- Getting up each morning to feed the animals before you feed yourself.
- Checking for chicken eggs morning and evening.
- Watch the weather daily so you know if you will need to shovel snow/dodge rain/plant veggies/cover veggies to protect from frost, if temps drop to 32 or below disconnect water lines to animal water buckets to prevent them from bursting(ask me how we figured this one out, duh!).
- Always keep an eye on how much hay/chicken feed/alpaca feed is on hand so we order/pick up more before we run out.
- Never drive all the way to "town" without a comprehensive list as we will undoubtedly forget something necessary.
And there are dozens more, but you get the idea. It's not like life in the city doesn't involve routines, it's just that they are different from how we live our life now. I realize now that life on a farm works pretty well for people like me who have a ridiculous amount of energy because there is a never ending supply of chores/ projects/ animal work to tackle. I do, however, wonder what will become of us as we get older. Hmmmm......guess I'll worry about that in a few years.
As you may already know, our #1 rule as a couple is this: Whatever we do here on the farm has to be something we both agree upon.....or as we like to call it.....a MEA. Mutually Enthusiastic Agreement. (Thank you, Dr. Angwin!) Yup, that came out of thousands of dollars of counseling years ago, but it works. If we both agree whole heartedly on a purchase of an animal, farm equipment, where to spend a holiday, etc., then we are pretty much assured of mutual contentment in our marriage. Don't giggle.....it works! Seriously!
Our second rule is if "it" (whatever it may be) stops being fun, then we will stop doing "it". For example, we currently have all these alpaca. So far, so good. I do most of the work around them as having alpaca has been a long time dream of mine. Joel helps me when I need it, but I enjoy feeding them, watching them and tending to their needs. But if taking care of them gets to be too much for me to handle, or we realize we are ready to move on to something else, those cute, cuddly critters will be sold to the highest bidder and we will move on without so much as a look back. But so far, we love having all our animals and are looking forward to acquiring a few more in the near future. More on that in the coming months.
One of our routines involves getting pellet feed for the alpaca every 3 months or so. Ha! It gets delivered to the end of our lane by an 18 wheeler.
You know you're getting a lot of feed when an 18 wheeler pulls up to your farm.
The bags get off loaded into the bed of Joel's truck....
.....which then gets backed down to the barn for off loading.
Then we dump the contents of all the bags into galvanized cans to keep the pellets dry and protected from rodents. Boy, are we ever glad when that process is done. Like I said earlier, it certainly is a good thing I have lots of energy.
Every once in a while, though, we do something new to break up the routine. Something like this:
Joel and I took a gun class at a range in town and yours truly got a score of 100! After putting 45 bullets in the number 9 and 10 circles, the instructor asked me if I could put a "nose" on my target. Well, I didn't exactly get his nose, but I hit his head 4 times and only missed once. Not too bad, eh? Joel says the other guys in our group were high five-ing and fist bumping him behind my back as I was shooting. And he was grinning from ear to ear until someone said, "Don't ever tick her off, man!". Giggle....
Well, speaking of routines, I need to wrap this up as it's almost dark now and we need to go down to the alpaca and remove all their food. Yes, tomorrow and Tuesday are the second round of shots for all of the alpaca to try and get rid of the parasites some of them have inside. Remember when we did this the first time 3 weeks ago? Yea, well, the next two days will be a repeat of that process. Should be fun. How hard can it be to round up 14 skittish animals and give each one a shot? Piece of cake!
Wishful thinking,
Debbie
