I spend my life in the barn at the moment grading alpaca fleece. This means that by the end of the day I am filthy, covered in dust with a brown face, apart from the bit covered by the mask. I am up to about a ton and a half of fleece squished into big bales to go up for processing but I need to double that. Three more farms came in yesterday and more next week. The barn was completely stuffed so I’ve been working on opening up alleyways through the dumpy bags. I know that seems weird but it keeps me amused and means I can actually get to my grading bench without weaving through a maze.
We have an awful lot of waste as well, fleece that is too coarse or short, so I am hoping someone out there wants to make an awful lot of duvets!
As a break from this horror Chas and I have finally cleared the giant pile of logs at the back of the yard. We have been working through it for years but every time it gets lower, another field is fenced or a tree comes down and it rises up again. I have never seen so many snails underneath it all, I chucked them in the grass and tried hard not to saw any – yuck. There were also lots of strange fungi, an odd purple sort that looked like little ears, the creeping white stuff and lots of tiny parasol type fungi. I was on the electric saw bench, a truly wonderful gadget that is easy for me to use on logs up to five inches in diameter. I love it as I don’t have to wait for a bloke to come out with a chainsaw and the logs are marvellously neat. Chas has another gadget, a thing with teeth that you shove a huge branch into and it holds it steady. If you saw it you wouldn’t believe it would, but it does. When it was all gone and the walls of wood in the shed finished, it was very gratifying particularly when the digger came out and the yard was cleared. Of course there IS another huge pile of wood on pallets on the other side of the yard, but that is for next year!