It's good to talk

There was only one lamb after all. Last year this ewe had
two, but didn't look after them very well. She is doing a
better job this time around.

I planned on writing the blog yesterday while I was travelling, since I didn't get the chance on Monday night, but I spent the time doing some work for my course which was urgently needed to be done instead. I thought I would get the chance today after tea (dinner) but Ian called as I was heading to the shops, saying "I can't come back just yet, one of the sheep is giving birth." The ewe managed to giver birth on her own with no problems and Ian managed to get the lamb and mother into the chicken house and then came to fetch me. Well we waited and waited for lamb number two and then Ian called our friend, who has infinitely more experience than we do to see what's next. So while they are taking a look, I'm spending a few minutes typing up last week's blog.

The swelling around Aggie's eye has gone down at least

Once we started Aggie on antibiotics, both our days were tied up. I had to help Ian with holding Aggie while he gave the injections. She definitely fell out with me. I am not her best friend to say the least. After the third day, the swelling around her eye started to recede, she also started to pick up. The day before she looked unwell and didn't seem to be eating properly, we were concerned at this, but since then, she has seemed much brighter in herself.

And she is eating at least

We had some visitors again this weekend. This time one of them could speak excellent English and they phoned beforehand to let us know they were coming. We gave them the spiel and they took lots of pictures. The lady could understand okay, but she had trouble speaking English, so a little translation was needed every now and again, but she definitely fell in love with the alpacas. They found our place through the website and so it seems like the combination of website, Facebook and local municipality advertising seems to be helping to send visitors our way, even at this time of the year, which is rather surprising.

Any food? 

This weekend I had to travel up to Tartu for my annual evaluation. Strictly speaking I should have finished my PhD but many people struggle to finish within the timeframe due to the criteria of having to have three papers published in academic journals, of which, two have to be in papers of a sufficient quality and the third to at least acceptance stage. I only have one so far. I have a four or five short articles published but they don't count. No one was particularly worried, I had at least got them well on in the draft stage, so if I get to the review stage I should at least have a chance of finishing this year sometime. At least the evaluation went okay.

The girls are not so keen to go out these days

I was a tad annoyed to find out that one of the buses I was relying on to get me to Tartu didn't run on a Sunday. I am not sure if this is a recent thing or not, it has been a while since I travelled on that day. I thought I had checked. Obviously not. What was even more irritating was finding out that my supervisor had actually been in the area close by on that day and was even passing through the town where I got delayed at the time I had hoped to catch the bus. If I had known I could perhaps had saved myself such an early start to the day. Oh well! The reason he was in the area was to do some skiing. We still have plenty of snow around us, but as I headed to the west and then north the snow gradually disappeared and there was some strange green stuff instead, I think they call it grass. At least the paths were not icy either.

Instead they stay in and eat from the feeders

It was not just a long day travelling up, it was a long day the following day. It started with my evaluation just after 9am, then I spent about an hour chatting with another PhD student about some of my ideas and he was so encouraging and suggested that he thought the ideas would even be useful in somewhere like India, where he comes from and had I ever thought about going. Errr! Well no! Not before. Not sure how that could come about, but you never know.  We'll see.

The boys go out more, especially Brencis, but then he has
got a very good dense coat on him

After seeing my supervisor and outlining some urgent tasks that needed to be finished by the end of the week I went onto have lunch with a friend of mine. I normally stay with her but this time took advantage of another friend being away and being allowed to stay in her flat. It made a nice change of scenery, not that I got to spend very long there, because once I had finished having lunch with my friend we both walked up towards the university, where we parted company and I went off to the veterinary school. No I haven't changed courses and no I am not finally becoming a vet - something I had wanted to do as a kid and had even applied to but didn't get in. Good job! Otherwise I would never have met Ian.

What is it about Mr. P and his food?

Anyway, this time I was having a chat about Aggie. I chatted with the one of the few vets at the university who has treated alpacas but mainly for skin problems and it was good to be able to share knowledge. Of course she has the more general animal health knowledge and I had the knowledge from mainly chatting with Ian rather than the hands on day to day knowledge he has. It was funny that when we had finished she said it was nice to chat with someone so enthusiastic, but then she hasn't met Ian yet! I also made sure that she knew that the university was welcome to visit and work with us and our friends up in Estonia to improve their knowledge on alpacas and alpaca handling. They might need that knowledge in the future if herds increase. She did suggest a change in Aggie's medication, it was fine for a week but not for longer since she was pregnant, something Ian and I had already discussed - some advantages to our previous degrees means at least we can discuss this type of thing and work somethings out for ourselves, but it is nice to find we were thinking in the right direction.

Looking rather portly

Mr. Tellus has been eating the snow again

Next stop was the university to download some papers before rounding off the day with another visit to my Indian friend and his lovely wife and daughter for yet more chatting and something to eat. I don't think I stopped chatting from around 9am to 8pm, apart from the twenty minute walk down to my friend's house and that is why the blog was late initially. The range of topics I covered over the course of the day was fairly wide, from my course, alpacas, family, the situation regarding the ban on Muslims in America - and as my Indian friend pointed out earlier on in the day actually meant one of our colleagues who also had her evaluation at the same time, a lovely lady from Iran, would not be allowed in and he wonders if he would be discriminated against due to the colour of his skin. Not a pleasant thought. We chatted about the EU and how the problems affected us both and on and on and on. As for the other two days since, well that is a subject for next week's blog.

Grandma Oh Oh

Our granddaughter reading
the book

I mentioned last week that Ian's mother had an unusual name, but that is one given her at birth. I have acquired mine from my youngest granddaughter and it is Grandma Oh oh! For Christmas I put together a book called "My Grandad," it was a way of sharing what Ian does on the farm and there was also a little bit about me of course. There was a picture of me feeding the alpacas and one of me skiing. Every time my little granddaughter gets to that point in the book, she goes Oh Oh! And that is the story of how I acquired my name. My daughter finds it hilarious and so I think there is a degree of encouragement going on there. I am also known as Grandma Jo and GJ, short for Granny Jo to my other grandchildren.

The front cover of the book

Whilst on the subject of Grandma's and Ian's mother we are heading to the UK the first week of February, for the funeral. It would appear there has been a spike of deaths over Christmas and a refurbishment of a crematorium, creating a backlog of funerals, hence the long wait. I am sure that must be hard for the families, for us at the moment it all seems so distant. I know it will hit us more when we see the family.  At least we won't be paying over £500 just to fly Ryanair though, which would be horrendous, the flights were much cheaper in February, not much of a consolation really. There was one point this week when the reality of it hit Ian, it was when he switched off the alerts to remind him to ring his mother. He had the alerts, because it is too easy to get busy and suddenly time has passed. It did mean that although she was so far away, he was in regular contact. It is such a shame she was afraid of computers, I'm sure she would have enjoyed a Skype to Skype call with him, rather than just hearing his voice.

Herk up to his usual trick of hogging the alpaca house.
Not too bad when it is fine, but he does this even when
it is snowing hard, so Tellus stays in the outside shelter and
poor Turbjørn ends up out in the cold. Doesn't seem to
be doing him any harm though. He seems fit enough.

One of the reasons for not dashing over is the animals. We have managed to find someone to look after them for the time we are away, as I mentioned last week, but it is a difficult time of the year to leave them for long. The days are short and they need more than just hay in the colder days. We had to give Veronica some more injections as we suspected she was being bothered by mites again, but the course should be finished by next week. We know a few people who would be willing to help, but it is a hard time to ask. One neighbour, who is the closest, also sometimes has the most difficulty in getting out from her house if it snows, because she is up the hillside. Another neighbour to where we live works regular hours and it would be difficult to fit in letting the animals out and putting them away at the times they need to be dealt with. At least another neighbour is more flexible and should be able to work something out if it snows heavily, which we hope it won't. I must share one funny incident about our alpacas that happened recently though. It was one of those, "I wished we had a camera handy" moments. We went up to the alpaca house to feed them and there sat on the back of Estelle, was one of the chickens. Obviously the chicken had found a very nice cosy place to sit, I bet her toes were warm. We were surprised that Estelle didn't seem bothered at all.

This was actually taken on the 6th January, but it is
pretty and since I am not at home today, it is more difficult
to get photos that Ian has taken

It has been another of those weeks of "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!" and in between melting away, but not quite. Ian is not a fan of snow any more, he used to enjoy it, but now it just makes more work that he has to do because of the animals. More work, more clearing and it stops him getting into the forest to cut down trees for next winter's fuel and progressing on the clearing work that needs doing. Chances are now the snow will be hanging around, once past mid-January the temperatures usually plummet and the ground is cold, so we shall see.

Ian kitted up for the winter. I keep
thinking he looks like one of those
Bayeux tapestry soldiers in that hat
and neck warmer

Sometimes I think I make it sound like alpacas are a lot of work. In many ways they are not, they need water, hay and additional feeding in winter. It is better to clean their paddocks daily, but since they have a communal poo pile that is not a huge problem. It is just that you have to be there at strategic times of the day at this time of year. In summer they are hardly any bother at all. Then it is just a matter of let them out, they eat grass all day, clean their communal poo pile to stop it spreading, fresh bedding in their living quarters every now and again, put them away at night and jobs done. There is of course the moving of fences for fresh grass from time to time and shearing. They are the main jobs. Of course as we get more, it gets more complicated and we have to think or rather Ian has to think, how we can manage them best. Like when do we want babies? Some folks have them all year round, we don't. I think the main issue is being tied, it is not like just caring for the land, where a day a way won't hurt.

A puppet I made for our grandson

On a completely different topic I have to admit to a degree of disorderliness over Christmas presents and I only got around to posting them after Christmas. Incredibly some of the parcels only took four days to arrive, normally it is more like 10 days. Unfortunately Ian's mother's present wasn't one of them and so that didn't arrive until after she died. At least that wasn't as bad as the Christmas card she sent to us that was posted on the 16th December to us and arrived a few days later here than her parcel did. Having said that, we actually got two Christmas cards from her, as one arrived before Christmas. Not quite sure if Ian's mother had got confused, or the two daughter-in-laws both sorted out a card on her behalf, knowing she wasn't feeling well. It is the sort of thing that Ian's family would laugh about. They have quite a black sense of humour at times, but it is one way of coping with the bad times and sometimes not a bad way at all.

Our egg layers

Since it has been quite a varied week this week, the next topic is about development. Development in our area has not been particularly fast. There are bright pockets where people are working hard, but there are also real institutional barriers - to put it diplomatically. There is money available, but trying to get people together to access this money is a bit of a challenge, especially with those barriers. It was interesting therefore to be involved in the first meeting to do with the Leader programme. This has been run by the EU for many years and run quite successfully in many places. It is a way of getting local people to decide where money should be spent, it is also a way of getting local people to think of ways that would benefit many people, not just themselves, but as I said, people have to cooperate.

The setting sun

We were fortunate that there was someone there who could translate, there were actually a few people, but one was coopted - poor guy. I have heard a lot about this programme, but I had never seen it being set up in an area before and so it was quite fascinating to watch and take notes. We got talking to the ladies after the meeting, as a friend of ours had helped to organise the venue for it and the lady was working on getting farmers together to talk about their experiences - we are down to talk on February 26th about alpacas and tomatoes in particular, as my friend insisted we do that. I had to ask my friend what was so fascinating about the way we grew our tomatoes and apparently it is because we mulch them and don't water them as often as Latvians do. We also take all the leaves off at the first sign of blight. Didn't realise that was so fascinating.

Christmas lights in Tartu are still up, but the Christmas tree
is not. Lights tend to stay up longer in Estonia and in
Latvia, as it brightens the dark nights.

And last but not least, I had my yearly evaluation today. The evaluators didn't seem to have any problems with where I am in my studies. They shouldn't do, I have more than enough credit points. I need 60 by year four and I have just finished my second year and I have 65. I also have papers in progress and I need three by year four. That might be more of a problem, but hopefully by the end of the year, I shall have full papers published and not just the short papers so far. I did explain my approach, because I am working in a social science field and they are all natural sciences, at least my science background helps there. I think they were still a little bemused by my presentation, because it was bright, colourful and had pictures of art work and diagrams with pictures. All my creative embroidery artwork board prep and children's work coming into play there.

Before

After! Courtesy of Google. They automatically created a panoramic shot

Why?

He almost looks like he's smiling here.
He was so much better on this day, so
perky. Here he is pictured with the soft
toy we nicknamed Dally, as in Dally
Llama. It is amazing how close they are
in colour

No suspense this week, I can't do it. It is one of the most difficult posts I have ever written, as  emotionally I am quite exhausted. Our little alpaca, who we named Benedikts -meaning blessed - died on Friday and it hit us both hard. We tried everything we could to keep him alive and still it may have been our inexperience that lead to his demise, although to be fair to ourselves, it was partly our experience and that of friends that kept him alive to that point. Before I go onto explain, I do want to say I'm not looking for sympathy, I really find it difficult to take much fussing. Life can be tough sometimes especially if you have animals and intend rearing them. We know this will not be the last death of a cria we will see, but it is our first and that's always tough. I know brighter days are ahead and even now we are starting to recover; the sight of our young female alpaca prancing around the paddock, without a care in the world was funny to watch and cheered us up. The random huge angel model in the window of the technical college also helped, but it still hurts that we couldn't do enough.

Mum time

Well I guess I had better fill you in then. We may have over done the Mum time on the Monday, as little Benedikts (oh yes! I am spelling this correctly, as this is the Latvianised version of the name) was rather poorly on the Tuesday. We called the vet out and she spent quite a bit of time with us. She tried to put a drip in, but it was tricky as she wasn't exactly sure of the anatomy of an alpaca - they don't teach that in veterinary schools here in Latvia. It didn't seem to work well, so Ian tried. His haematology training coming in handy. It worked best with our vet and him working together to locate a vein and this time it worked. Our vet also wondered if the baby milk was not doing him any good, so she rang around and located some goats milk and her and Ian went to get it from an old lady. I think the old lady gave us pretty much what she had and unfortunately it wasn't a huge amount, but enough to get us by and she agreed to give us some every day after that. The drip gave him enough energy for us to risk taking out for a brief visit to his Mum, but this time we kept it short. It kind of broke our heart to see the distress it caused Mum when we took him away, but there was no other option, he couldn't stay with her and he needed to maintain contact if possible. Ian managed to get hold of a number of a breeder in England and he ran through a few things to try and his chat was reassuring.

Snug under a blanket of straw

The temperatures remained low and there was a cruel wind blowing, which wasn't helping our little one. One of our friend's was in the nearest big town and so we got him to purchase a heat lamp for us, to see if that would help with Mum time. He also came round to help us see if we could still get any milk from Alicia, Benedikts' Mum, as there just hadn't been much time to milk her, we weren't hopeful and he only managed to get a little. She was obviously drying up and only to be expected. We kept the time with Mum short again and went through the agony of separating them. Her calls for him were heart rending. It's not easy to convince an alpaca Mum that her baby wasn't safe with her, not in those temperatures anyway. Benedikts and I both sat in the caravan, next to the radiator and wrapped in one of my Granny's Jacob blankets, while we waited for Ian to finish his daily chores. I think my Granny would have approved of me wrapping up our little Benedikts in the blanket she crocheted many years ago. It had the advantage of being big to wrap him up well and yet dried fast when it got soiled.

Potty training!

We found Benedikts would get some energy and have a little walkabout, but then he would crash, so lots of ups and downs. On Thursday though there seemed to be a real improvement, with him wolfing down his milk, as if trying to make up for lost time. We even risked letting him spend a little longer with Mum and both of them seemed to appreciate it. I took him back to the caravan and continued feeding him there and now he was getting strong enough to make a real effort to get up when he needed a pee - made looking after him a whole lot easier and a few less blankets to wash. I think I was washing blankets twice a day up to this point. We just weren't set up for him at home, apart from loads and loads of blankets that I happen to have. There was one point he needed to pee and I took him out to the greenhouse and he even took a little run around. It felt like he had really turned a corner and was on the mend. We even took him around to the vet to show her and get him weighed at the same time.

Mum was taking a keen interest in his feeding

We had had an exhausting week, as we were taking it in turns to feed him through the night. I would take the late night shift and Ian would take the early morning one. We slept on the couch when it was our turn, just to keep an eye on him. His midnight feed went okay but in the early hours of Friday morning he took a turn for the worse. He wasn't comfortable at all. We wondered if he was constipated and so gave him an enema after consulting our vet. It seemed to help. He continued to deteriorate during the day, to such an extent we didn't even take him out to his Mum, just out for a ride in the car to the land to see if whatever was troubling him would shift, but it didn't and I just ended up nursing him again in the caravan for a little while before deciding he needed to go back to the vet. Once again Ian and the vet worked together to find a vein and Ian got him hooked up to a drip. Ian then had to go back to the land to put the animals away. Meanwhile the vet gave him another enema and again he perked up. Before Ian got back our vet had to take her daughter for music lessons and our little perked up Benedikts went for an explore around the surgery and shop while we waited for everyone to come back. By the time Ian had got back though he had flopped, but was still perkier than when he left.

Alicia, his Mum

Friday evening though, he lost energy. He wasn't suckling and he even seemed to lose his ability to swallow at all. His little eyes lost spark as I tried to dribble feed him. He also seemed to be in pain and so uncomfortable that eventually at 11pm we decided enough was enough. We phoned the vet and started to get ready for going to the surgery, for one last attempt to save him. It was at this point Benedikts seemed to go into cardiac arrest, he threw his head back. My immediate reaction was to start pumping his little chest and try to bring him back, we knew we were losing him. Ian tried too, but then we stopped, it wasn't fair, enough was enough. We had to let him go. At 11.10pm we phoned our vet and said not to bother coming out, it was too late, he had gone. It was a hard night. We both cried a lot. I'm not usually so emotional, but we had fought so hard for him and seemed to be winning only the day before. It all seemed so unfair.

Clearing up the ice

I went with Ian back out to the land in the morning, we were both still emotional and needed each other's support. We had to tell the old lady, we didn't need any more milk and the irony of it was, that it was possibly the first time we had ever communicated something effectively in Latvian apart from ordering food in a restaurant. After breaking the news to our friend who had first helped Ian when we saw her in the village, we headed on up to our other apartment to light the fire and look forward to a bath that evening and some downtime watching a DVD. Unfortunately that turned out to be a bad idea, when we got there a disaster had happened during the week. Ian had been in at some point in the week and everything was fine, but sometime after that our cast iron radiators had blown with the ice due to the extreme cold we have had. In fact one had blown a piece of iron clear across the room. There was ice on the floors and black marks up walls. It wasn't a pretty sight at the best of times and not something we really wanted to see. We went home at that point, we needed to sit down and have a cup of tea. How English!

The power of ice. It blew this piece of cast
iron, clear across the room

One of the bedrooms

We knew we couldn't just leave it though and went back after that breather and started on the clear up. Ian chipped up the ice and I followed with a bucket of water and cleared up the black stuff. Fortunately as we worked, that side of things didn't seem so bad. The water hadn't penetrated the laminate. We worked away on that for a while, until the vet rang again. When we had rung her to tell her that Benedikts had died the night before, she suggested an autopsy to see what we could learn and we agreed. We wanted to know as well. It might seem odd to some of you, but we stayed to watch the autopsy, I suppose it was the scientific side of us coming into play. It wasn't just a morbid fascination though, we really wanted to know what an alpaca looked like inside, so we knew when they were ill, what part was in pain. We also wanted to learn from this and take the lessons back with us and sometimes we just have to see with our own eyes for the lesson to stick. What we did find though was disheartening. The milk was in the first stomach, when it should have been in their third stomach. Apparently when that happens in calves, it usually means the milk was either not warm enough or they weren't suckling properly. Our conclusion was that if a baby alpaca is not suckling then they need to be given sugared water, or even an enema with sugar in it and when they are suckling, make sure that the milk is warm enough. I guess not having bottle fed babies when they were first born meant that I didn't really internalise that message strong enough and not even sure whether coolish milk is harmful to human babies or just not desirable. We are still not sure if this really was the problem and the guy from England that Ian rang earlier in the week, suggested that sometimes it is just a problem with animals settling down in a place. It was ultra cold, not a good time to have a baby anyway and just a few months after relocating. The odds were stacked against little Benedikts.

Not much snow, but bitterly cold

We took Benedikts back to the land after the autopsy. Ian fed the other animals first and then we spent the rest of the afternoon chipping through frozen ground to dig a hole big enough to bury him. We had to dig in the bed where the Jerusalem artichokes are, because it had a layer of straw on the top, that meant it was less like concrete than the grassed over areas. This winter has not been a kind one from that point of view, we are more like the hard frozen tundra of Mongolia, than the soft snow sculptured land we have seen in the past few years. It almost seems superfluous to say we felt so sad. This little gift of life that burst into our lives with no warning, was now laid to rest under the frozen ground.

The sheep have been making good use of the shelter
in the cold that Ian built them 

Fortunately the news this week hasn't been all bad. Just over a week ago, I was trying to get a form filled out for an evaluation I had to have done this week, in order to be allowed to carry on studying. I was having a hard job contacting my supervisor, as he is often away. I text him to let him know about the email and found out he was having trouble with his computer. This wasn't going well and hence I was fairly stressed before the weekend. I really don't do stress normally and need to get a handle on this, I'm sure I will find coping mechanisms soon. Anyway I ended up trying to get this stuff done while nursing the little one - not good for the nerves either. I requested a change of date for the evaluation, as I realised that I wasn't going to be able to make it on the Friday up to Tartu, no matter what happened. In the end it was decided to do it by Skype. As Benedikts was much better on Thursday, I managed to get my head around what I had actually done last year and got some notes down on my computer. I was reading through the notes in preparation for a 10am start, when the Professor rang and asked if we could do the evaluation straight away at 9am instead and make one of my poor student colleagues wait. Fortunately they took pity on me and weren't expecting a full presentation and just asked me to run through the past year and then asked a few questions. They even told me that the evaluation form was very thorough. I am so pleased that's over with. Only another three years to go!