Wellington Fibres

Here are the photos from the trip to Wellington Fibres.

These are the breeding herd goats.

This is a boy goat, who is waiting to be sold to another farm.



This is fleece that has been dyed, and it waiting to be washed.

This is washed fleece, hung up to dry.

Picked fleece (that's the step after drying; it takes out all the extra bits of stuff) going into a carder.

And coming out the back end of the carder.



These are the roving cakes that are make by the carder, waiting to be fed into the spinning machine.


This is the spinning machine.

This is a skein of spun yarn.

And this is the store!

I don't have photos yet of the lovely yarn...Mom spoiled me with enough for a sweater, and I got two colours of merino/mohair blend that will make Fred and I each a pair of socks.

The cake was wonderful - both to eat and to look at. Fred did a fantastic job! But I forgot to take a photo, sorry.

A weekend in the country

Ok, so, really only a morning in the country, but I couldn't pass up the chance to hum a little Sondheim.

Anyway!

Tomorrow morning I am accompanying my mother, some of her guild members and some of the London Handweavers and Spinners guild to a goat farm! Wellington Fibres is about a 30 minute drive from home. They raise angora sheep, which produce mohair. Mmmm...mohair. I'm taking a camera with me. And some cash. But the debit card stays at home.

While I am out playing with goats, Fred will be at home baking this cake. We're going to a pot-luck Hallowe'en dinner party tomorrow night, and he decided while flipping through my Martha Stewart catalogue, that this would be our contribution, and that he would be making it.

I should be home from the goat farm by about two, just in case.

Day by Day

We did not have to make a trip to the vet today! Roo is doing much better: she's eating and drinking and not vomiting! She's kept everything down for 36 hours, now we're waiting to see when/if she'll have a bowel movement. Let me tell you, I never thought I would look forward to picking up dog poop.

Her balance is still off, and she falls over when she shakes her head or tries to chase a cat - but at least she's back to wanting to chase cats.

Thanks everyone for your good thoughts and wishes.

It doesn't look good

This is Roo. Up until last Thursday she was pretty darn healthy for a senior puppy. Sadly, although the head tilt is going away, she's still vomiting. On the vet's advice we've tried switching her hard food for soft, tried not giving her the anti-biotics, tried giving her Gatorade. She'll eat or drink a little and then at some point later on it all comes back up again. We were hopeful yesterday - she went for almost 24 hours without bringing anything back up again, but today... let's just say we're going through paper towels at an accelerated rate. The vet says that if the vestibular disorder diagnosis was the correct one, we would have seen a marked improvement within 3 days so it is likely something else. We'll wait to see how she is on Friday, but if there is no improvement, we will probably have to say good bye to Roo this Saturday.

The good, the not-so-good, and the downright crappy - updated!

It's been a crazy couple of weeks.

The good: the new job is exciting and only a half-hour drive from home, compared to the roughly two hours each was I was travelling. I miss my friends from the last job, but that's about it. As a going away gift, the company gave me a round-the-world tea package. Once a month for the next 6 months, I will get two fancy teas in the mail. Usually people who quit there get a "Don't let the door hit you on the way out" kind of good-bye, so the gift was quite a pleasant surprise. I got spoiled for my birthday this year too, with knitting books and yarn and more tea and an evening with Fred (he works the afternoon shift, so we don't see each other during the week usually), and I went to meet some internet knitters and eat gelato last night.

The not-so-good: Last Sunday we brought Fred's 14 year old husky/shepherd cross home to live with us. We expected that the cats would be unhappy with the change, but the level of unhappiness was far worse than we expected. Like, Zoe climbing the blinds in the kitchen then making Fred bleed really badly when he tried to get her down, then her racing across the top of the kitchen counter trailing urine (the cat's) and blood (Fred's) after her. The cats have pretty much lived in our bedroom since Sunday night, although they will go out into the hallway for food and to use the litter. We had to put a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs so that the cats live on one floor of the house, and Roo lives on the other.

The downright crappy: When I got home from knitting in public last night, Roo was sick. At first I thought it was just because she had gotten ahold of and chewed up a bunch of kleenex. So I cleaned up the carpet, gave her a drink and took her out to pee. Then she threw up again. All the water she'd just drunk. This went on all night, with her only being able to keep water down for about 5 minutes, and not wanting to eat anything. She didn't even want any peanut butter. Fred is on his way to the vet with her. We're both thinking kidney failure, and Fred said that while the vet didn't want to diagnose over the phone, he felt from her tone of voice that she agrees with us. So after a traumatic 5 days with the cats, it's about to get a whole lot more traumatic.

Edited to add: Apparently we get the slightly broken animals. Roo has the same thing that Zoe does - vestibular disorder. This is something that manifests in young cats and old dogs. I'm very happy that Roo's illness is not the worst-case scenario, but boy, it would be nice to have an animal at some point that isn't dizzy or limping or running away from dust.