horns?).



Afterwards, we headed even farther north to Bethel, where I had reserved us rooms for the night so that we could spend Saturday seeing the leaves and doing a bit of hiking. We all went to bed relatively early so that we could be nice and fresh for the day ahead, because in addition to the hiking, David had recruited Greg to be a RedMaple fashion model and we had a bit of a photo shoot planned.



He seems a natural, no? This particular shoot was done at Screw Auger Falls in Grafton Notch State Park. We stopped at most of the park sights along the road, doing photo shoots at some and just exploring at others. We eventually made our way up to where the Appalachian Trail intersects the park and hiked a short section of the trail up to Table Rock. And though the segment itself was short (1.4mi/2.1km), it entailed a vertical rise of about 900ft/270m. My quads are still a bit sore, but the view at the top was definitely worth it.



We decided to do our last photo shoot of the day there, but by then Greg was getting a little punchy (the altitude, perhaps? or maybe just the excitement of a well-crafted alpaca sweater) and the photos got, well, interesting. It's not entirely clear, but there's a little nipple play going on in this photo.



We hadn't intended it to be that kind of photo shoot, but I suppose if it sells sweaters....

And on that note, we made our way back down the mountain and back down the road to Bethel, where we had an excellent meal and some equally excellent beer at Sunday River Brewing Company (thanks to Kit for the suggestion), then made the nearly 3 hour trip back home.

Yesterday was much more relaxed and close to home, with an outing to take a few more pics and let Greg get the obligatory lobster dinner, followed by blueberry-apple pie and silly movies. After a little more driving around the area today, we put him on the bus back to the airport, and he is hopefully having a very uneventful trip home.

Yummy, Yummy Naan

I love, love, love naan, which is really the quintessential Indian flatbread. Of course, there are others - chapatis, pappadam, etc. - but when most people (here in the US, anyway) think of Indian breads, naan is the one that comes to mind most often. I mostly follow the recipe from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian cookbook, with very slight variation, and have been very pleased with the results.

• 4-5 cups unbleached all-purpose white flour, plus some for dusting
  
• 1½ teaspoons baking powder
  
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
  
• ½ teaspoon salt
  
• 1½ teaspoons sugar
  
• 1¼ cup plain yogurt (note: If you are cooking for vegetarians, please check the label. Some yogurts use gelatin and so are not vegetarian. Even kosher gelatin is usually non-veg, despite misconceptions to the contrary.)
  
• 1 egg
  
• butter ghee, and plenty of it
  

First sift together 4 or so cups of flour with the baking powder, baking soda and salt. Then mix the sugar and yogurt in a large bowl. This can be done with a mixer, but I prefer to use a wooden mixing spoon. Slowly begin beating in about two cups of the flour mix a little bit at a time. It is essential for proper texture to beat this very well, as it encourages the gluten molecules to crosslink. I generally add in roughly ½ cup at a time, stir until mixed, and then beat the batter 100 strokes with the spoon for each addition.

By the time you have beaten in 2 cups of the flour mix, the resulting batter should be smooth but have some obvious resiliency from the activation of the gluten. At this point, mix in the egg and 1 tablespoon of melted ghee, then continue adding in the flour mix in increments until the dough is sticky and getting too thick to stir readily. Then you should turn it out onto a board or countertop with the remainder of the flour mix plus any additional flour needed to keep the dough from sticking. Grease up your hands well with the ghee and knead it briefly until the dough can be shaped into a ball readily. It should at this point still be a bit sticky.

Making sure your hands are still well-greased, divide the dough ball into 8 or 9 smaller balls and place them on a well-floured tray. Flatten them slightly with your hand and cover with plastic wrap or parchment paper. Allow the dough to rest for at least 30 minutes - or refrigerate for up to 48 hours - as this will give the gluten molecules more time to crosslink.

Turn on or light your broiler. If this is in the main oven compartment, then the rack should be set all the way at the top. The original recipe calls for the initial cooking to be done on stovetop with a large cast-iron skillet, but I do it all under the broiler on a cookie sheet.

Take each of the dough balls and dip into flour. Then grease your hands well with ghee and begin to pat out and flatten the dough ball into an oblong shape. You want the dough to be quite flattened. If the gluten has been activated well, it shouldn't tear too readily. Daub both sides with a bit more ghee and slap the nan down onto the heated pan. Cook under the broiler for a minute or so, making sure after about 30 seconds that it is not sticking. Once it has started developing a few reddish-brown spots, flip it over and cook on the other side for another minute or so. Remove the finished naan from the broiler and daub on some more ghee and enjoy.

Happy 4th!

My Monday night at work was busy but manageable, and I'm so very happy to have the holiday off. I'm expecting farm visitors, which means I should be getting to bed early tonight. By which I mean maybe 2-ish. But first I wanted to share a few things.

First is this little invader, whom I found & hurriedly released before I left for work.



When I was letting him go on the back of the property, I heard what I think was most likely fox kits playing just around the hill and out of my line of sight. I released him by an old stone wall, though, so he's at least got a fighting chance. If you're really interested and look really closely, there is a bit of mouse poo visible in the photo, but it wasn't what I was shooting for (Speaking of which, if you have an aversion to that sort of photo, don't go here. And on another knitting blog, no less!).

And going even a touch further back, we got word Monday morning that one of David's girls had delivered a healthy grey boy cria. David already had a full slate, so I went over and took some pics and only just had a chance to get on his comp to upload one.



No name yet, but he's exactly one year younger than Juliette. He looks very rosy on the surface but he's pretty silvery underneath his tips, so we have yet to see what his final color will be.

I managed to get a touch of sleep this afternoon and got up to head over to Chicks with Sticks. Julie has promised not to rechristen it "Chicks & Dicks with Sticks" just because I'm representing the Y chromosome there, but today I wasn't even the only man. Not only that, The Sheep showed up! So it was extra special, but I still had to cut out a little bit early so that I could get home in time to throw together a salad before we headed down to watch the fireworks across the river in Portsmouth. It was a little chilly down on the water, but at least it kept it from being very buggy.

I'm sure there must be more to tell, but it's time for bed, and I'm sleepy. Next time I'll try to elaborate a bit more on Devanagari and how Firefox fouls it up (and why JoVE got question marks instead of the characters).

Okay, So Here's What Happened

I already mentioned that the first spring cria was born to one of the landladies' girls before I got up to head to work on Wednesday. After a fairly busy night at work, I got home Thursday and went out to take this photo.



I didn't stay out watching her long because I was tired and wanted to go to bed, but I had barely gotten back inside when David got a call from New Hampshire to let us know that his oldest girl, Melinka, had delivered just after being shorn. And since it was their rescheduled shearing day because the original date had been rained out and they were shorthanded and frantically trying to get as much as possible done before it started raining again, could we drive over and watch the baby? So, no bed for me. We hopped in the truck and headed to the farm, where amidst all the hubbub of shearing day we found this little one, still a bit damp.



She was doing well, but not showing much initiative to get up and nurse. We got her up to see if she'd figure it out on her own, but she didn't quite seem to get the idea. So David held Melinka while I got baby into the general vicinity. We weren't quite sure how Melinka would react, since she's a South American import who learned early on that the way to respond to human touch is to scream, spit and pee. She's a very experienced mom, though, and was very tolerant of my milking a bit of colostrum out to give baby a taste. Once the cria smelled the good stuff on my hand, it was like the proverbial lightbulb going on and she knew where she needed to go. Actually latching on to the teat, of course, was still a bit of a challenge, because legs this long



mean that baby has to tilt her neck at an angle that is difficult for wobbly front legs to maintain. Watching this whole learning process unfold never fails to amaze me. There's a reason it's called the "Miracle of Life".

Anyway, we sat and watched for most of the afternoon (and I suggested names that I knew would be flatly rejected - Mayflower! May Apple! Maypop! Mayfly! Maypole! Eulah May!) to make sure she had a pretty good handle on the whole nursing thing before finally making our way back home. I'm told I snored a little bit during the ride, but it wasn't more than a brief nap and by the time I finally went to bed that night I had, for all practical purposes, been up for about 36 hours. I slept pretty hard and got up 12 hours later to get ready for yet another night at work.

Enter the Firemen

Friday night was a busy one at the clinic. The summer season has definitely kicked into gear (not that it ever stopped being busy during what we still refer to as the "slow" season, but it's now even busier), and we were pretty much hopping from one case to the next all night without much of a lull at any time.

Because I work such long hours, I generally maintain some small food stores at the clinic, but I've recently depleted them and had grabbed some steel cut oats on my way out the door so that I would at least have something to eat. So during one too-brief lull, I took the opportunity to set some water to boiling to make a bit of porridge. I poured in the oats, set the stove to a simmer, and zipped back to stir it occasionally in between trying to get a few records written up. Then all of a sudden the fire alarms went off and everyone started yelling my name.

Really, it wasn't my fault. My porridge hadn't boiled over and was still simmering away at the nice slow pace I had planned. The problem was that there was a bit of residue on the glass cooktop that hadn't been readily apparent and that had started smoking just the tiniest bit (the questionable wisdom of installing just such a cooktop with a group that is so domestically challenged is a frequent rant of mine at work, but we'll just leave that aside for now). That it smelled of burning steak was pretty strong evidence that it had nothing to do with me, especially since we have a receptionist who pretty much lives on steak and milk. It didn't matter, though. The fire department had already been notified by the alarm company and were on their way. Fortunately, I had another case waiting to be seen by then and had a good excuse to duck into an exam room.

KnitNZu commented, "Hope you at least got to play with the fire hoses", and I had to laugh. While there are doubtless any number of films aimed at my demographic on this very topic (well, more or less), I can honestly say that I did not even so much as see their hoses, let alone play with them.

Afterburn

The rest of the weekend has gone by very quickly, mostly because I've done nothing but work and sleep. I ended up working a couple hours past my shift on Saturday trying to get all the loose ends tied up. By the time I came home, all I could do was crawl into bed and sleep. I woke up for about 4 hours and David & I had dinner and watched Fried Green Tomatoes, which he hadn't remembered seeing before but then decided he had. Then it was back to bed so I could get up for my new Sunday daytime shift.

As Sundays go, it wasn't too bad. The caseload was steady all day - busy but not terribly overwhelming. In the last couple hours of my shift, though, I had two pretty sick cases that needed a fair bit of work - one of which was particularly frustrating - so it took me a couple of extra hours to deal with those and get all my other paperwork done so I could head home. At least tomorrow will be a day off that I won't have to spend catching up on sleep, but it'll be the last one for another week.

Two By Two

Today was quite a day for things in pairs. First off, it was David's birthday, which means it was also Landlady Paula's birthday. They are exactly twenty years apart in age, and next year will be their 100th birthday. We are in the pre-planning stages for that one, but for today we decided to celebrate by, what else, doing a couple of alpaca castrations!

Here are the victims patients pre-surgery, Spirit on the left and Otis on the right. I cropped out Paula & Wendy because Paula didn't want to be seen in her mucking-about-the-farm attire, but they're both smiling, perhaps a bit too gleefully.



Some good drugs, and then it was just a little incision, a clamp



a tie, and a cut,



and repeat,



followed by a few sutures. David intrepidly managed to take photos for the first one, but decided that was enough for him. Otis's surgery was much the same, though, and at the end we were left with what the folks across the Pond might refer to as a "bloody, bollocky mess".



Literally.

Nonetheless, within a very short period, both boys were up and about and none little the worse for wear.



Lest you think that was all our excitement, afterwards I put on some nicer clothes and took David out for pizza (his request) at a restaurant we hadn't been to before but were told has the best pizza around. I'm not certain about that claim, but it was decent, at any rate. After dinner, we came home and had some fudge that I made up last night from a mix - I was dubious, but it was a gift we'd had for a while - but with extra cocoa and walnuts added. We also watched Helen Mirren as The Queen, and I finished up these for Dulaan:

Toddler socks in Cleckheaton Country 8 ply, Sherman short row toe up pattern, 3.25mm (US3) dpn's

So, to recap - two birthdays, two alpaca castrations, two balls each, two small pizzas, and two socks ready to go. There was only one thing today that didn't fit into the pattern of twos. While we were watching the movie, there was a little bit of a ruckus downstairs, which I assumed was Tolo getting into some sort of trouble (as he does). After the movie, David started down the stairs and I heard him exclaim, "OH! MY! GOD!"

It turns out our little troublemaker was earning his keep.



He was quite proud of himself, but he was having fun playing and wasn't being too quick about dispatching the poor thing, although it was barely moving by then. So I gave him some praise and told him what a good little hunter he was, then took the mouse away and (after David had gone upstairs so he wouldn't have to watch) euthanized it to spare it a lingering demise.

I'm still proud of my little man, though.

A Quickie

Not much battery power left on the laptop at the moment, so this'll be quick. I managed to get in a little nap at work and got out to see Juliette & Madelyn for a bit. Juliette's first show is coming up in a few weeks and I'm planning on putting her on the sales list (not easy, I'll admit, but I did do this as an investment). She's lovely, as always.



And I blame Elemmaciltur for this one.





Find your Celestial Choir

I also owe Scout some tattoo photos for her tattoo meme, but I don't think the laptop will stay up and running long enough for that tonight.