Hi There Hammy

In honor of the 2010 Winter Paralympics which starts tomorrow… good luck Tyler!

Joe, Emma, John, Bennet, Kate and I went over to Bonnieview to shear some sheep this morning. None of us had ever sheared sheep, and some hadn’t even wrangled them so it was a bit of an adventure. Neil had already gotten a few done and was in the middle of another when we got there. At the end of the day we’d probably sheared around twenty sheep and while we sorted through the good, the bad and the ugly in terms of wool, we got to pick out what we wanted to take with us. Joe and I wound up with two big black garbage bags: one full of white fleece and the other full of black.

A fairly biblical shot of one of the newly naked…

Bennet, shearing his first very pregnant ewe.

Kate holding so much garbage fleece that it looked like an intact sheep!

Emma and Joe, getting two done at once. Emma got really quite good at shearing them by the end of our time at Bonnieview. The whole process was fun to watch and made the whole afternoon fly by. Next? Lambing… oh man, lambing!

It’s been too sunny and warm the last couple of days to not take Linus out in the snow to play! He was out for a good long romp and now he’s busy drying off his incredibly muddy paws.

Meanwhile, happening elsewhere… I finished knitting a second New Aviatrix hat for Aunt Carol! I just popped it in the mail this afternoon.

My cousin, Tyler Walker, will be skiing in the Paralympics next month in Vancouver. A German Film company just released a really great short feature about Tyler in preparation for the upcoming events.

Yesterday, I rather hastily and unskillfully gave Linus a new haircut. He turned out to be about 1/3 the size of his normal self and much busier without all of that hair getting in the way.

Tyler got the gold medal in Mono Skier X at the  Winter X Games for the third time! Go Tyler! Next up… the Paralympics.

Joe and I walked down to the farm to off-load our compost bin into a large, more impressive compost barn and since it was such a pretty day I decided to take a picture of the animals that are still down there. First up: horses. 

These are the two new Belgian mares: Brandy and Lady (in some order, I can’t remember which is which).

And here are Rex (white) and Lincoln (brown). I caught them this morning on my way to the post office.

And then again later when we went to the farm.Silly faces…

And here is Bronze, one of the oxen brothers. Chrome is chilaxing just out of sight behind Bronze’s rather large rumpus.

The three lady pigs, resting in hay divots. They actually have perfect pig-shaped impressions about 1-2 feet deep in the straw that they’re crammed into. When they got up to snuffle about and see if I had any food, you could see perfect outlines of where their legs and snouts rest a good foot into the straw.

And here’s Peanut, the pregnant milk cow. She was a calf last spring and now she’s ready to start the whole cycle all over again.

And of course, none of my farm visits is complete without a peek into the hen room to see if there are any warm eggs to cup in my hands. Lay hennies lay!

Here’s a wee bit of a peek into what the reminders/posters/such things will look like in the dorms this next semester. Much better than the bare-bones stuff…

Well, this is a combination of today and yesterday. Today I baked some bread, did some papier mache and doodled about a little bit. Yesterday I made a craft organizer, a pot holder, and a dish towel. Domestic, eh? I got the idea for an organizer an all those other fabric bits from a book Ashley gave me called Simple Sewing by Lotta Jansdotter.

New bread and a new pot holder. The bread is from my absolute favorite bread recipe from Bread & Honey.

Go ahead, ask me what Linus does all day.

And here’s that sweet organizer I was talking about earlier. And here’s the craft space over all. Ta dah!