Thanksgiving

My family killed the turkeys on Friday (I was at work unfortunately and did not get to watch/participate) and we ate one of them today. He was tasty. Anyway, we also had a bunch of vegetables and good stuff from the gardens of my mother and aunts. This thanksgiving was totally bitchin.

Roosters!

I got me some roosters yesterday. Woo! Will post pics maybe.

Sorry About That

I’ve been working and that has sort of put a rift in my update schedule (which was not particularly rigid in the first place. Anyway, a few things have happened since I’ve been absent:

We lost a whole mess of chickens to foxes or raccoons during the fair. All but one of the adult buff rocks, all but one of the young buff rocks, Little Crow (a beautiful black rock hen – I loved her and almost ran over a couple of raccoons driving home from work for revenge) and the remaining partidge rock. The Buff rock hen died today. So we really only have two laying hens left.

On the other hand, my aunt and mother bought six Silver Phoenix hens, two roosters, one partiridge and one buff silkie the other day. They are absolutely beautiful and since they are quite young they will only get more so. Also, I’m arranging to buy four roosters – two Buff Brahmas, one black cochin and one blue cochin – from some people I know. They would be pets. I haven’t seen them but apparently they arerather stunning.

Also, the two remaining turkeys are probably going to get killed tomorrow morning. I will be at work and thus unable to assist with the cleaning and so forth. Oh well. And we sheared Finn today too. Good stuff.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on. I will try to write more frequently now.

County Fair

The Queens County fair started today. w00t Tangled Flocks had a float in the parade and won first prize for best family farm float. We were the only float in that catagory, of course… anyway, the guy driving the tractor what pulled the float was the local MLA. How weird is that. Gotta love rural life. So yeah, I’m going to take my camera down when we go later so I will have some photos and shit to put up here.

Also, I’m trying to figure out how to delete a blog on here… I don’t really want to keep my cooking blog seeing as it is almost totally poitnless but I dunno hwo to get rid of it. So… how?

Pictures

As promised, some crappy ass pictures taken mere moments ago using the flash. Yay! Flash! I think my brother would be offended to know I was taking such shitty photos with his camera.

First off, a scarf I’m working on. I made one before and a woman commissioned (I’m too lazy to look up the spelling so I’m just going to hope) two more so I kind of have to get on that. Fuck. Anyway, it’s Gabe’s mohair plyed with angora from Chuck/Emmy/possibly the late Jude. Using size 6 needles, CO 12 sts. k1 p1 until you’re done. Easy pattern. The amount of yarn required depends on how long you want it and I don’t have a gauge yet so… yeah.

Close up

And there’s the closeup. Mmhm. Yes, the photos were taken on my bed.  Note how grotty the sheets are. I can’t remember the last time I cleaned my room but I found I spider in my bed when I was getting in so I guess the time is now. I will do that tomorrow I guess. Hopefully I won’t sleep in so fucking late.

Anyway, this is a tiny spinning wheel a friend of mine gave me today. She is cool. Note how messy the surrounding area is. It’s sitting ontop of my record player (which reminds me, I should take the record outta there lest it gets warped. My friend said that would happen) as well as a letter I wrote to somebody which has been sitting around for, like, two weeks. And then there’s a pile of crap next to it. My room is a dump.

For scale, here it is next to a VHS copy of The Lost Boys which is kind of a crappy movie, but sort of funny. I have a weird thing for Kiefer Sutherland even though I’ve heard he is an arsehole, and Lost Boys is my second favourite performance of his. I think I’ve only seen three movies with him (I’ve never watched 24 either), which are, in reversed order of how much I enjoyed him in the movie:

3. Dark City (1998) – Bitchin movie, but Kiefer was really weird and retarded in it. I mean, what the fuck was that supposed to be? It did, however, start my love of both Rufus Sewell (who is weird in every single movie he’s in. What the fuck is up with that guy?) and Jennifer Connelly.

2. The Lost Boys (1987) – Discussed above. I remember when I first watched that movie I really enjoyed it but it kind of lost all of its goodness for me when I saw the vastly superior and similarly themed Near Dark.

1. Stand By Me (1986) – He is such a badass in that movie I love him. I mean, he’s a complete jackass and a nasty piece of work and really not my type but… I dunno, I thought he was hot. Go figure. That movie is fucking amazing too. Again, I’m generally not into that kind of movie but I think that’s what makes me like it more in a way. It exceeded my expectations and was just really fuckin good. Yeah.

Yeah, so those are the Kiefer Sutherland movies I’ve seen. My favourite Donald Sutherland movies are as follows:

3. Mash (1970) – Eh, I don’t really recall my brain exploding with wonder at his performance in this but he was pretty cute and I love me some Robert Altman.

2. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – Fuckin a.

1. Virus (1999) – No, I jest.

Good christ, this is turning into my other blog. Oh well. Bye.

Laziness

I haven’t been doing a hell of a lot lately, but I do have some stuff I need to photograph. I will do that tonight, probably. Photos will be uploaded, yes indeed.

Mortality

Nico the chicken died. I think probably the other chickens killed him/her but I guess it could have been internal bleeding. So that’s a downer.

Jude died as well, same day, meaning that we only have one of our original rabbits left (Annie). He was a pretty good rabbit so that was also a downer. We were planning on breeding him to Tera and getting some german/french crosses but… so much for that. My mother put POE in with her the other night though. So maybe satin/french rabbits. They would have nice fibre.

Photos

As promised, ever so long ago, some photomatos.

Hand warmers

I knit these a while ago using a pretty generic pattern. They are made from Gabe’s mohair dyed with natural dyes (I can’t remember which ones though. I think it was logwood and something else… we have a box of mohair dyed different colours and I just spun little chunks of purple and pink) plyed with plain alpaca from Monarch and/or Bravo. Woo.

Blue and green shetland from Polly I spun for a project, which I will photograph at some point in the future. Again, the colours are made from natural dyes. The blue I believe is indigo but I forget what the green is.

Thats’s a picture of me dog Boomer a-runnin down the road.

And that’s the chicken which he went after yesterday. It’s a buff brahma and I have been calling it  Nicolas (or Nico should it be a hen) in my mind for some reason. It is pictured here in a box in my bed. The photo is shitty coz I only had one hand free and couldn’t adjust the settings. Also coz I suck at takin pictures. So… yep. Good stuff.

Guess What

Guess what I did this week? Pretty much nothing. I kept not doing stuff and then trying to catch up with the stuff I didn’t do… so I think I’ll just stop and try to do the week over from scratch. Today is my writing day. That should be easy because I tend to write compulsively anyway. Also, I hyave to package some dog biscuits and take them up to that blah blah blah who cares.

Yesterday my dog went after a chicken. The chicken is now staying in my house. It is very cute. I took some shitty photos of it last night so I might put one up here. Yay.

Shearing Alpaca

Sheared one of the alpacas today (my relatives say it was Monarch. Damned if I can tell them apart). I wasn’t here when they got sheared last year so this was a new experience for me. It took five people to get it done – my mother hog-tied the bastard and she and my grandfather help onto the rope, keeping his legs up so he couldn’t really get any leeway; my brother sat on his head and kept a bag over his face so he didn’t spit on people; my aunt did the actual clipping and I followed her around with a couple of bags making sure that the hair didn’t get on the ground.

Little shit screamed like a crazy thing the whole way through, to the point where it started getting actually ridiculous. I thought my head would explode. I could hear it’s demented shrieks echoing all around, and I’m sure people up the road could probably hear it and assumed we were torturing something. Oddly enough, my father didn’t hear it. Weird.

The whole time the thing was spitting and bringing up green shit from its rumin or wherever, which was kind of disgusting seeing as it had a feed bag over its head. So the bag got all full of stuff and when we let it up, its head was covered in green slime.

The only thing I could think of was the theme song to the movie Green Slime, the music video for which is below:

Also today we managed to sex the latest generation of rabbits, which are probably at least three months old now and will be able to breed soon if they haven’t already. Of course, out of seven rabbits only two of them were female. Interestingly, there was a shitty doc on CBC a while ago (which I didn’t even finish watching coz it was dumb) about how there are fewer and fewer males being born each year or something. They said that this was true of every species. Not rabbits. Which sucks powerful ass because the males fight with one another so they each have to be housed individually. It’s majorly stupid.

Anyway, a little while ago, Pippin and Jakob started fighting with one another so they both got kicked out of their cage and are living off and about on the grounds. It’s actually kind of cool to walk down to my aunt’s house and see a rabbit darting from the barn to the vegetable garden. They basically just camp out in there which is cool. So we put the five males in their old cage.

Also, my aunt’s rabbit, Sid, died a few days ago (he didn’t get moved out of his cage until today though. Really fucking disgusting. I’m sorry. I don’t mind handling dead things really, but only after they’re freshly dead. When they’ve been sitting around in the heat for four days… ew. Fortunately, I didn’t have to move him, my mother ended up doing it) so we have his cage as well and put the females in there.

Hm. What else… um. I’ll upload some pics any day now, just haven’t gotten round to it yet. But yeah, tomorrow is the second paca, which will be oh, so much fun.

Anyway, here’s a short clip from youtube of an alpaca being sheared. You can see the GREEN SLIME on the floor and hear the hideous screaming. The clip isn’t very short, so you’ll have to imagine it doing that for, like, ninety minutes straight.

Woo hoo hoo hoo