Jeff Brooking, the designer, and I have been looking through all the photographs for our competition this quarter. There are some great pictures. We found the competition winners and a cover picture today. We have a week left to put the whole thing together and I have quite a lot of news left to write – mainly bad – Foot & Mouth Disease and Bluetongue plus a review of Mike Safley’s new book that I haven’t quite finished yet.
I am waiting for the sun to come out to get out there and take pictures of some of the alpacas as we have more to put on the Sales list. We have sold three females, two with female cria at foot, and a young male recently. The vet is coming today to do the veterinary health certificates that all animals of ours are sold with. It is crucial as the vet can make sure there are no heart murmurs or cataracts, things that we could not identify. It also means that the animals can be insured with Armitage Insurance – a must, I think for the new owner. One of my first three animals died and I had only bought her a few months ago so I was very pleased that I had insured her and could get a replacement. She had a six week old female cria at foot that we bottle fed successfully and I still have some lovely photographs of Joshua feeding her. He was outraged when she was sold as an adult.
I have had a series of very annoying conversations with the robots at Orange HQ about their decision to stop dialup. We can only get broadband on one of our three lines but neither they or British Telecom give a toss. I fail to understand why these companies employ such Kafkaesque methods of communicating with their customers. I must change my mobile from Orange to another provider so they will have one less customer to drive up the wall.