More Lambs



Misty presented us with twins (one ram, one ewe) on Wednesday, Jan. 28. Last year she was the only ewe to have twins in our flock (we have had a lot of single lambs since the drought started a few years ago). Last year's twins were badgerface color (that's one of them you can see standing behind Cornflower in her picture below), but this year Misty had black twins. Since Misty is the blackest black sheep we have, these babies might stay dark. That is only a guess, however, as black lambs usually fade and can become various shades of grey, silver, or brown by maturity.

The kids have named the ewe lamb "Black Cloud."



This morning was Amidala's turn. Her lamb is a ewe, and I'm not sure how well you can see that color in the picture, but isn't she a beauty? Big, too. There are at least four colors on that lamb. Her back is dark brown, her sides are reddish brown, and she has tan under her chin and around her eyes, as well as a white crown. I think that the official name for this color of sheep is "brown and tan." Original, isn't it? Somebody correct me if I am wrong, but I believe it is also called reverse badgerface. Amidala has had a reverse badgerface lamb before, but he was actually black on top, and his fleece color when he grew up was black. I think that this lamb will be brown, however.

It's interesting the way the sheep stick to the same trails across the field. You can see the places where the snow is kept clear by sheep traffic. Although we had hoped to get down to a total of about five sheep this year, and even attempted to donate the majority of the flock to the Navajo-Churro Sheep Project (to be donated to the Navajo on the reservation), they didn't make it out here to collect our sheep. So they are still here. Since lambing season is always one of the highlights of my year, I am glad to have the chance to see all the new lambs once more. So far they are incredibly nice lambs and I will be tempted to keep them all. But I know that I do have to let go for the next few years. Here's a look at the flock all together.

Culture

It's interesting how much culture is emphasized in all of my classes lately. Of course, one of the classes I am taking is specifically about culture, but culture pops up in the others too. Last semester it was particularly prominent in the Interviewing and Counseling class. Health Psychology has also spent one and a half lectures out of four so far dealing with culture. There have been some great discussions about this in all of the classes.

Culture covers so much more than how we celebrate holidays and keep traditions. It is deeply engrained in how we live our lives and how we view the world. One topic that came up was how our society now considers it wrong to expect children to walk to school and other activities. This phenomenon has been bugging me for a while now. When I was a child it seems that we always lived just barely under two miles away from my school. Two miles was the required distance to qualify to ride the bus. So I walked almost two miles to and from school most of the time, from first grade through high school (except when we lived in Spain, and didn't live on base - riding the bus there, driven by a Spanish bus driver who did not speak English, was an experience). But now it seems to be an expectation that parents drive their children everywhere. I allow my children to walk to activities in the neighborhood and to the library, maybe one mile from home, and neighbors pick them up and give them a ride. I'm afraid that they think I am negligent because my kids were walking. I also like to walk when I am going somewhere close, and people look at me funny and offer me a ride home, which is nice of them even if it is only four houses down the street (quite a bit of space between the houses I'll admit - this is a rural area). But it is common for people to go for a walk for exercise and walk two miles, five miles, or more. Why has walking been rejected as a form of transportation even when the distances are reasonable? I guess I got side-tracked there, but still, if you have any ideas about walking, I would love to hear them.

Lamb Picture


Click here if you want to see a bigger picture.

The Computer Situation
While I was at the fiber retreat, Mark reformatted my computer for me. Thanks!!! So now I am playing with it of course. And as you can see, I have photo imaging software again! It feels like I'm home, but this computer is more like a new home, with room to explore. Unfortunately, I lost all my e-mail one more time. Even though it was not unexpected, (and some messages are saved on the server) the most recent ones are gone, and there are some addresses I didn't get written down. So, if you sent me something recently, or most likely ever, I don't have it so please send it again. Thank-you.

Blog Birthday

My blog is one year old today!

I am going to make this short and sweet, as I've been busy and it isn't letting up. We had our first lamb of the year this morning! He's beautiful - white with brown spots. Cornflower is his mother. I still haven't put the software on this computer to handle pictures (I want to reformat first - I have this feeling that I'm using somebody else's computer). In the mean time, here's Cornflower's picture with her lamb from last year.


I promise I will start doing pictures again very soon.

Sorry to blog and run, but I have to go to class in 15 minutes, and after that I am going to the second annual Fibre Outlaws Winter Retreat, and will be away until Saturday night. Retreats are fun - at this one we camp out in the USU building in Roosevelt, and as you might expect, we spin and knit and have fiber classes, ....

My classes this semester are really fun so far. The part I like the best is that there are other students in the classes. Last fall I missed out on the interaction with other class members, since there weren't any that attended classes with me. The linguistic classes are offered here for the benefit of teachers working on their ESL endorsement, and the school district really knows how to do it. Yesterday's class included an hour of working on the internet, which was fun, and dinner. They brought Mexican, Chinese, and Greek food since it is a class about cultures. They even provided quarters for the pop machine!!! Wow, I'm impressed! And I get to do a presentation (it's a group effort actually) to the class on Norwegian culture in a few weeks. Cool, that gives me a terrific excuse to buy books about Norwegian culture! My group also wants to interview some Norwegians about their culture and general outlook on life, so if you are Norwegian and would like to talk to us (by e-mail) I'd love to hear from you. I have two volunteers already from the Norskklassen e-mail list.

Saint Distaff's Day

It seems fitting that my first class this semester will be on January seventh. In many traditions the Christmas holiday extends for 12 days after Christmas, and Twelfth Night is celebratad on January sixth. Or in Spain the sixth is Three Kings Day, and is the day when Christmas presents are exchanged, in remembrance that it was the three kings who brought gifts to the Christ child, and it took them some time to arrive after the birth.

The seventh of January may be considered the day to transition back from holiday mode into work mode, and St. Distaff's Day is a reminder for the women to take up the distaff once again and get back to work. However, the boys didn't have to go back to work until Plow Monday - the first Monday after the twelfth day. That often meant that the girls would go out with their spindles trying to get back in to the spirit of productivity (or not) while the boys, still allowed a few more days of idleness, sat around tormenting the girls.

Partly work and partly play
Ye must on St. Distaff's Day;
Give St. Distaffe all the right,
Then give Christmas sport goodnight;
And next morrow, everyone
To his own vocation.

I try to honor St. Distaff's Day by doing some spinning on that day each year. Not that I stopped during the Christmas holidays, but I never do get as much spinning done as I would like.

I hope that you have a wonderful year in 2004

Confession time. I didn't get around to doing Christmas cards this year. I'm not the only one though - we get fewer of them each year. Not that I don't appreciate the cards we did get, from my grandmother and my sister and a couple of aunts, etc. Although I've gotten out of the habit of writing letters with actual pen and paper and sending them in the mail, I really should do just that and respond. Even though they do all have internet access.

It's great to hear about how everyone's year has been. As my grandmother said in her Christmas letter, "Maybe we should have another Christmas in June so we could stay in touch more often, but do you really think we would do that?" Actually, I do consider myself to be doing that through my blog. It's an open letter to anyone who would like to know what I am up to, in more detail than I would fit into a Christmas card letter, and with more pictures. So I honestly don't feel guilty about not keeping in contact with people - it's all right here. Problem is, though, I'm never sure who is keeping up with me through my blog. There are a few that I know are (like my brother and also a couple of my Norwegian relatives) because they leave messages and they mention things that I have posted here when we talk or correspond. They pass along anything important to the rest of the family too. Thanks! I appreciate it.

Those of you who read my blog and aren't my relatives are also most welcome here too. You are all part of my 'blog family.' Maybe since having the internet some of us have gotten a little lazy about using other methods of correspondence, but I know I have gained more than I have lost. I have friends all over the world and they are just as close as the nearest computer.

The Old Year

My blog is just about a year old, which means that 2003 is well represented here. It has been an eventful year. Starting my weblog is just one of the important events of 2003. Like I said above, it's been a good way to communicate with my family and the world. Having a knitting blog has also encouraged me to do more knitting, since I want to have something to report and show here. Just like writing a journal, it is also an opportunity to organize my thoughts and record them so that I can look back at them later. I actually print out my blog archives and save them like a journal. Although I trust the web server more than I trust my own hard disk lately (and have been looking for ways to rely on the web to store data - for example, I plan to add a links page here and use that rather than the favorites file on my web browser), I know that the web isn't infallable either.

Probably the biggest event of the past year was my decision to go back to school.

I don't tend to write a lot about my family here, do I? Yet they are a very important part of my life. The kids change so fast, yet I miss it because I see them every day. Ashley is almost as tall as I am now. Carol has matured so much too and is becoming quite the socialite since going back to public school this Fall (Ashley and Jonathan have continued homeschooling this year). And Jonathan is no longer a baby or even a pre-schooler. He's well into the stage where little boys spend most of their time out playing with the other little boys up and down the street. Ashley has been corresponding (by snail mail) with a Norwegian cousin. Carol is showing some aptitude for languages, and picks up the Norwegian words and phrases I have been using from time to time. All the kids are learning a few basics like how to tell time in Norwegian. Mark has had an eventful year also, with many achievements at work and in his personal life. He has started new hobbies like geocaching and renewed interest in some old ones such as scuba diving.

The New Year

A lot of what happens in the year to come will depend on if and where I get accepted to graduate school. There could be big changes in store. It looks like it will be another eventful year, but then, aren't they all when you think about it?

Fiber Content

I've been taking pictures even though I still haven't tried uploading any yet. The shawl pictures are still on my camera, as are pictures of several skeins of yarn I have been spinning. I just finished another skein last night, which brought the total to 11 skeins I had not gotten around to washing yet. For those of you who don't know, yarn needs to be washed after it is spun and before it is knitted or woven, to set the twist among other reasons. Those skeins were washed today and are drying now.

Carol did decide to try knitting a shawl with her yarn she got for Christmas, and is surprised how fast it is coming along. Ashley remains undecided. So many possibilities!

A web pointer

Among the collection of links over to the right, there is one to HJS Fiber Studio. In case you haven't checked that one out, you may want to. It's not a blog, but is updated more often than some blogs I've seen, and has lots of great tips and patterns that are a great resource for knitters and other fiber artists. Holly has just added a few new pages including a basic sock pattern and an addition pertaining to knee socks, information on spinning sock yarn, and a pattern for a bottle holder.