I did not sleep well last night. I was too busy thinking up things to worry about! Hopefully tonight will go better. Missus is hard at work this week and being swamped with things that are frustrating and high pressure. I won’t say more due to business being a business. I just want to put down that she is under a lot of pressure, and her job role is difficult because she is a multi-hat wearer including Senior Project Manager and Director. While she is wearing multiple hats, I take mine off to her for dealing with all she is right now, while we are adding more stresses at home with the farm.
Someone has driven by the place across the street and looked at it a couple of times today. I think it is in a prime location and will draw some attention. I was just amazed at how quickly it turned from an office visit with the realtor to actual people looking it over.
Seeing such things just about leaves a knot in my stomach. Turning ideas into reality can do that, especially early on, and when we are not sure where tomorrow leads us. But there are ideas of what to do, and I am happy to share some of the generalities.
We love our llamas, and have no plans to give them up. We would like a few more! They are wonderful animals, and for all of the talk of them being great guard animals, and the viciousness that that implies, I have always found them quite the opposite! They are lovely. Just this morning I went into the pen with the old girl with the bad hips, Mystique. I have to go into her pen to water the little pigs, and she has formed the habit of coming up behind me and waiting for me to turn around and spray her down with water. She does this early in the mornings, before it has got hot, so either it is really hot being a llama, or she just likes it either way. Whatever the case, I would like to quarter all the llamas and be able to work with them better going forward to develop these sorts of habits. I think having a barn for them to do that in, and to put them up in during bad weather would be really wonderful, so it is on the shopping list! Any new property going forward wants to have a barn.
I think in addition to a barn, a field to turn the llamas out in that gives them access to a pond and lots of water would also be very good, and increase the odds of us leaving the property for longer than we have been able to before. Currently, we can go out for a tops of about 36 hours. We would like to better that.
Chickens are a given on a farm. The eggs and food source are obvious, and helpful. There is too much that can be done with eggs to give up on them, and fresh eggs are really so much better than store bought.
We will keep the peacocks, too. They are ornamental, and maybe they could pull a bit of money selling them as they breed, but we would like to have them as a permanent part of our farm, wherever.
I don’t want to do pigs again unless we are properly set up for them for the long term. I am not a butcher, either, so that has got to either be learned, or they have to be given up on. Maybe they will come again in the future, but only if there is good housing and strong fencing set up for them, and the breeds we pick are a bit smaller than our Large Black was. She was lovely, but weighing in at about 400 pounds, she was also a big, expensive pet. So pigs are probably out, at least for a bit.
Missus wants to carry on with goats, but we will need the means to sell them of so, or we will be overrun! I have the boys away from the girls now, because they come in twos and threes when they do come! That turns into a lot of hay consumption!
Missus wants to carry on with our Lionhead Angora Cross Rabbits. Who could blame her? She wants a better pen for them where they can have social time and such, so that is something we are looking at in a new place.
Waterfowl are okay, but again, I would like to seem them with access to a pond because ducks and geese see fresh water as something to go ruin with mud and dirt just as fast as they can, and messing it all up for the chickens that currently live with them.
I have been on this place not for some nine years, working with one hose connection for all of it, and with no tractor to help out with the heavy work. Those are two things that have got to change, especially where I have crossed the fifty-mark! Snow removal is a pain, moving hay impossible in the size bales we currently buy, and so many other jobs that would be aided, especially firewood and compost and other wood products and byproducts!
Other tools I would like to procure include a sawmill and a few more hand tools to try my skills at some furniture building from timber to finished product. I could use a workshop rather than a garage for that kind of thing.
Missus wants to get the fiber mill going where we can handle our own llama fiber, and other people’s fibers as well. If you are following my logic here, you may be adding up the out buildings we are shopping for so all this does not have to be stuffed into a house with us! There are places, and they are in our range, but we have to get ourselves to one, and hopefully not find it in serious need of work when we get there. Only time will tell on that part. Geography has not even been worked out yet.
Last, but not least, I have got a little model of the train I rode on with mom when I was nine. I would like to have a little space to set up something with that. A basement or an attic would do it.
Leaving the area we are in would be bittersweet. While we don’t know a lot of people around us very well, there are a lot of wonderful places around us that we like to go to, such as the ice cream manufacturer’s shop, and the flour mill, the cheese factory, and the honey maker. These are places we can get items that are very fresh, and very good. There are other treats as well, such as the milk shakes over at Brea Lake, or the wonderful little BBQ place over in Malad.
Right now, things are not set in stone or even wet cement. But the ball has been pushed and will either roll, or not. It is time for a change, so I am happy for it to. I have had changes of scenery all of my life, from living in places like California and Colorado and the UK, to little changes from city to city.
I’d like to live where the grass is tender, and I can scythe it without it pushing over because it is dry. I’d like to put a canoe in the water and row from shore to shore, listening to the birds, and spotting the occasional fish breaching the surface of the water, and teaching my daughters to appreciate nature and out part in it. I’d like home to be a place where I can let my llamas graze all summer long, and where I can provide winter feed without being subject to massive price hikes like we have recently. I’d like to spend my evenings in the wood shop, working out how to build a chair for a grandchild, or building a detail for the model railroad. I would like to roll around on a tractor, pulling a chicken coop behind and setting up the birds so they can peck and scratch in a new spot each day. But mostly, I want to see Missus able to spread out and do her hobbies and making the things she enjoys doing, and have a space to teach others the many things she has spent years learning on our hobby farming adventure, and I would like to see her with a deep, contented smile on her face. It is going to take a change to do all of that, and the time is here to at least try to make it so.
I am fifty. Accidents aside, I am probably 20 to 50 years away from snuffing it. Whatever, I need to make good use of it all. We need to put down where our roots can grow a little deeper than they have been able to here.
Oh, and I still love heating our place with the woodstove, so wherever we go, I am going to need that! There is nothing better, and nothing that provides more security over the winter than having heat with the flick of a match and a good pile of dry wood at the ready! I don’t ever want to give that up! That rules out most rest homes for me in the future!