Annmarie has been working on washing and cleaning the alpaca fleece. She uses a bin and some fabric netting. She has washed this single fleece four times and each time she pulls it out of the water the organic matter gets physically picked out. After four times, actual progress is being made. It will have taken a solid 48 hours to get the fleece dry. Annmarie wants to dry this one before she starts in on a second one. She has some medieval looking device that is full of nails that is supposed to align the fibers and help pull out the rest of the organic matter. Getting the fibers all lined up will make a huge difference. Just being clean has made a huge difference. She will sort it directly into a vacuum bag and can work on spinning it when its cold outside. We cover the fiber with the fine netting and fold it under, all around the edges so that the wind cannot blow it away and the birds cannot steal it for nesting material.
Annmarie and I had been discussing my weekend project priorities all week. The alpaca are pretty high on the list but I have someone who has never helped shear coming out next weekend to assist me. It will be a hoot for them. So that is next week. I need to hammer out the fence around two sides of field one so I can turn the animals loose in there next month. This was my preferred choice. Nope, my number one task will be to fix the front porch decking. We did not get the last board screwed in correctly and it is bowed now. Unfortunately, the thought was someone would have to crawl under the porch and army crawl 40 feet through cobwebs, gravel, dirt and yellow jacks to get to the far end of the porch. The real problem is there is a special decking screw for the TREX decking and I know I have some somewhere on the farm I am just unsure where they are. So Mr Rainman and I proceeded to look for said special screws. After about 45 minutes I came to the conclusion that piling stuff in the old house for the last eight months has made a huge mess and I cannot find anything. So we started to throw away trash and put stuff away. After almost one and a half hours cleaning Mr Rainman found them on the shelf we had both already looked at. On a plus, side the old house is a lot cleaner now!
I did not really want to crawl under the porch. It had a lot of spiderwebs and a Yellowjacket nest under there. Unfortunately, the entrance is fairly small. I did not realize how small until Mr Rainman attempted to get in through the opening. I had to lay on my belly with my arms forward and crawls forward using my feet and elbows only. I was only able to move forward about two inches at a time. We had an old long handle to knock down the cobwebs so you did not have to crawl through them. They can be a little overwhelming. I was about ten feet under the porch when we realized that I could not actually scoot the board over from underneath. I had to back out two inches at a time. We were able to pry it from above and get it screwed down. There was dust and cobwebs everywhere so Mr Rainman pressure washed the entire porch and outside furniture while I went and put away tools in the machine shed.
Mr Rainman did some preventative maintenance on the John Deere tractor. We cut down all the sucker trees from the front yard and tossed them over to the sheep as a snack. We started to work on the floor in the new freezer room. I had measured and cut the new floor boards but somehow am off by a bit. The new floor is not quite level. I will need to cut a little piece for two legs of the freezer so it sits level. I am still not sure how I managed to do this. On the plus side I think I can finish the floor and maybe the siding tomorrow. Once that is done we can move the freezers into this room. They should stay a lot more clutter free this way. Once the freezers are in I will see about adding some storage shelves into the space. The space where the freezers are currently will be for the two tool boxes in my future office space. This should open the space up so it can be worked on gradually. The front porch will be done when I finish installing a door to get under the porch. Currently, it’s a crawl way with the horse mounting block stopping the dogs from getting underneath it. I will work on this also! I will, really…
Stewart Creek Somethings 