In spite of a developing head cold, went to the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival as planned. My friend Susan and I had never been before. The typical two barns full of vendors' booths, of course, selling everything from felting needles to raw wool. At least it wasn't all yarn, though the preponderance of foreign made alpaca products was distinctly noticeable. The alpaca pyramid scheme in the US is collapsing now, and overpriced animals are not selling. Those who bought into the scam late are desperate to find a profitable way to get out of it. Alas, I doubt that flooding the market with alpaca yarn or socks knitted offshore somewhere is going to do the trick.

What we enjoyed most, though, was the herding dogs. They had demonstrations, instinct testing for untrained dogs, and a full sized competition going on. We also saw new born lambs (both of us have seen plenty of them before, but they're always cute) and exotic sheep breeds, including the Barbados which looks like a goat, and the Jacob which often has FOUR horns instead of just two.

Met up with other guild members at noon, exchanged pleasantries and delivered items for the show in October, and we were off, getting home a little after three in the afternoon. I let Tess out into the pasture and collapsed, the cold symptoms having become too much for me.

Now off to bed, as soon as I take some medicine that will hopefully let me breathe and sleep.

Tags: dogs, sheep, spinning, wool
Current Location: Home in the oak grove
Mood: sick

Well, they promised "terrible" thunderstorms for today. I guess some parts of the state may have gotten a few, but there was nothing here. The afternoon was sunny, the temperature pleasant, the only thing out of the ordinary was a gusty wind that perhaps approached gale force in the gusts. The tops of trees were waving about and making ominous creaking noises, but down at ground level you mostly just noticed the noise.

The NOAA radio alarm kept going off repeatedly with watches and warnings, but none were for this area. Tess wasn't happy about the noise the wind made, though. I took her out to the pasture anyway this afternoon, and it was a nervous trip out. She settled after a few minutes out there, though. Grass does that. She made one high speed figure eight while I had my hooves crossed that there were no gopher holes we hadn't noticed, and then stopped to eat grass. She was still eating grass a couple of hours later when I went to retrieve her. The wind was noisier by then but she was so contented and full of grass she didn't care.

One of the dogs wasn't feeling so contented though. When I came in from my two hours doing chores and bedding everyone down, there was a huge pile of barf on the floor. Feathers. In fact, obviously cardinal feathers. I'm guessing a cardinal crashed into the dining room window and Sarah went out the dog door and retrieved it. Ugh. I can hope she learned a lesson from that but I suspect not. Too bad it wasn't just a sparrow, we have those in great abundance. I prize the cardinals for their song and color. We are seeing red breasted nuthatches again, too. I hope they will stick around all winter.

There has to be something geekish, so I'll announce that OpenVMS is configured and running on the Alpha now. Transferring the license keys from my e-mail to the Alpha when networking on the VMS system wasn't yet enabled due to no license key was a bit of a trip, but I succeeded. You don't want to know how, but it worked in the end. Then the only major problem was convincing the VMS OS not to insist on trying to run its NIC at 100 Mbit Full Duplex instead of autonegotiating and discovering that our home LAN doesn't run that fast. That involved a utility I had never used before, and one that took some pretty bizarre syntax. But it's working now. The machine has been switched back to Linux so it can run BOINC all night, but sometime tomorrow I hope to start installing the "layered" products that I have, including language compilers, editors, and so forth.

Tags: birds, dogs, geekery, horses, weather
Mood: disappointed