An employee at last

Because you need a smiley alpaca in your life

Most of my life I have been a freelancer of sorts rather than an employee. I worked for my parents as a teenager and then in the shop they opened just before I went to uni after my A' levels. Does that count as an employee? I did a bit of cleaning at our church once. These were the only times I remember being an employee. I don't remember any contracts though, maybe there was for the cleaning. My other careers involved childminding at my home, freelance children's worker, self-employed tutor for an online educational organisation (sort of employee but not strictly speaking, more of a contractor), a Mum at home and teacher for our kids when we homeschooled, alpaca owner, self-sufficientish homesteader, self-supported researcher, well you get the picture. Some are still ongoing, some are finished and in the distant past. Not often though was I an employee, with specified hours and paid holidays. Well now I am and will be until March 2020 when the contract runs out, unless other projects come along of course and it gets extended.

We live in a magical place

With some rather cute animals

My job does take me in a slightly different direction to where I have been going with my own research, but I think it will all add to my general knowledge on natural systems and how we manage them. Instead of rural places, it will be the marine environment. I was born by the sea, so a little bit like returning to my past, but not quite. I never really felt a deep connection with the sea, although I like places where the mountains come down to the sea and love to sit on the steep hillsides listening to the sound of the sea crashing onto the shore. There won't be much of doing that in the Baltic Sea region, which is more like a big lake than a roaring sea. Not even sure if there are any mountains that come down to the sea, maybe around Sweden or Finland, I don't know. I guess I may find out.

Ian is busy halter training the youngsters, they were very
good about it. They didn't make a fuss at all. Ian hasn't
put them on a lead yet though. That comes next

I think this one looks very funny. Jakobs looks like he has
blow dried his hair and applied to much lipstick

The first half of the week was made up of meetings of course. My colleagues and I were getting our heads around the work that needed doing and what our duties would be. I was welcomed as an official employee with a staff calendar and one of my colleagues said I was welcome to use the desk in her office, as no one else was using it - no official desk as such, as I still work from home most of the time. I finally got to see my other colleagues on the project via Skype, although that was a bit of a process in itself and I had to leave early due to a meeting with HR to sign my contract.

I love the winter sun. It has a very special quality

But there are downsides to winter of
course. Freezing rain is never pleasant

I had to read through a lot of HR-ese about health and safety and work/life balance and such. Not quite sure what that will look like at the moment, as my life is not full of clear cut boxes, things tend to merge into one another. I will be working this evening due to a deadline for a paper, as I am waiting for something to work on from another colleague. So I thought in the interests of work/life balance, I will take the morning off and work on the blog. Does that count?

A chance to play in the sun

Well maybe I will just come out for a little while. Turbjørn
sampling the snow. Sometimes the alpacas would rather
eat the snow than drink the water. The chickens are the same.

Work/life balance is hard when you also have a business and a farm. When does felting go from being a hobby, since I don't sell much, to work? I love the creative process anyway. So is that work? I am making myself a felted tunic and incorporating embroidery into it. It would probably be too expensive for people to buy, with the work that will go into it, but I also need to find out how wearable a felted alpaca tunic is. Will it hold up, or will it also need merino. I need to make another tunic because just laying out the raw fleece ended up with patches with no fleece on the cotton muslin fabric I had felted it with. Will carded fleece work better? Maybe! Maybe I am just not laying it on right or it doesn't work as well with the muslin. And so on. It might also be the actual fleece I use.

Frosted pink in the morning sunshine

I wonder if Freddie is having a laugh at what I am trying
to do with his fleece?

I know that I should make samples first, but I get bored with that and dived straight in. I don't have much time either and it would be tedious if all I did was to make samples. I love the spontaneity of it anyway and can use my embroidery to work on areas where there is no fleece. I have made another thin piece of felt on silk to make leaves that I will sew on to the fleeceless fabric areas. We'll see where it goes. I think I should just aim to enjoy the process rather than think of a finished product. Hopefully it is still something I can wear though and, even better, be reversible.

The patchy fleecy side. I think the photo
makes it look worse. The piece at the top
is what I shall use to make leaves

This is the side dyed with leaves from our
land and onion skins at the bottom

The close up of the leaves shows the
detail better. The brown patches are
the fleece poking through

This is a close up of the interesting
texture of Freddie's fleece

Ian has been cutting a lot of paths in the snow, sometimes
using the snowblower, sometimes using the tractor to
flatten the paths with the tipping box on the back of it and
sometimes by hand. The problem is that the recent stuff is
heavy and wet which is not so easy to shift whichever
method you use.

Well this happened today. I said it was heavy wet stuff. This
is the small greenhouse that we had covered with black plastic
that we used both for storage and as a drying place, It will
need to be totally replaced as there is no way of
reconstructing this

Before I get up in the morning when I am at home I like to read, I have two books on the go and one is Celtic Prayer and the other is a yet another Wendell Berry book called "Bringing it to the table". This is a collection of essays brought together in 2009 and with a foreword by Michael Pollan. I like the quote that Pollan finishes with, written by Wendell Berry with his collaborator Wes Jackson in 2008:

It is difficult to make out any landscape features now. The
pond has all but disappeared, just a depression in the snow,
the root cellar is now just a white mound with a pipe sticking
out of it, looking like an igloo.  

At the apartment the greenhouses are slowly disappearing in
the snow

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we have food. This is a mistake. If we continue our offences against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billions of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Everything is quite well blanketed now

Sofie is back. Ian brought her back. It didn't seem fair for
our neighbours to keep on feeding her. Sofie is not best
pleased 🤣

We haven't learnt much in the last 40 years since Berry and others have been sounding the warning regarding our treatment of the soil. We desperately need to listen now. There is something elemental about his writing and that of the Celtic Prayer, something that makes me feel like I am waking out of a deep winter sleep. It makes me feel like I am touching something real that we have lost in our modern life. We can feel insulated against what happens in the fields when we live in the West, because we still have food, even in the bad years. Yes we might grumble about the price of the lettuces in a year when there is a late freeze, but so what? There is still the glasshouse grown spinach, or radicchio, but is that a real way to live? What does it take for us to feel alive?

The slippers I made with help the week before.