Reckoning

I had to make a terrible decision yesterday. Oscar the ram will have to be slaughtered.... I'm so upset. He is my all time favorite sheep. But the decision was made because his horns do not have a good configuration.... that sounds so dumb really because it sounds like we are out to keep only animals that look nice... but horns can be tricky things. The horns are full of nerve endings and if they are not polled when they are very young then it is more difficult to poll them as they get older. You would think that horns would grow properly but like human teeth they don't always do that. Oscar horns started giving us trouble early in the spring when they began to curl against his eye. Teapot bought a little saw and we began to saw the tips off so that they would not cause blindness or worse. The problem is that as Oscar's horns grow longer they also begin to thicken.... and the thickening is beginning to squeeze his skull. He is such an easy tempered guy that I hate to slaughter him but unfortunately I've tried every source I can think of to find a solution and unless I want to spend a fortune dehorning him then I have to slaughter him.... When you are trying to run a farm then the idea is to make it as cost effective as you can and this time that means slaughtering one of my favorite sheep.

Xavier, our other ram is still on our list of keepers, so at least I can breed again when the fall comes. Xavier is a pure bred BFL (Blue Faced Liecester) and he will make a very good breeding ram over time. He has a lovely configuration and to my eyes no sign of horns yet... mind you he is still young so perhaps the horns haven't come in yet, but it is certainly something that I will watch for. But then, not knowing a whole lot about the breed other than I really like their fibre, I do believe that both sexes are polled.... meaning that they are bred to be hornless I think. I really never gave any of this much thought when I bought him, since I was planning on using Oscar primarily and Xavier would be just used to breed with Oscar's offspring.

Teapot wants me to cull the flock back even further than the six/seven I had picked out and since he does so much to help me with them and since my back issues dictate that I need help, I will have to take his desires into consideration. I have decided on Xavier, Greigg, Fanny, and Nellie. That will give me ten animals in all when you include the alpacas.

For days now I have had a bad back.... this is nothing abnormal for me since my back has gone through horrible stresses and surgeries since I was a child. Normally, medication keeps everything going along tickety boom... but this week the back monster reared it's ugly head and I have had shooting pains up and down my legs as the nerves for these areas are being horrible compressed.... I continue to hope that nothing back there has changed radically in the last week but am beginning to wonder since five days of drugs is the most that it has ever taken to get things back under control. Like Oscar, my day of reckoning has come..... well... I'm not going to meet my maker..... I'm just going to have to stop treddling for a few weeks, which is a horror since I have not made much progress over the summer on the level 3 homework. But I have two questions that I can work on for sure. I have to spin a yarn appropriate for a summer top, and I have to spin a yarn appropriate for a baby outfit.... both of these can be done on things other than spinning wheels. The summer top of course will need cotton and so I will spin that on my charkha, which does not require my feet or legs at all. The other can be spun on the charkha as well if I use cotton, or I can spin on my drop spindle if I choose to use some other fibre.... possibly a blend of silk and alpaca and wool, (for a christening gown). I might even be able to spend the time writing up the questions on count since I have tons of samples from the t.p.i. questions that I can use them for the count questions. I also have the fibre spun for the distaff and the distaff is pretty much finished but I need construct a handle and do a little trimming on it to finish it off.... all these questions can be completed without treadling and so I am going forward today with that.

After the last few weeks, and though rain has been sporadic and only a little, there is some green on the ground.... not lots mind you, but at least it is not that brilliant golden almost white of dead grass... I took a short walk yesterday on the trails through the forest and discovered that the leaves from the Poplar trees are beginning to fall, see these little yellow things in our driveway, they are dead fallen leaves.....
and this tree has turned mostly yellow under the outside canopy of green....
and autumn coolness is definitely in the morning air. As I sit here with the window open above my desk, the air is penetrating my joints and making both my fingers and toes very cold. Many of the birds have begun to flock and head south. The crows began their journey a week ago. We are on the slippery slope down into another kind of reckoning.... the reckoning of winter, and probably an early one too!