Latest Batch of Good News

It's been a busy week. This time of year, July and August, are the hardest for the sheep because of the heat and the parasites, so it's always a time of worry for me. Plus our finances are getting very tight again, which is another source of worry.

But I've had several bits of good news lately, which I'm quite happy about:

1. On Sunday, the mare (Callista) that I sent to my trainer was sold. Hurray! So that's one fewer horse I have to worry about and a few thousand dollars coming in to help pay bills. Now I only have 2 more horses left on my sales list, and I have 3 different buyers interested in one of those.

2. Both of the clients I'm designing web sites for have needed work done right away, and both of them had added complications come up suddenly that created more work for me. But I have had more time available lately to actually WORK on the two sites, so I've been making rapid progress, which feels good.

3. My stallion has now made enough progress in his training that he is being ridden by a 14 year old girl. This speaks volumes about what a wonderful temperament he has!

He also just had his wolf teeth pulled, which will make him more comfortable wearing the bridle. And all of his mares have recently tested "in foal" except one, whom he will be rebreeding this week. Between a busy training schedule and a busy breeding schedule, he has had a lot going on in his life this summer, which is great for him. He loves both his jobs!

4. Although this time of year always brings challenges with the sheep's parasite loads and heat stress, in looking back over my worming records I discovered that one of the ram lambs I'm keeping (Umber) has shown extremely good parasite resistance, with near-perfect FAMACHA scores and ZERO worming.

Since he is also our largest lamb of the year and is a cross between my best fleece ewe and my best meat ram, the fact that he is so parasite resistant as well makes him incredibly valuable to my future breeding program. Especially since he is unrelated to Nicholai, who is my other extremely parasite-resistant ram.

Between these two, the new ram I'm getting this summer (who I know to be highly parasite resistant), and the possibility of another new-ram purchase next year that I have already lined up, I should be able to start making some excellent progress on my goal of breeding for parasite resistance without sacrificing meat conformation.

In another few generations, perhaps July and August won't be a time to worry about the sheep at all anymore!

Another Busy Day

Today was a busy day!

I had a cash offer on Torchsong first thing this morning, from someone who wanted to come pick her up this weekend. However, the offer wasn't high enough, and besides, Torchsong is a complex horse. I would not feel comfortable just selling her in a flash like that, without talking to the buyer a little more first. So anyway, I thanked the person and declined the offer.

I'm still deep in discussions with the other prospective buyer who is considering both Torchsong and Callista. Lots of things for her to consider, lots of choices to make!

The sale of Andromeda is pretty much finalized now. The buyer and I talked over the terms of the sales agreement and he has sent the deposit check. She will be leaving here before the end of April.

It's nice to think of her going to a good home, where she'll be spoiled and appreciated. So many of the people who are looking at my horses are, rightly enough, looking for sport horses who will be great at dressage or eventing or foxhunting. But Andromeda just never fit that body type all that well, and everyone thought she was far too short to be worth considering.

But now she is going to someone who wants her to be an informal driving/draft horse on a small farm, and he thinks that she is just the right height! That's an excellent match for her abilities and body type, so I think she'll do great there.

This afternoon, I got a phone call from someone interested in breeding her mare to Senter. I guess she'd been exchanging emails with Senter's trainer, and had called my number by mistake, thinking I was the person she'd been writing to. It was so odd to hear the words, "Oh, you must have been talking to my trainer. This is Nancy, the owner," come out of my mouth, just like I was some fancy, rich horse lady. It made me laugh.

I am also making huge strides in my filly Grace's handling. She has been a bit of an enigma to me ever since she was born. She is neither timid nor bold, but simply holds herself apart from people and other horses. She keeps to herself. I've had a hard time figuring out an angle by which I can truly bond with her.

But in the past few days of mini-lessons in the pasture, she has started to really respond to me. She has decided that she loves having me scratch all her itchy places, and that I'm pretty fun to hang around with. We did more desensitizing with the rope, some practice with leading, some practice with picking up her feet, and she did every single thing perfectly! Considering how little work I've done with her up to now, I was so proud of her!

I was concerned that she would never open up and connect with me---and I REALLY wanted her to, since she's my mare Char's daughter, my once-in-a-lifetime dream foal that I planned and waited for since before she was even conceived. But tonight, after the training session was done, I stopped by the hay feeder to tell her good night, and she not only walked away from the hay so she could come stand next to me, when she saw Andromeda coming towards me, she even wedged herself between me and Andromeda, so she could have ALL my attention. That was a first!

I can't say as much for my progress with my demon-filly, Glory! She is being a little poop-head, and doing it on purpose simply because she loves to be wild and willful. Pretty soon, she and I are going to have to step aside and do some private sessions in the round pen, where she has to pay attention to me, without the distraction of the other horses getting in the way. No time for that right now, though!

On the sheep side of things, we have no lambs yet, but I did get an email from someone wanting to buy all six of my remaining sheep hides. It's not a lot of money, but at least all the hides will be gone without me having to invest the time and money into sending them to the tannery myself.

And this weekend, I have set aside to do NOTHING but work on that website for the good folks at Bloomin' Acres, who have been waiting ever so patiently for me to finish building their site for them!

(Does me saying that pretty much guarantee that some urgent farm crisis will come up and devour my whole day tomorrow? I hope not. I'm looking forward to getting their site done for them.)

Web Work

I've been neglecting the blog for the past few days because I've been very busy doing web site design work.

First, I'm doing a very extensive site for lovely Bloomin Acres Farm in Arkansas. It has many pages and is taking a lot of planning and organizing to get it all set up. It's not done yet, but when it is, I'll post a link.

Second, I just updated my sheep website in preparation for spring lambing time. I'm getting lots of inquiries for lamb sales already, and some folks came this past weekend to look at the flock and buy my ENTIRE selection of bargain, salvage, and sale fleeces. Now all I have left for sale are 12 premium fleeces. And I haven't even advertised, that's how well these fleeces sell!

And third, I just redesigned my sister's farm site and gave it its first update in several years. Horses, ponies, Maine Coon cats, chickens, goats, gorgeous mountain scenery... Lots of pretty photos on this one. Everyone should check it out!

I still have my horse website to update too, and horse for sale ads to update. I'm getting a little tired of staring at the computer all day every day---I can't wait for lambing season!

Not much else has been going on, on the farm. We had another big windstorm this weekend, and it completely shattered our sturdiest sheep shelter that Ken built. Fortunately no sheep were hurt when the wreckage flipped over and crashed to the other side of the paddock! But this is all the more reason why we need to build real, solid sheep shelters before next winter. I'm getting tired of all these ugly tarp shelters that can't handle our extreme wind!

Surrounded by Flowers

I spent the middle part of today surrounded by flowers. Well, virtual flowers, that is.

I've been working on the website design for the fine folks at Bloomin Acres Farm, and a major part of that design is putting up photos and descriptions of all the plants in their plant nursery so that people can buy them online.

Today I worked on the Clematis section. Lots of beautiful, colorful photos to insert, position, resize, etc. It's pretty repetitive, detailed work, but on a gray, damp, cold day like today, it was really cheerful to spend several hours looking at lots and lots of flowers.

I also sold three more fleeces---payment arrived today, I'll send out the box tomorrow.

And I got a few more horse inquiries today as well, so I spent some time replying and answering questions. It would be so great if I could sell another few horses really soon!

A Load Off My Mind (And Out of My Closet)

Back around the end of October, I decided that I would sell my large personal stash of spinning fibers that I'd collected over the years, since I needed the money and I never have time to do any spinning anyway.

A few people bought individual items from the stash, but recently a lovely woman who runs a shop at a Renaissance Faire bought the entire remaining stash for $500. Tonight I just finished packing up these two gigantic boxes, crammed full of just about every kind of spinning fiber there is. Tomorrow, we'll ship them off to Washington state, and in the summer, she'll sell them in her shop. I like to think of all my fibers and fleeces going to a Ren Faire---surely someone will have fun with them!

The money, of course, like all our other money, is already spent buying hay for the horses. But it arrived on a week when we didn't have any other money to buy hay for the horses, so the timing was perfect.

Now, I'm reveling in the enormous amount of empty space I now have in the closet and under the bed in the guest room where I've been keeping all this fiber. With that gone, I may be able to reorganize the room to hold my loom and spinning wheel, plus all the fleeces from my own sheep that are waiting to sell, which will then clear out a lot of free space in our library where the fleeces have been stored. Maybe in time, we'll be well organized all over the house!

Now I'm on to my next big project, which is designing a website for a fellow Icelandic breeder. That's work I enjoy, so it should be fun.

Sorting Out

No immediate progress on the money front today, but I finally started making headway at some of my various projects that have been piling up.

I got my horse sales list recreated and sent out. I worked on two of the websites I'd promised people. I spent a bunch of time on the phone with my sister Donna sorting out which horses I will send up to her house if I can't sell them here soon.

It's very hard to decide which horses to keep without being able to see what kind of foals they'll produce with Senter.

For instance, I'm not particularly bonded with my mare Bonnie, but the foal she produced this year (to Art Deco, a famous Dutch Warmblood stallion) is spectacular. If she will produce that kind of foal with Senter as well, she would be a valuable one to keep, even if she's not my favorite. She's registered AND homozygous for tobiano, so those are marks in her favor.

Then there's Callisto. I picked her when she was a little weanling, and have raised her for two years now. She's turning out SO beautifully, awesome gaits and personality, and is going to be very tall. But she's gray, which is not a plus in a pinto broodmare, since she'll pass that gray on to half her foals.

Of course, the palomino and buckskin fillies, Torchsong and Callista, are high on my list to keep, simply because of their desirable color, their height, and the fact that they too are homozygous tobiano. But they are still young---I have no proof of what kind of foals they'll produce with Senter.

The only ones that I KNOW I'm not parting with are the two Art Deco fillies, Glory and Grace, and my stallion Senter. Other than that, it's all up in the air. How many can I sell? How many can Donna find homes for? How many can I afford to keep? What's the best business decision? What's the best emotional decision? When emotion and business decisions hang in balance, how do you decide between them?

With so much indecision and waiting going on, it was a relief to make some solid progress on some of my concrete, hands-on projects today. At least I can feel like I accomplished something today!

Desperate Again

I was wrong. We don't have enough money to buy a new computer. In fact, we don't even have enough to buy hay. Our hay guy has been letting us get some on credit, but he's reached the limit of what he's willing to extend us. Not that I blame him---he's been very patient with us so far, paying as much as we can, even when it's not enough.

So yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we've been rationing hay. I let the broodmares back out into the pasture, such as it is, so that I could save what hay we had left for the young horses and the sheep, and Senter, who are in pens where they can't graze, even on the sparse November grass.

Fortunately, Ken had just bought a load of grain, so everyone can get a little extra grain to make up for the smaller hay ration.

Ken's paycheck just came in, and I'm expecting several checks in the mail: payments for the two horses I'm selling on "layaway" and payments for fleeces, sheep's horns, and skulls that I've sold. Ken is due for his annual raise and, perhaps, a Christmas bonus sometime in the next few weeks.

So we'll be able to buy hay again soon... good thing, because all that's left in the barn is the loose leftover scraps, which we'll rake up and fork into the truck tomorrow at feeding time.

The trouble is, even though we can scrape together enough to buy hay again right now, we also need to scrape together enough to pay $1,000 in property tax, plus the electric bill and heating bill and phone bill and mortgages...

When I look at the horses in the field, I know that I made good choices in selecting them. They are really nice quality, and I know they'll all produce gorgeous foals with Senter. But then I look at our bills and our budget and our empty hay barn, and I wish I'd never started this horse enterprise.

I'm so tired of knowing that it's all my fault that poor Ken is under such stress, trying to juggle all our bills. He works so hard, he deserves to be able to enjoy the benefits of his labor without having to flush all his money down my horses mouths. I want so much for the horses somehow to pay him back, but unless the horse market turns around drastically and I can get decent prices again, I don't know how that's ever going to happen.

It didn't seem like I was risking so much. All I needed was modest sales and steady hay prices for the horses to break even this year, and then my investment would start to pay off next year. But now we're just scrambling to sell as many as we can to cut that horrible hay bill down to a manageable level.

So anyway, we have no money for a new computer for me. We did scrape together enough to buy the one piece of software I absolutely require, and installed it on Ken's computer, so I can mostly keep working there when Ken's not using it. So I'll still be able to work on the websites people have hired me to do for them, as well as my own websites which need updating.

Mostly, this whole ordeal of worry and scraping leaves me feeling tired and sad all the time. Ken wavers between optimism and panic, but really the only thing holding me together is sheer stubbornness that these things HAVE to be done, so somehow we'll find a way to do them. But it drains me. I go to bed at 8:00 some nights because I'm just so tired, only to wake up again at 4:00 a.m. to start worrying all over again.

Some friends of ours have invited us over to their Thanksgiving dinner, which is really nice of them, since we can't afford to do one of our own this year. Thinking about going to their house made me realize how infrequently I get off the farm. Ken drives into town frequently, sometimes to do errands, sometimes to go to poker night with his friends. But I never go anywhere. I feel guilty spending the money for gas to drive to town, when we can't pay for hay, so I just stay here on the farm for weeks at a time.

We don't get TV here (although we do have videos we can watch on DVD), and I don't listen to the radio or subscribe to a newspaper or any magazines. So, other than the internet, I'm completely isolated. The animals are my life. And I'm not even able to do right by them.

I'm too tired even to write this post properly, so I'm sure it sounds very rambling and whiny. For that I apologize. Sometimes when I write here I try to make things sound happy and interesting, even when that's not how I feel. But this time I'm too sad to even do that.

Things will get better. Or they won't. Either way, there's no choice but to keep plugging along, doing our best.

Fillies at Recess

The rams seem to be feeling a bit better today, so maybe it was just a simple matter of dispensing worm medicine, selenium booster, and supplementing their protein intake. I'm sure it helped that the weather was cooler today.

Leeloo went to the vet for another checkup on her leg today. She was very frightened to have to go there again---bad memories!---but the vet says she's doing great. He removed some of the pins in her leg, so that the bones have to start supporting more of her weight as the brace supports less. In another couple of weeks she has to go in again, and might even be able to get the brace removed completely then.

I spent some time working on the website design I've been hired to do. It's actually a lot of fun. I enjoy doing it: the detailed work of getting the formatting and layout just so, as well as the creative aspects of coming up with ways to improve the customer's experience.

But the most fun part of the day was when I let the fillies out into the back pasture to play for a while. They are so beautiful, galloping around in the sunshine. Here's a video clip.

One of those times that they ran up into the paddock, Grace apparently tried to jump the fence again, because when I went up to pet them all after "recess" was over, Grace had a big scrape on her chest and the fronts of her forelegs (nothing serious, just a big patch of hair removed), and the top of the fence was bent.

Naughty girl! But boy, it sure does seem like she's got the jumping tendencies built in, if I can only teach her to do it safely and only when she's supposed to!

Ingleside Icelandics at the Virginia State Fair

Most of today was taken up by driving our four chosen sheep (Salem, Savannah, Theo, and Timber) to the vet for their official health papers, and then to Richmond to the state fairgrounds.

Here they are, enjoying a nice snack of hay in their exhibit pen, right after we unloaded them:

They'll be on display in the "Young MacDonald's Farm" livestock breed exhibit in the Big Red Barn throughout the duration of the state fair. So, if you happen to go to the fair, be sure to stop by the Big Red Barn and say hello to our sheep!

Our "payment" for allowing our animals to be in the exhibit is that we get free passes to the fair. So we'll probably make a day of it sometime next week. It's nice, since with our finances the way they are lately, we wouldn't be spending the money to buy fair tickets otherwise. But this way we still get to go.

Meanwhile, I think things are finally settling down here enough that I can get working on those web sites!

The Barter System

Earlier this month, I mentioned that we were trying to work out a deal with my hay supplier to trade him a starter flock of Icelandic sheep for an equivalent value of hay. It seemed to be a perfect trade: I desperately need hay to feed my animals, and he really wanted to get started raising sheep.

Unfortunately the deal didn't go through. He's just not quite ready to have the sheep on his farm yet (fences to build, pastures to reseed... we all know what that's like! Some things just take time). He's still very interested in doing the trade, but will have to wait until next year.

It's just as well, I guess, since except for two ram lambs, I've already sold of all the sheep I want to sell. I even sold a few that I hadn't planned on selling, because I had an interested buyer and we really needed the cash. Thank goodness for these sheep that sell easily at good prices, because they've been paying the bills around here lately!

So anyway, until some of the horses sell, we're still going through hay faster than we are earning money to pay for it. We've been excellent customers for our hay guy, and recently, he's been super understanding about being willing to still bring us a load of hay even if we don't have the all the cash for it quite yet. But with the sheep trade postponed, that still leaves the question of how to bring in more money to pay him.

Out of the blue, today, he brought up the possibility that I could create a website for him. I never even told him that I've JUST started doing this for people. I have the one other sheep website I'm working on for someone, and another person who is a cat breeder who wants me to do a simple site for her soon.

It's kind of amazing to me, the synchronicity of it. I'm in desperate need of a way to make more money while still being able to stay home to take care of the farm work. I love designing my own websites, plus I have tons of professional writing and editing experience. And then all of a sudden, POOF, three people out of the blue ask me to make websites for them.

So, I guess, with three clients lined up, it must be official: I have the beginnings of a new sideline business. Something I enjoy doing and can get paid for---It's a miracle!

Wish me luck!

On a Roll?

I'm almost afraid to say too much, for fear of jinxing myself, but I'm beginning to have a little bit of hope that our luck may be changing.

After reading this blog, a fellow Icelandic sheep breeder---from whom I bought several sheep last year, including Paris, the gorgeous sheep in this photo---offered me the job of redesigning her web site for her.

I'm really pleased about getting the opportunity to bring in some more money doing something I enjoy doing, especially for such nice people. Designing websites for farms and other small businesses is something I have long thought of doing, but this will be my first paying job at it.

I have a lot of years of professional writing and editing experience, plus I get lots of compliments on my own websites, InglesideSportHorses.com, InglesideIcelandics.com, and KeepingTheFarm.com, so I think that I'll be able to do some good work. I know a lot of small farms don't have the time or inclination to want to build their own sites, so this is something I can help with.

On top of that, I got to meet a very nice couple today who came to look at our horses for sale. They stayed for a couple of hours. The young woman was very experienced and competent, so I would have no worries about what kind of care and handling a horse would get if I sold it to her.

She visited all the horses, and especially looked at Bonnie, Boo, and Penny. She said she liked all of them but price was a factor. I told her we're open to offers, so she and her husband are going to discuss it and get back to me.

It seemed pretty certain that she would make an offer on one or more of the horses. Whether it will be an offer we can accept remains to be seen---we can certainly be flexible to some degree, but we're not GIVING the horses away after I've invested this much into them---but I have hopes that we can work out some kind of deal.

The fun part of the visit was letting her take our stallion Senter out into the round pen to try out his gaits. He's such a pretty boy, and a gorgeous mover. It's always fun to play with him.

Next time I need to think ahead and take some video of him moving, to share on the blog.

After things quiet down around here (if that ever happens!) this fall, I need to continue with his saddle breaking too. Guess that will be video for the blog as well.