Recycling Works

Well it would appear that all the recycling everybody has been doing is working and global warming is over. We have below zero temperatures for the foreseeable future. When we go outside we are so wrapped up that only our faces are exposed. I am becoming an expert at holding my breath; it is so cold that I feel as though my lungs are freezing when I inhale. For some reason the animals are loving it. The sun is shining and the alpacas are looking so cute and fluffy. Si went up to turn off the water at dusk the other night and telephoned me to look out of the window. All the alpacas were pronking, even the older ones. I reckon that the haleage doesn't just smell like red wine and they were having a New Year's party of their own. We tried to get some more haleage and drove around everywhere yesterday but couldn't get any. It's worth the extra expense as they loved it much more than the hay so I'm going to be hitting the phone tomorrow when things are back to normal to try to track down more. They are going through hay at quite a rate but the haleage was like giving chocolate to a child (or woman), not a drop was wasted.

Poor Si is out doing more fencing at the moment. He is in absolute agony, he's managed to injure his back but doesn't know how. He's being a brave little soldier (What does patronizing mean?). He has been spending the evenings sitting on the sofa with a hot water bottle in the small of his back to try to ease the pain. He'll be doing hard sums again tomorrow so will get a bit of a rest in a nice warm office. As he has hardly seen the animals because it is dark when he leaves and comes home he thinks it is hilarious that they know their feed times. We slept in the other day and when he looked out of the window all the alpacas where at the troughs. I was busy cooking and was late doing the evening feed and they all gathered around the troughs again. He asked me how they knew what time I usually feed them. Well, they're either creatures of habit or maybe somebody bought them a watch for Xmas. I'm still amazed at how intelligent they are.

I managed to speak to MGB yesterday, I've been really missing them. We were trying to get together before Xmas but with the horrendous weather down here we didn't so we'll have to try to meet soon. They have quite a few of our animals over there and they are being really well looked after, probably to the extent of pampering. Ours are first into the barn every night and they said that they have started to queue to get back inside in the middle of the afternoon now that it is so cold.

The views here have been wonderful over the past few days with the sun shining and when we are in (defrosting) we are spending quite a bit of time kneeling on the sofa leaning on the back and just admiring the alpacas out of the window. It's funny as some of them come right over and just stare back at us, they get bored before we do though. I really must learn how to use the new camera; I suppose reading the instruction leaflet would help but that's soooo boring and anything slightly technical I put under the heading "boys' toy".