A red letter day: I started the knit-addicted stash-stowing task. I finally decided I'd better look at everything I own and categorize it by yarn type. I am soooo embarrassed. I have stuff I forgot about, totally. I found a pair of 3/4s done mittens on the needle still. And one finished mitten out of some of my handspun, with the ribbing cuff of the second on a needle. And....If I knit a pair of socks a week, I'll use up the sock yarn I already have in, oh, a matter of years or so! (That won't stop me from lusting after new sock yarns.)

After much cogitation, I settled on the following categories for yarn: superwash wools, feltable wools, sock yarn, alpaca, silks or silk blends, and novelty (ribbons, mostly). I have an excess of fuschia in all fibers, which I vaguely recall collecting for a specific project whose characteristics escape me now. I know it was for someone else, not myself. Hmmm.

Naturally, the impetus for doing all this....looking for two specific yarns I NEED to finish two pairs of socks....led to disappointment. I found every type of yarn BUT the ones I was looking for. I can visualize them in bags with other yarns, but those specific two bags are nowhere to be found. I might be making "fraternal" twins for the second socks, and hope nobody looks too closely.

Ron sent me home with an orphan, sick little lamb two days ago. I've been bottle feeding him regularly and giving him antibiotics and supportive nutrients. He seems less "hot" (temperature going down) but remains very stiff and doesn't move around much. This morning I gave him tetanus antitoxin in addition to antibiotic shots, and a few hours later he tried to follow the other sheep out to the field. He couldn't keep up and made it out of the barn but then started bleating pitifully. I carried him out to the pasture and put him down in the clean grass. I'm a proponent of fresh air and sunshine! At least he's brighter eyed and trying to move around.

I'm also feeding one of a set of triplets, who is now a real pet, running up to me, following me around, talking to me. In a pen in the barn, I have a ewe with mastitis and her twins, who also drink a bottle twice a day. I gave the ewe a big dose of penicillin this morning. She eats well and is hale and hearty even though she's 10 years old. I hope the antibiotic helps. I'd hate to think it's her last year here.

All these "bottle babies" must be payback for my bragging that I don't get pet lambs from my good ewes! I normally don't keep anything that can't raise its lambs, and that way have reached the point where I usually don't have "bummer" lambs that need bottle feeding. This year is payback, I guess!

I want to start the sweater for my nephew, out of hand spun yarn from "his" sheep (born the same day he was). With all the books and patterns I've searched, I still haven't settled on a design. I'd like something with simple cables or something to make it less generic. I know he'd like a hood! He loves hats of all kinds.

It's been beautifully warm and sunny during the days, but at 6 a.m. I need a jacket. Yesterday morning, I even wore the great hat made from Rowen super chunky wool that my SP sent to me...Thanks, Pal!!

Yaawwwn....zzzz.....baaa!

This morning the "old gray mare" (an elderly sheep) finally went into labor and produced a huge and extremely oddly colored ewe lamb. The old lady's belly still looks huge, but there aren't any more lambs in there....I think she's just showing the aftermath of age, pregnancy, and sagging muscles. (I can sympathize with the latter, at least! After adolescence, gravity is NOT our friend!)

The lamb seems determined to nurse on the side of the udder that is "dead"....has no milk due to a case of mastitis last year. The good side hangs much lower, which lambs usually catch on to once they've found it, but this one seems a bit dense where that's concerned. I fed her 4 oz. of replacement Colostrix from a bottle this evening. I didn't want to feed her much, because I want her to keep trying on the ewe until she learns where the milk comes from.

This mom was the last of the ewes to lamb here at FenCroft. There are more of the Leicester flock yet to lamb over on Pleasant Lake Rd., at one of friend Ron's farms, and there might be a yearling or three bred to lamb in about a month or more here at home. One is showing a tiny, tiny bit of "bag" (udder), but I can't tell if any others are pregnant.

A knitting disaster (well, sort of): In my hurry to run to the barn for a quick check, I failed to hide my project bag and came back into the house to find the ends chewed off of all the needles in a sock-in-progress, and a set of (gag! horrors!) EBONY double points slipped out of their paper package and chewed in halves. Believe it or not, none of the stitches fell off the sock in progress (it's just a simple plain Jane sock); however, slipping the stitches over munched bamboo led to a bit of frustration because just about every stitch caught, snagged, split, or something. The culprit? One of the greyhounds. I honestly am not sure whether it's Jello or Dottie. I'm not willing to sacrifice any more dpns just to see who has turned criminally inclined. (I could leave them one at a time with a tempting knitting bag in sight and within reach.)

The lamb born this morning is very odd: Snow white head with big black circles around her eyes, very black legs and belly with two very white "bracelets" around her back legs, big very black spots on her body, but these are on a background of mottled gray....kind of like a blue merle dog. Her father is white and her mother's black (well, gray with age now); her grandparents were moorit badger and gray, moorit and gray badger. She is definitely a California Variegated Mutant of a different variety.

A swarm of honey bees went at my apple trees today. As I approached a gate to shut the sheep out of the pasture south of my house, I could hear the bees buzzing when I was still about 15 feet away from the tree. They looked like they were in heaven. The apple trees have more blossoms than I've ever seen before. I'm not sure how that will translate to fruit, but if bees polinating them is a good thing, then I might as well think positively! I don't use pesticides (because of the birds, etc.), so I never get a very good crop....sheep feed is about it. It will be interesting to see what happens this year. The pear trees didn't have as many blossoms, and my two peach trees look dismal. Rhubarb survived the sheep attack of last year, and is coming back. I think I'll leave it this year and not pick any, since the plants are definitely smaller than before last spring's sheep feast.

I actually bought new batteries for my camera so I can show knitting works and critters here, but now I can't find them. I'll blame it on the fact that I've had few full nights of sleep in the past month. The day before that old ewe lambed, I spend two hours walking the farm, trying to find her. I swear she was constantly moving to where I had just looked, sneaking around behind me, because it shouldn't take two hours to find a full grown sheep, off on its own, in a space that's only a total of about seven acres. She had been hiding the day before that, and I was worried that she'd have trouble lambing or the lambs would need help eating, so when I finally found her last night, I "herded" her a couple hundred yards back into the barn, where I gave her a big pen, hay, and fresh water. Since she lambed so early this morning, I'm glad she was in the barn and I didn't have to search again!

They're predicting dry weather for another four days or so....that will probably be the first solid week to ten days that it has not rained here this year. I'm afraid we're looking at very little rain this summer....not good for pastures or those of us who have to buy hay for next winter.

Enough! I can actually go to bed without first going out to the barn. Sigh. Bliss.