Saturday 10 January 2009

Wrong Decisions

David and Jane and the grandchildren came down on Thursday evening and David and I cut the herd toe nails yesterday. It was quite surprising the different rates of growth between them. They are always cut at the same time but the whites seem to have fast growing nails, the blacks make the most fuss and my favourite brown girls and boys just take it in their stride. They are also due for vitamin D injections but I am hoping that David and Jane will do that tomorrow when they call in to collect their dog and leave the children. Jane goes back to work a day earlier than they go back to school so they are staying with us. I shall be busy collecting Mike from the hospital.

He is looking forward to coming home and is now only taking paracetamol for the pain and is rejecting the morphine.

I had decided to go to the South West Alpaca Group meeting this morning, but was also invited to join family and friends for lunch at the Mason Arms at Branscombe. I could not decide what to do but as I strongly believe that you cannot complain about things if you don't get involved, so I thought it would be a good idea to go to the SWAG meeting and sneak out early.

I got that one wrong because the early part of the meeting which was about the follow ups from last year's AGM took quite a long time. I had planned to leave at 12 noon but as we were in seats near the front I thought it would be a bit rude to walk out during a debate and had to wait for a suitable break in the proceedings. This meant that I left later than planned and arrived at the Mason Arms when everyone had finished lunch and were about to resume their country walk. So I got the worst of both worlds. Still, it beats work!

I have mixed feelings about SWAG. I have never before been in an industry where proprietors of individual businesses have little get togethers with their competitors. The main good thing that they do is organise the shows which raise the profile of alpaca breeding, but I am not sure of what other useful function they serve. I very much agreed with Lynsey Skinner of Dreamfield Alpacas when she said that alpaca breeders tend to keep things close to their own chests rather than sharing information. Possibly a group like this does promote a little more communication about health and welfare issues.

When I got home I caught up on a few things and before I realised it, there was hardly any daylight left so I ended up putting the hay and feed out by the headlights of the quad bike. Oh and you would have laughed. I even laughed myself after i stopped cursing.

I have been driving up and down the A303 visiting Mike at Shepton Mallet and the Nissan was covered in salt from the road gritting. I checked the hosepipe and it had finally defrosted after being frozen up for about a week and so decided to give it a quick wash off to try and save too much damage. Mike brought a new long handled brush to go on the end so that you can reach the roof and put a bit of muscle behind the cleaning. Whilst gaily washing away the brush decided to detach itself fom the hose and I got a faceful of freezing cold water. My hair was soaked too. Luckily my clothes hardly got wet at all so I did not get too cold and miserable.

Happy days!!

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