So Many New Projects!

Have you seen?  I've been a very, very busy girl lately, with several big projects to help promote the farm.

First, I finally finished doing a total redesign of the farm's web site.  Not only does it have a whole new look, it also has more than twice as much information about (and pretty pictures of) the farm.  The address is still the same:  http://inglesideicelandics.com/.

The redesign took me forever, and I'm very pleased with the results.  I think it gives a much fuller picture of who we are, what we're doing, and where we hope to go from here.

Second, I've launched a project with Kickstarter.com to raise funds to get the equipment and supplies necessary to start making all of my luscious sheep's milk soap right here on the farm instead of hiring an outside crafter to make it for me.  I'm pretty excited about this, especially since the soaps have become our most popular product.  I just shipped my first order of soaps to Japan, where the charming buyer pronounced them "very splendid."  Isn't that sweet?

I've also been working on increasing our fan base on the farm's Facebook page.  I'm so honored that more than 900 people count themselves among our fans already!  I have so much fun interacting with the people there and sharing bits of daily life from the farm .

To celebrate all these projects, and express my appreciation for all the fans and customers who help make it all possible, I've decided to do not one, not two, but THREE big giveaways.

To keep the entries for the giveaways separate, I'm going to give details of them in three separate blog posts, coming right up:

Free Icelandic Fleece Giveaway
Free Handspun Wool Scarf Giveaway
Free Sheep's Milk Soap Giveaway

Five Years With Sheep

How time flies!  It was five years ago today that I got my very first sheep, three bred Icelandic ewe lambs that I named Pandora, Portia, and Phoebe.

Three more bred ewe lambs from a different farm arrived a week later, and my flock was on its way.  Today I maintain a flock of about 35-50 adult sheep at any given time, and we're only a couple of weeks away from our 5th lambing season.

I can't believe it's been five years already.  I've learned so much along the way, but there's always more to learn.  Of course, things haven't always gone exactly as planned, but even so all I can say is, I am so happy that I got these sheep.  They are a blessing and a delight, every day.

In honor of my original three girls, today I've released a selection of cards, magnets, mugs, journals, shirts, and other cool gifts in my CafePress shop, featuring the photo above.

I have a lot of other designs on there too, featuring all my favorite photos of the sheep, the horses, the farm, and our glorious sunsets.  So check it out!

We're Featured On A Blog!

Hey look! An interview with me about my farm and my art is featured on the Late Night Design blog this week!

Did You Miss Me?

Hi everybody! Is anyone out there still reading this? I can't believe it's been more than 2 months since I last posted. I imagine most of my faithful readers have give up on me by now!

But, despite it being a busy, busy summer, I'm still here, the farm's still here. Our finances still aren't much improved, but we're still struggling along, so I have hopes we'll get to a less anxiety-producing state eventually. If we can just hang in there for another year or two, I have hopes that thing will get better.

Anyway, I've been saving up lots of news and happenings to post about, but rather than trying to write one big long post with everything crammed in, I think I'll try to break them up into a bunch of smaller posts, divided by topic.

See you in the next post!

One Year

I just realized: This blog is one year old now!

Looking back, I can't believe all the stuff that has happened in just one short year. It was a very difficult time, perhaps the hardest year of my life so far, but we hung in there, and I learned so much. So now it's time to look back on some of my accomplishments:

• I learned how to write a blog. And though my readership numbers are not huge, the blog has had visitors from at least 49 states and 65 countries, on every continent except Antartica!
• I sold 11 horses, more than 30 sheep, dozens of fleeces, plus a few sheep pelts, skulls, and horns.
• I learned how to sell on Ebay, and made several thousand dollars selling some of my valuables to help us buy hay for the animals.
• I learned how to negotiate trades (sheep for horses, horses for sheep, horses for services, sheep for services) and how to negotiate sales (deposits, payment plans, shipping arrangements, what extras are or are not included in the sale price). I even negotiated an excellent situation with free board and professional training for my stallion, in exchange for free breedings to him.
• I gained a lot more experience working with young horses of widely varying personality types.
• I helped and/or watched the delivery of dozens of lambs.
• I learned a lot of new things about veterinary care of livestock and pets (wounds, sicknesses, birthing challenges, broken legs, poisonous snake bites, maggots, parasite control).
• I got my first 3 paying jobs designing websites for people.
• I got a year older (could be worse), got through another year of marriage (still going strong), got a year closer to having our credit cards paid off (whoo-hoo!), and got another year closer to having our sheep flock reach its "certified Scrapie free" status (not a huge deal, but nice).
• I made a lot of tough decisions, faced worry, heartbreak, fear, indecision, disappointment, and anger... and still retained some semblance of sanity and humor (most days!).

So, what's ahead for the year to come?

• I want to keep learning and improving the farm, of course.
• I want to keep working on getting our finances back under control after the financial disaster that the horse situation has caused.
• All the stress of the past year or two led me to eat for emotional reasons, and I gained a lot of weight, which has made me feel unhealthy and tired. I want to get slim and fit again. I have a plan to lose 1 lb. per week for the next year. I started in late June, and have lost 7 lbs so far without "dieting" or exercising more---just by making more conscious food choices. I don't expect that all the coming weeks of weight loss will be as easy as these past few, but that's okay, I'm tired of being tired and heavy. I'm ready to be "the real me" again.

Lightning and Lightning Bugs

Back on June 16th, I took a video of a lightning storm playing over our big pasture. If you look closely, you can see lightning bugs rising up out of the grass at the same time. It was beautiful.

Here are a couple of still clips from the video:

I'm Still Here

I want to thank everybody who has been inquiring about where I've been and what's happened to all my blog posts. I'm still here, just very busy around the farm lately.

Besides the usual daily farm chores, I'm still trying to sell the last few sales horses before they eat us out of house and home. Many of the sheep on my sheep sales list are already spoken for, but I've been trying to get the others sold as well.

I've been trying to fit in a little spare time to put a little training on the two Art Deco fillies I'm keeping, and I gotta say, they are not easy! They are so hair-trigger, they take about 50 times as many repetitions of a lesson before they settle into it as my other horses have. For example, I was thrilled yesterday that when Grace managed to scrape her halter off in the paddock, she let me put it back on her without making very much of a fuss. This is only the second time I've been able to do that without investing a serious amount of time on the lesson. So at least she's making progress!

Glory is also making progress. I've been doing mostly desensitizing training on her, because she's so suspicious and spooky. The first time I waved a flapping raincoat (one of my usual desensitizing tools) in her paddock, it took more than 3 hours before she would settle down and reluctantly let me bring it near her. Now, she'll still spook at first, but then she remembers she's supposed to stand still, and she'll let me flop it against her (although her skin still flinches every time).

We had a professional shearer come and shear the sheep, which is a first for us. Usually we struggle along and try to do it ourselves, but it kills my back and takes a really long time. The professional shearer did an excellent job, and finished the whole flock in just a few hours.

The sheep have mostly been doing pretty well. The summer is always the most difficult time for them, because of the heat and the parasites. Once they were sheared, I could see that a lot of them were thinner than I would like them to be. Our pastures are not very good, so we've been supplementing the sheep's protein levels with protein blocks and hefty doses of pelleted sheep feed every day.

At this point, the bossier sheep (the rams and the larger, older ewes) are starting to get fat. I'm just waiting for my vaccine order to arrive so that I can do the annual shots for the flock, then after that, I'll be weaning the lambs.

I don't normally wean my lambs, I usually let them self wean. But this year, a lot of my buyers are ready to take their new sheep as early as July, so the babies will need to be weaned first. This will be good anyhow, since once I separate the lambs from the fat, bossy sheep, I'll be able to cut down on the feed for the adults, while still continuing to give the youngsters lots of nutrient-rich food to keep them growing well even through the hottest part of the summer, which will soon be upon us.

It's been helping a lot so far, I think. There are still a few lambs who are on the smallish side, comparatively---mostly the twins by the smaller, first-time moms---but the majority are much larger than usual. I've had occasion to pick a few of them up, and there are several that are well over 50 lbs. now, at only 2.5 months old. Compare this to a group of sheep I bought a few years ago, where the smallest was only 35 lbs. in September!

Since breeding season is still 4 months away, these lambs have tons of time left to keep growing before that. The larger and more mature the lambs are at the time, the more likely they are to have a good first breeding season. So, things are looking good so far.

I'm trying to sell off all the polled sheep and keep just the horned ones, which I happen to like better. I had two buyers who between them were planning to pretty much buy up all the adult polled sheep I have. But one sale fell through when the buyer had a financial crisis and the other buyer changed her mind and decided to buy horned sheep instead.

So, now I am almost completely sold out of all the horned sheep on my sales list, and still have the entire group of polled available. I was hoping that adding polled to the flock would expand my customer base, but apparently not. So, if I have to keep them through another breeding season and lambing, I will. They are very nice quality sheep, after all. But they'll stay on the sales list until someone decides to buy them.

The polled ewe lambs are all spoken for now, not because they've been sold, but because David, who is the person I traded my beloved mares Char and Scylla to in exchange for the group of polled sheep, has decided that he can't keep them after all. So I'm trading the ewe lambs back to him, plus Scylla's foal, to get Char and Scylla back.

If you remember how depressed I was about having to sell (trade) those mares in the first place, you would think that trading back would be great news. But we simply don't have the money to bring the mares back here. We can barely afford to feed the animals we have, that's why we got rid of the mares in the first place. So I'm trying to work out a way that the mares can go to my sister Donna's farm. Donna is also taking Char's foal, who will be her new stud to breed to her mares.

The difficulty is that David's farm and Donna's farm are very far apart, so shipping is going to be expensive. And I have to bring the ewe lambs to the Michigan Fiber Festival to meet David, so he can take them back to his farm, which will be another very long trip for me.

So, while I am committed to not losing Char (my favorite of all my horses) again, this turn of events is rather complicating my summer plans.

In other news... I've been trying to tackle a major cleanup and reorganization of our house. Because when we moved here, we knew that every room in the place was going to eventually need renovating, we didn't at first try to set them up the way we really wanted them. In time, several of the rooms ended up turning into big, messy storage areas for all the renovation supplies and all the belongings that we didn't have a final place for yet.

But since it seems that we are not going to have any money for continued renovation any time soon, we've been getting tired of having all those rooms be messy and unusable. So I've been struggling along doing a deep-level cleanup, pulling everything out of every closet and room, throwing away all the junk that is no longer relevant, and reorganizing how and where all the rest of the stuff is stored. It's a time-consuming job, and definitely makes the house look worse before it looks better, but when it's done, it will make the house a lot more livable until we can finally start renovating again.

Anyway, there's been more stuff going on in the past month when I haven't been writing blog posts, but that's the gist of it.

I appreciate all the people who contacted me to tell me they missed my posts and to ask if I was doing okay. I'll try to make time to post more frequently again. I appreciate all your comments and support!

It's the Pits

I picked more cherries yesterday---almost 7 quarts so far, and perhaps that many more on the parts of the tree that I can still reach (while standing on a small stepladder placed in the back of our pickup truck, that is!).

What I didn't realize was how long it would take to pit all those cherries! They are small, about the size of cranberries, so there are a lot of cherries---and a lot of pits---in 7 quarts. Lucky for me, Ken pitched in and helped. We spent several hours pitting cherries and watching tv last night. The results all went into the freezer.

I plan to pick the rest of the cherries that are in reach this afternoon, so I guess we'll have another evening of pitting tonight.

But for cherries that taste this good, it's worth it to preserve as many of them as possible.

Defending Our Cherries

One of the nice surprises we discovered after we bought this farm is the cherry tree in the back yard. I'd never seen a cherry tree before, so I didn't identify it for the longest time. It's clumped in amongst the lilac bushes, so at first I just assumed it was some kind of ornamental shrub. Even after it formed fruit the first year, I ignored it, thinking it was some kind of crabapple, and not worth harvesting.

The following year, on a whim, I tasted one of the "crabapples" and figured out what we had. Yummy delicious cherries, free in our back yard! But things were busy and I was going out of town, so I didn't harvest any.

Last year, I had good intentions to harvest some. I checked the tree regularly, waiting for the day when they would be ripe. The day I thought they would be just about perfect, our neighborhood crows got up several hours earlier than I did, and stripped the tree bare before I could get a single one!

This year, we have a bumper crop, just starting to turn red. The crows and other birds have already been checking them, but they're not quite ripe yet. We don't have much time left to stake our claim to our share of the treasure.

So Ken went to the local farm store and got some bird netting. The tree is large and the majority of the cherries will be well out of our reach, so the birds are welcome to them. But we draped the netting all around on the part of the tree that we can reach, hoping that will protect at least a little of the crop for us.

I tasted one of the not-quite-ripe fruits today. It's still very tart, but wow, what a flavor. I'll have to decide what to do with the cherries I pick. Eat them fresh? Make a pie? Freeze them? Dry them? Make a cherry cordial? I'm a whiz at making home-made cordials---I've taught workshops on it, and have developed dozens of recipes.

I guess what I do with them will depend on how many we get. I'm just looking forward to getting SOME, for a change.

Lamb-A-Rama

My sister Donna informed me that now Lamb-A-Palooza is over, I need to have Lamb-A-Rama, which is when I show off all the new lambs that arrived during Lamb-A-Palooza.

So, without further ado, here are some photos.

The lambs and moms are learning how to manage grazing in the field without losing each other. For some, this is an easy task. For others, it takes several days of trial and error.

Here's Phoebe with her twins, Ursus and Ursula.
Phoebe is a very caring mother, but she can't count. Sometimes she has one white lamb following her.
Sometimes she has as many as five! As long as she has at least one at her side, and as long as all the lambs following her are white, she figures that's close enough. After all, with this many white lambs running around, who can keep track?
Here's Peri, with her white twins, Ulric and Ulrica. I was worried that Peri would have a hard time being a mom this year, because one of her ankles was destroyed by a rattlesnake bite last summer, so she has to hop on 3 legs. But so far, she's doing fine.

Ulrica stays close to her mom.

But Ulric is apt to wander off and get lost. He usually ends up being the 3rd lamb following Phoebe instead.

Here's Moriah, very proud and protective of her surprise spotted ewe lamb, Ulani:

Pandora's white ewe lamb, Utopia, looks like she may end up being as large and well-built as her mom.
Halsa's black mouflon spotted ewe lamb, Udara, has so much white covering her mouflon markings that it was tricky deciphering her genetics to figure out what her real color was.

Poppy's babies are Ulyssia:

And Ulysses:
Una continues to be as cute and stout as can be.
Dainty little Unity frisks around:
One of our cats, Oliver Sudden, stops by for a drink:


Tonight is the first night I'm leaving the pasture gate open so the ewes and lambs can stay out there after dark if they want to. The temperature was in the mid-80s (F) today, so the hot sunny pasture wasn't as enjoyable to them during the daylight hours.

My rams are a bit thinner than I'd like them to be, since all the ewes have been getting the majority of the attention lately. So to give them a treat, I opened the ram pen gate and let them out onto the lawn to graze on the new grass. They are pretty happy about that!

The lilacs and cherry trees are in full bloom here, so the air is filled with sweet perfume. And at sunset, the sky put on one of its fiery displays that we are so privileged to enjoy:

Signs of Spring

It has been a late spring, with record amounts of snow in many parts of the country. My sister's farm in Maine is still buried in snow, and lots of other friends who live in Northern states are still coping with the white stuff too.

So I thought I'd take a few minutes this afternoon to celebrate and share all the spring wonderfulness here on my farm.

Take a deep breath, and say, "AHHHHH, Spring!"




And, of course, the best part of spring, new lambs!

This is Umber, who was born this morning. See all his fancy flashing spots on his face?

A Bird's Eye View

The ewes are still holding off on lambing. I now have 7 ewes plus yesterday's lamb squeezed into a lambing area that was originally intended to house only 3-4. I set up two extra makeshift lambing pens in there, and I've still had to double up the occupancy in a couple of pens.

These girls better hurry up, because I have about 4 more ewes that are supposed to be due this weekend. They can't ALL fit in there at once!

While we're waiting for new lambs to be born, here's something fun to look at. My husband was playing around on Google Maps yesterday and put in a marker for where our farm is. So now, if you go to Google Maps and search for Ingleside Farm, Buckingham, VA, you can find a map to our house. If you zoom in, and click on the option for "satellite" image, you can see a bird's eye view of our farm.

Pretty neat!

A Pear Year

In our back pasture, we have a very old pear tree. It would take two people to reach around its trunk, and it's much taller than our two-story house. Middle-aged neighbors who grew up in the area remember having pears from it when they were small children.

As far as we have seen since we've lived here, it only produces fruit every other year. On the no-pear years, it doesn't even produce a blossom.

Last year would have been a pear year, but between the horses damaging the tree by chewing on its bark, and a late frost killing all the blossoms, not a single fruit survived. So we settled in to wait another two years before having pears again.

But the tree had other ideas. This is what it looks like this morning:



So, if we don't have any more hard frosts, it looks like we'll have pears again this year. They're not the best pears ever---the taste is okay, but the texture is mealy and very hard. Which is probably a good thing, since all the fruit-bearing branches are so high out of reach that we don't even bother to try to pick them, we just wait for the wind to blow them down.

Still, they are free, and will probably be quite abundant. Our previous pear year, we could have filled the back of our pickup truck to the brim with pears, if we'd wanted to.

Last time, we just fed all of the hard, mealy fruit to the livestock. But it would be nice to find a way to use some for ourselves.

So, if anybody has any ideas or recipes for using rock-hard pears, let me know!

More Gremlins

Well, the gremlins have infested the dishwasher now. I loaded up the dishwasher tonight, started it going, and when I left the room it was working just fine. When I came back a few minutes later, it was dead. I thought it had tripped a circuit, but Ken checked the circuit box, and everything there was fine.

The dishwasher did this once before more than a year ago. Just stopped working. At the time, we went to the store and started reluctantly thinking about spending the money to get a new one. And then, all of a sudden, it started working again, without us doing anything to it, and has worked perfectly ever since. Until now.

The bizarre thing is, this is exactly what our pickup truck does, too. It will work fine for months, then one day it simply won't work. Sometimes, if we do nothing to it for a while (10 minutes, 3 days, the time varies), it will just start working again. When it starts working again on its own, that seems to last just as long as if we actually take it to the shop to be fixed.

It's very frustrating. If we knew what was wrong, we'd fix it. But our mechanic doesn't seem to be able to get those gremlins out of there! :-)

Cursed? Or Just Cursing? Quirky Thoughts About Finding Hope During Times of Trial

The way my life has been going lately, it's easy to see how people in ancient times could believe in things like curses and evil spirits tormenting them and causing their bad luck.

What do I mean by that?

Well, let's put it this way: There are many, many things in my daily life that work perfectly, day after day, and never give a moment's problem. The 13-year-old television still works. The toaster oven always toasts. The microwave, despite being 12 years old, always microwaves. So it's not as if EVERYTHING in the world breaks down all the time.

But what is the most important focus of my life right now? My farm. And what are the most important, absolutely crucial tools I need to use on a daily basis to keep this place running and try to earn enough money to not go bankrupt? (1) A digital camera, (2) a pickup truck, (3) a cell phone, (4)a computer, (5) a home phone and internet connection, and (6) email.

EVERY SINGLE ONE of these items that I own is currently broken, malfunctioning, or has done so in the past few months. It's enough to make me tear out my hair!

(1) I already complained about my digital camera yesterday, so I won't go into that again.

(2) My pickup truck has a mysterious ailment that we've tried to have repaired a dozen times, but nothing ever works in the long run. So now it sits, unable to start, leaving us unable to haul hay or building supplies for farm improvements. When we get a little more cash on hand, we'll try again to have it repaired, but I've lost confidence that anything will ever truly fix the problem.

(3) My cell phone has been almost worthless for 6 months now. That one is partly my fault. I accidentally dropped it in the horse water trough, and then forgot it in my jeans pocket and ran it through the washing machine. Of course it died! We spent $130 to buy a new one. A week later, I was out training a horse, it started to rain, and before I could get back to the house, the brand new cell phone in my pocket again got wet and again died. Only the power button and the speed dial buttons still work, so I can't receive calls or check messages, and the only calls I can make are to people who were already programmed into my speed dial (Ken and my sister). We haven't been able to afford another $130 for a new phone, much less one of the more expensive waterproof ones that I clearly need! So we're waiting another couple of months until our phone plan qualifies me to get a new phone for the cheaper "sign up" rates.

(4) My computer died a few months ago. My husband fixed it, but it broke again shortly thereafter. After weeks of it being out of service, Ken finally got it fixed again. By that time, I'd gotten all my work transferred to Ken's computer, which I'm still using, while Ken uses his laptop in the living room. Someday I'm going to have to do the complicated task of organizing all my files and transferring them all BACK to my computer, but my office is FREEZING in the winter, so for now I'm using Ken's office for as long as he lets me, even though it's inconvenient.

(5) Our home phone and internet connection has been okay lately, but several months ago, it got broken three times in a row. Why? Because out of the whole 26 acre farm that the sheep could be roaming around on, one of them decided that the very best place to stand every day was in the 3 feet of space right up next to the house near where the phone and DSL wires attach. Although these wires are stapled to the side of the building with very little slack, three times, the sheep managed to insert his horns under the wires and rip them down. Try explaining that to the phone company repair person! We've since put up a barrier to keep the sheep away from the spot, and Ken has figured out how to fix the wires himself if it becomes necessary again.

(6) Lately, I've been having sporadic, but serious, email problems. Everything looks fine on my end, but as time goes on, I find out from more and more people that some of my messages are never getting through to them. Many are getting shunted to the people's spam folders (even though I am on that person's "accepted" list), and many are just never showing up at all in ANY folder.

So I send long, detailed answers to people inquiring about horses for sale, only to find out a week later that they never received them. I have people inquiring about fleeces and other sheep products that complain I never answered their emails, when in fact I had never received any messages from them.

It's very frustrating and makes me really paranoid. If I answer a horse buyer inquiry and they don't respond, have they changed their mind and decided they're no longer interested? Or did they never get my answer? Or did they send me a reply that I never got? The wondering is driving me nuts!!!

So anyway, back to what I was saying about ancient cultures believing in curses and evil spirits:

Clearly, we all have hardships in our lives. And for some reason, those hardships and difficulties always seem to hit the aspects of our lives that are the most important to us, the things we focus the majority of our attention on.

To an ancient mind, uneducated by modern scientific thought, and unsullied by modern cynicism, would that not suggest some kind of malevolent intelligence, seeking the most effective way to cause harm?

And, in some roundabout way, might that not actually be a comforting thing to believe?

What I mean is, if all these difficulties are simply "The Way Things Are," then our only choice is to accept that life is hard and bad things happen when you can least afford trouble. There is no hope for relief from the troubles because that's just "The Way Things Are." It's depressing!

On the other hand, if instead you believe that malevolent pixies have infested your home and are tormenting you on purpose, then at least you have the entertainment of wondering what invisible pixies might look like, what their motivations might be, and how you might appease them.

In Ireland, farm wives used to leave out saucers of milk, honey, or whiskey on their doorsteps to feed the Fairy Folk, to keep on their good side and avoid being cursed or having mischievous tricks played on them.

Regardless of whether the pixies are real, just by wondering about them, you've engaged your imagination and had a brief respite from the drudgery of trying to overcome your latest batch of problems! Not only that, you can also indulge in the hope that if only you find the right way to appease the mischievous sprites, life could be easy and good again.

And that's the crux of the matter: When times are at their very hardest, sometimes the ONLY thing that you need to help you survive is the hope that things will eventually get better.

Here's another example:

A couple of weeks ago, when I was feeling very stricken and depressed about parting with my favorite horse, my sister sent me some homeopathic medicine intended to help cure grief and emotional upset. She said it had helped her, and she should know, since she's had plenty of cause for grief and upset in her life.

My husband, on the other hand, thinks that homeopathic medicine is a load of hooey. At the levels of dilution they claim, he says, there are not enough molecules in the bottle for even ONE molecule of the original medicine to still be in there. So how can it possibly work?

Me, I tend to stay open to both sides of the debate, and be willing to experiment to find what works for me, regardless of WHY or HOW it works. So I decided to try the homeopathic pills.

The directions said to take 4 tiny pills, 4 times a day until I felt better. My symptoms might intensify for a few days before they improved. I could take the pills for up to two weeks, if necessary.

Sure enough, for two days after I started taking the pills, I felt so sad that I would start crying at a moment's notice. I lost my appetite. I didn't want to do anything but lie down and sleep. But after another two days, I felt better. I was able to get on with my life.

Was it the pills? In a way, I think it was. But maybe not in the way you might think.

You see, regardless of what is IN those pills, they have another potent effect: They distract your mind briefly from your pain, and they give you hope that things will get better. Like I said before, sometimes that's all you need.

Four times a day, when I took those pills, my mind was able to stop dwelling on my sorrow long enough to think, "I wonder if these will work?" By the very act of wondering, my mind was admitting to the possibility that I would soon feel better. Which generates hope. Which, in itself, makes you feel better!

The directions warned that the feelings might intensify before improving. Letting my mind absorb that information gave me permission to mourn as much as I needed to, right away, rather than trying to hold it in. How better to heal from grief than to actually go through the mourning process?

Did the actual ingredients of the pills have any effect on my mood? I don't know. Do I feel better now than I did before I started taking them? Absolutely.

I'm a firm believer that there are many layers to how we interact with the world, both seen and unseen. Sometimes when things get really hard, if we're going to make it through, we have to find whatever methods we can that allow us tap into that undercurrent of hope that runs beneath it all.

I Hate My Camera!

When people look at my sheep website, horse website, and this farm blog, they often admire the photos and ask me what kind of camera I use.

So I'll tell you: I use a Canon Powershot G3. And I HATE it! The majority of nice photographs I get are IN SPITE OF the darn thing, not thanks to it.

The response time when you push the button to take a photo is just laughable. I have missed thousands of great shots because of this. It literally takes 3-4 seconds, sometimes before the stupid thing will actually take the shot. Which means that by the time it takes the photo, that beautiful horse I'm trying to photograph prancing towards me is already passed and gone to the other end of the field, and the only image I've captured is her distant rear end as she gallops away. It's so frustrating!

The other thing I hate about this camera is its complete inability to deal with anything other than super high light conditions. Even a moderately overcast day will cause all the photographs to come out blurry, even the still shots!

That's what happened to me today. I went out and took a whole bunch of photos of the horses playing in the field. Despite the slow camera response time, I managed to luck into catching quite a few really nice action shots. But today is overcast, so when I came back inside, fully 90% of the photos were completely blurry.

GRRRRR! What a waste of time and effort. I had also taken several shots of the sheep standing still in the yard, and more than half of them were blurry too. They were just standing there---it's not as if they were fast-moving targets. And it's not that dark out, just a high, bright overcast cloud cover. It's ridiculous that the camera can't focus properly in these conditions.

I'm not a technically advanced photographer. My needs are pretty basic: I don't want to mess around with special camera settings, I just want to be able to "point and shoot" and be able to trust the camera to get a decent basic shot. To me, the whole point of having an "Automatic" setting on the camera is that it is supposed to automatically adjust to the current conditions and still take a decent photo.

The vast majority of my farm income is derived from business that comes in over the internet. Which means that good photos are crucial to my business. I've managed to make do with this camera, because it's what we've had, but I would never buy one again.

When we bought this camera several years ago, we didn't really know what specific qualities we were looking for. But someday, when I can afford to buy a new one, I'm going to have a much more exacting list of what I need.

Coming Down With Something

All yesterday I wasn't feeling well. I rested all day, took some vitamins, and got a good night's sleep. This morning I felt a lot better, so I thought I'd shaken it off. But this evening I started feeling ill again.

I'm not sure what I have, or where I might have caught it, since I haven't been anywhere to be exposed to any germs. I'm unreasonably tired, and a little woozy. The gland in the right side of my throat is sore, and it's going into my ear now as well. My skin is starting to feel that hypersensitive feeling you get right before you get a fever, but I'm not feverish.

Ugh! As if I don't have enough to do, without being sick too. I try to always be careful to rest and recover as soon as I start showing symptoms, because if I don't, I'm very prone to having every cold or flu turn into a 3-week session of bronchitis. Let's hope that doesn't happen!

We got a small load of hay yesterday. Prices have gone up again, to $7.50 per small square bale. Our supplier says it'll go up to $8 soon, and may go up to $10 before this year's first cutting comes in.

On the bright side, I got birthday cards from family today, with money inside. Every little bit helps, so I'm very grateful.

There have also been a few new horse inquiries. So I hope a few of those turn into sales soon.

Our Old Country Store

In response to Kris's comment yesterday, saying she'd like to see photos of our store: Here you go! :-)

The only photos I have of it are from the day we came to look at the farm to see if we wanted to buy it, so a lot of things have changed on the property since then. But the store is still pretty much the same.

I'm not sure when the store was built, but I do know it was built by Charles Agee who, as far as I can tell from the records I have, bought the farm sometime around 1890. From the shape of the store, I guess that it was built in several stages: small first, then expanded several times as business grew.

The building also served as the local post office for the area known as Alcoma. I've been told by neighbors who have lived in this area all their lives that the store sold shoes, cloth, tools, seeds, and all manner of other things---a true old fashioned country store.

After Charles Agee died, his unmarried daughters continued to run the store. Miss Nora Agee continued to live here and run the store for the rest of her very long life. Every now and then, neighbors will still refer to this as "Miss Nora's place," which I think is sweet.

After Miss Nora died, the farm changed hands a couple more times. We bought it from an elderly gentleman who had been using the store as an antique shop. When he moved out, he left a lot of junk behind in the store. Unfortunately nothing really nice or valuable, though!

Here's the store as seen from the road. The tree has been cleared out from in front of it now, and---because the sheep are often loose in the yard, mowing our lawn for us---we now have a gate across our driveway, which runs right up past the right edge of the store.


Here's the store as seen from the house. All that green field you can see between the house and the store is now fenced horse pasture. That would be the area we're going to eventually reseed and add sheep paddocks to.


A few pictures of the interior of the store, complete with the junk the former owner left behind.




As you can see, the place will need a lot of fixing up. It'll need rewiring, repainting inside and out, floor repair, windows replaced, heat and air conditioning added, etc., etc. There is a little room in the back that is the perfect size and location to turn into a bathroom, but the store currently has no plumbing or septic system, so that would be another big expense.

Clearly, if we ever do decide to open the store again, we would have to plan for the long term and make the improvements gradually as we can afford them. Maybe it'll be my "retirement" job! Not that I ever plan to retire from farming until I'm too infirm to get around any more. But it's nice to have options.

Straw + Camel's Back = ???

Don't get me wrong: I'm really glad I traded the mares Char and Scylla for the new group of sheep. I think it was a true example of the best of bartering: two people offering the best of what they had in exchange for something they wanted or needed more.

And I know that Char and Scylla are going to have a great life in their new home. David has already sent me several batches of pictures, showing them happily exploring and eating hay in their new pasture. They are going to be well loved and taken care of, so I have no regrets about letting them go there.

But even though it was a good choice that needed to be made, all the same, parting with Char took something out of me. It left a hole. It changed the way I feel about our horse operation.

Even though I've cut down our herd from 15 horses to 9 in the past month---no mean feat in the current horse market---we're still floundering in our financial crisis. No matter what I do, it's never enough to keep up with the hay bills and vet bills and so on. So Ken and I have been discussing our farm's future.

We're both so tired of the stress and worry. And after parting with Char, I just don't have the heart to continue struggling to keep the whole horse enterprise together, so we've decided to sell all the horses except for Senter and the two Art Deco fillies.

That means Torchsong, Callista, and Callisto will go on the sales list now, as well as Maggie, Andromeda, Penny, and Libby. They are wonderful horses, and I love them all, but I just don't have the heart for it anymore. I never wanted the horse operation to overwhelm the rest of the farm. I wanted to have a more balanced mix of livestock. And I definitely want a more sustainable lifestyle.

I'm tired of being on the brink of crisis all the time. I'm tired of watching my husband killing himself worrying over money. I'm tired of watching every penny I make siphoned away to pay for hay and still not be enough.

If the horses are not giving us any joy, then what's the point of all the struggle? Time to get the farm back on track. Maybe once we've thinned the herd down to just the two Art Deco fillies (and Senter, when he comes back from training), we'll be able to recapture some of the enthusiasm, on a smaller scale.

Meanwhile, I have seven more horses to sell. I wish it were over already, so we could just get on with our lives!

The Cross-Dressing Farmer

It all started a few years ago when I stopped into Walmart in search of some cheap workout clothes. Simple sweatpants and sweat jacket, that's all I wanted. I searched the women's clothing section, but there was not a single simple pair of sweat pants anywhere.

I had thought that if any store was going to have plain, cheap clothes, it would be Walmart, but instead there were all these shiny lycra spandex yoga-pants and things with huge stripes and logos.

My husband had just bought himself some simple sweat pants that were as plain and cheap as they could be. Why did they have nothing similar for women? Frustrated, I went and looked at the men's clothing area.

Not only did they have lots and lots of plain, comfy workout sweats with NO ugly stripes or logos, they were all about a third the price of the womens! My solution was obvious---I bought my workout clothes from the men's section.

After we bought this farm and started raising animals, my lifestyle was such that I pretty much wore t-shirts or tank tops every day. And because my work is usually pretty dirty, soon all of my shirts were stained and worn.

When I went to the store to replace them, I learned from my sweat pant discovery, and compared prices of men's and women's basic t-shirts. Once again, the men's shirts were cheaper and sturdier, so I bought those. I see no reason to pay twice as much for shirts that are going to be smeared with dirt, manure, birthing fluid, or whatever, the first time I wear them!

Next came my search for the perfect shorts to wear during our long, hot summers on the farm. I needed them to be loose, sturdy, and come down to my knees so that I could still comfortably carry bales of hay without getting my legs all scratched up. I needed them to have big pockets for those times when I needed to carry half a dozen tubes of horse wormer and still have my hands free for opening gates.

Once more, I searched the women's clothing section with absolutely no luck. Women's shorts were tight, form-fitting, made from flimsy material, and had undersized pockets you could barely put your hand in, much less anything else. These clothes were made for people who wanted to stroll down sidewalks showing off their tans, not for people who actually needed to do physical labor for a living!

So, once again, I looked at the kind of long, loose, sturdy carpenter shorts my husband wears on the farm, and bought myself several similar pairs. They're not exactly shaped for feminine hips, but they're baggy enough that it doesn't matter. They're not particularly attractive, but they're comfortable and stand up to the rigors of doing chores, which is the most important thing.

Last week, frustrated with all of my women's sweaters and long-sleeved t-shirts that are cut to "fashionably" come down only to my waist---paired with the annoying women's jeans that now are all cut to come BELOW the waist, thus leaving a breezy gap that lets in the wintry wind and handfuls of hay chaff every time I do chores---I took one of my husband's long, fleecy shirts and started wearing it around the farm.

It was so cozy and comfortable, I told my husband if he ever wanted to get his favorite shirt back, he'd better take me clothes shopping in the men's section of whatever store he'd bought it in.

So, yesterday I went clothes shopping, and I didn't even bother to look in the women's section. There were sturdy, loose, warm, comfortable men's sweaters and shirts on sale for $4, $5, and $7 each, so I stocked up with enough to keep me warm and comfortable all winter.

It seems a little ridiculous that all the women's clothing I find in the stores nowadays is so inappropriate for my lifestyle. But I guess the truth of the matter is, I have what is often considered a fairly masculine job. My clothes need to be comfortable, sturdy, and able to withstand constant farm dirt. Fashion and beauty really don't enter into it.

I did make one concession to my gender and bought myself a pair of comfy, FEMININE pajamas: a pretty pale green jersey material with lettuce-ruffled edges and soft blue and white stripes.

So, I may dress like a man all day, but at least I can still look like a woman when I sleep.