Moo’s Blog

The shelter roof collapsed yesterday. Last night it was the turn of the greenhouse! The snow from the barn and the side slid off and ONTO the greenhouse. It could not hold it. It collapsed!
In retrospect, it was not a good location for the greenhouse. However, saying that, maybe the past never got the snow storms we are having now? This is our fourth winter here in Grand Forks, and this is the first year we have seen snow staying on the rooves for so long. The snow got to a depth of over 16 inches on the rooves, and as it got wetter with the raise in the temperature, it got heavier.

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Wow! What a lot of snow we have had these last four weeks! I think we have had at least the amount we normally have all through the winter. This year not only are we having a lt of snow, but the snow we are having is NOT going away. Usually the snow that falls on our rooves fall off after a day or so.
This year the snow is STILL on the rooves. Some of it has melted a little, and formed icicles on its way down. BUT it has NOT fallen off the roof with a WHOOOOMP! That is still to happen!
I heard the news tonight about the road conditions. Avalanches are a problem in many areas.
Indeed the Hope-Princeton Hwy (Hwy 3)is closed near the Manning Park area, both lanes (both ways);
the area East of Christina Lake is closed bot h ways (Hwy 3) , (the Paulson Summit area), and the Coquihala is closed too. Also an area near Hope on Hwy 1.
To the south of Grand Forks, in the USA there is a Flood warning for Coleville.
So, if anyone wants to go far from Grand Forks, it is going to be very difficult tonight and maybe for the next few days!!

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A Happy New Year to you all.
May 2009 bring you all that you wish for;
health, wealth and happiness!

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I have been doing a lot of family tree research since we have been snowed in.
On one branch of the family tree…. a great grandparent on my first husband’s side…. I found an interesting fact.
John had been married to an Emma. Emma died and John had children with his live-in servant, a Caroline. Caroline it turns out was the neice of Emma! Caroline’s mother was Emma’s sister!!
This is one occassion where it has paid to research a branch (the fist wife) that is really of no relevance to the tree, other than to complete a bigger picture! Without the research on Emma, I would not have easily found the relationship to Caroline!!

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I found a gt gt grandfather (my grandfather’s maternal side) a Daniel Tucker in a 1901 census. The exciting part was that I knew the area that the census was talking about. It was the Workhouse in Taunton, Somerset. This was situated in the parish of Holy Trinity, the parish where I went to my infant and junior school. My home was “just down the road” about a mile away! Not only that, when i was a child of eight, I went around the then infirmary, the hospital for old people, which in the past was part of the Workhouse!
In the same census I found some relatives of my direct line on my grandmothers side….. there was a Richard Maddock, his wife Elizabeth and their nephew William who was only 53.
On further investigation it appears that my mother’s grandfather, a Joseph Tucker was at this workhouse in his later years, and that her father took her to see her “granfer” there. Her father called him “Jack” so am assuming this was the name a lot of people knew him by. I will get his death certificate which should give the location of his death.

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I got really excited the other day to find that a nephew of my grandmother emigrated. What was most exciting was the fact that on his landing papers (Toronto, Canada) there was a description of him. He was 17 when he emigrated and when he was 23 and ten months old he was having five days in New York visiting a friend. He was five feet four and a half inches tall (interesting to me as my grandmother was under five feet tall, and all her siblings were short too), he had light brown hair and blue eyes!

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I have a new web page. We recently got some new material for our dining room chairs. Although the chairs were only about two years old, the material on them was a cream color and had got stained with wine, paw prints, and from our work clothes when we would sit on the seats before changing our dirty clothes! The web page tells how we re-upholstered the chairs and also has a power point presentation with photos of the proceedure.
I have been finding it difficult to put photos on the site that are jsut little thumbs. So my way around it was putting the photos onto powerpoint, then uploading the power point presentation.

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The girl alpacas have been with us over a weeknow. They appear to be settling in well. They don’t eat as much hay as the boys, but they are a slighter build so I am supposing that is normal. The boys love gettign their grain forst thing in the mornings, and come running up to me and eat out of my hands, with Frankie eating out of the bucket. The girls took a few days to get used to me, but now they come running too,and can’t wait for the boys to get fed their grain and for it to be their turn. Keremeos was the first to take the grain, eating out of the bucket. Sasha, our girl alapca has been eating out of my hand for three or four days now. The littlest one, I call her Delilah, does not eat the grain either out of my hand or out of the bucket, but she does now nibble at bits of grain that have fallen on the grass. She still suckles from her mum, and is still very wary of getting near me.

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We are excited as our girl alpaca arrives tomorrow! Sasha is the new girl. She is about 15 months old and is the sister of Chopaka (male, single registered)and the half sister of Sumac (male,single registered). They all share the same mother, Keremeos (single registered), and she will be coming too along with a baby of hers so that Sasha (siingle registered) will not be lonely.
Alpacas need to have company. One on their own is no good as they get lonely. And since we can’t have our boys in with any female in case they mate, and particularly with Sasha who is a close relative, then we have done the next best thing to buying a couple of girls, and that is borrowing them!
Female alpacas are expensive to buy, more expensive than male alpacas. Double registered alpacas (those registered in Canada and the USA) are more expensive than single registered (those registered in just one country).
Sasha should be pregnant. Sasha is dark brown in color and Caesar, the male she was mated with, is a light brown color so we are hoping that the offspring will have brown fleece. We thi8nk she is pregnant as she spits and kicks at the male once she has “taken”. The cria, or baby,shoul dbe due about 11 months after mating, which means sometime around about September she should give birth!
We (the Royal “we” here…meaning mainly my husband!) have cleaned up the paddock where the horses used to be, fenced a new area off and made the shelter more suitable for the alpacas. Plus we have a heated bucket for the water for the females and more hay coming tomorrow to make sure they all have enough to eat over the winter.
Chopaka should be pleased to see the females. We took our males down to the neighbours alpaca farm (Sunshine Valley Alpacas) while we went to England and they stayed there for three weeks. (this is the farm that has Sasha and Keremeos and her baby, plus many other females,most of them double registered and the farm where we got our male, white, blue eyed (unregistered) Frankie.) When we got our alpacas back and walked them down the road back to our farm all but Chopaka were pleased to be home. Chopaka however spent many days looking over the gate to see if he could escape back down the road!!
I wonder what he will make of having females around?!

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We have had the horses on our property for three years. They have been a pleasure to watch and although we have not had to look after them (apart from the odd day or two when requested), we have got used to having them there.
Last night, at about 6pm they moved location.
Their owners are moving out of BC to Swift Current. The horses are not able to go with them so they have been relocated for the time being to new owners about three or four miles from our farm.
Bo saw them going for a “walk” last night, their owners riding them (when he was in with the alpacas. However he was surprised and disapointed this morning to find no sign of any horses in their paddock. I know he is going to miss them very very much as he used to love to spend time watching them from the other side of the fence, getting in with them whenever he could!

The up side of all this:
we now have room to have female alpacas!!! We have “Sasha” coming in about a months time. At the moment she is at her farm, being bred with a male stud “Caesar”, a fawn coloured male. Sasha is the sister to Chopaka and the half sister to Sumac, so they will not be allowed to breed with her. Frankie Blue Eyes coudl breed with her if we choose to allow him. Hopefully Sasha, a very dark brown coloured female, will have a baby (cria) in 11 months time!!!!

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