SUSAN’S FARM BLOG

New Blog address.

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:17:00 -0400

Our blog has moved! You can now find the Martha’s Vineyard Fiber Farm Blog at www.mvfiberfarm.blogspot.com.
See you there!

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

Fri, 8 Feb 2008 13:02:43 -0500

Kidding Season officially got under way this morning when I stopped by the barn to feed the nannies and found this little four-legged angel staring up at me. She must have just been born- Mary Poppins (the nanny formerly know as #14) was still in the process of passing the afterbirth when I came in. (Sorry, I should have warned you that something gross was coming.)
She is beautiful, if a little dirty in these pics. Her mother cleaned her up as soon as I took this, just before my camera battery died. But it’s all charged up now and I’ll be heading back over to check on her in half and hour or so.
Update soon, I promise. In the meantime, start passing out cigars!

Holy Monkeys! That’s a lot of snow.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:45:41 -0500

So it starts like this. I got up extra early this morning because it snowed last night and I thought I might need a little extra time to feed the animals. When I opened the front door there was a LOT more snow than I expected. So much snow that I almost didn’t bring Gulliver, our chihuahua along with me to the farm. The thing is though, our morning ride in the truck is the highlight of his whole day, and I hate disappointing him. I decided to bring him along in spite of the fact that I had to carry him because the snow drifts were deeper than he is tall. This was my first mistake.
When I got to the farm I realized that I had grossly underestimated the situation. My truck got stuck once on an unplowed road so I backtracked and came at the farm a different way. Getting the barn door open to get hay was an adventure with the snow piled up around it but I am nothing if not determined when it comes to feeding my animals.
When I got to the pasture gate, the snow looked a little deep, but I have a really big truck, a Toyota Tundra with 4 wheel drive and a V8, so I wasn’t worried. Mistake number two.
As you’ve probably guessed, my truck got hopelessly stuck in the snow. About half a mile from the animals. I called AAA and waited. And waited. And waited.
Then I got tired of waiting and decided I could probably walk the half mile to the animals with the dog food so at least they wouldn’t be hungry. (There was no possible way I could carry even one forty-pound bale of hay.) Mistake number three. The snow was up past my knees in places and the wind was fierce. I had to keep my eyes closed. My boots were full of snow. To take my mind off how much further I had to go, I pretended I was the heroine of a historical fiction novel, determinedly making my way through a blinding blizzard to get the much-needed dyptheria medication to the dying children in my village.
I finally made it to the pens, feed the dogs, dug four goat kids out of snow and headed back to the relative warmth of the truck (still no sign of the tow truck) completely forgetting to break the ice on the water buckets. Mistake number four.
When the tow truck arrived we quickly realized that there was no way he was going to be able to get my truck out. He was a nice guy and gave me and Gulliver a ride home.
It was after 2:00 p.m. by the time I got to work.
When Patrick went back to try to get the truck out of the snow he discovered that I had left one of the doors slightly ajar, draining the battery. Mistake five. He managed to hike out to the animal pens with grain and hay, remembered to break up the ice on the water, arranged to have the truck battery started and the truck towed out AND brought me lunch at my office.
There are times when I think I could do all of this farming business by myself. Today wasn’t one of those days.
I have become amazingly capable in the last year and a half. I can lift heavy bales of hay and carry them. I can get the animals water on my own. But there are times when all of this is just more than one person can handle and I am really lucky to have Patrick.
My goal for 2008 is to make Martha’s Vineyard Fiber Farm so successful that I can quit my day job and concentrate all of my attention and energy on running my farm and my business.

My (latest) addiction

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:36:22 -0500

I am a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. I love the whole idea of the slate being wiped clean and everybody getting a do-over. This year I decided to finally tackle my Diet Pepsi addiction.

I am...er...was ..okay...am a hardcore Diet Pepsi addict, sometimes drinking 6 or 7 of the 20 ounce bottles in a day. 3 or 4 bottles was more typical, but no matter how you look at it, that’s a lot of artificial flavoring, colors and chemicals to consume.

I have quit before. In fact, a year ago December I gave it up cold turkey because I was traveling in Sicily and there wasn’t a DP to be found. Diet Coke was every where, but I can’t stand it. Ironically, I think Diet Coke tastes like the chemicals that it is.

So I went nearly three weeks without my drug of choice but I got hooked again when I came down with a sinus infection on the plane ride home from Italy. When you have a sinus infection water tastes revolting and Diet Pepsi truly made me feel better. Probably all the caffeine. Within days I was back up to my pre-Sicily levels and it was a full year before I was ready to face my problem again.

The thing is, I don’t really want to quit. I love/crave/need the first diet pepsi in the morning. I totally get why smokers don’t stop smoking even though they KNOW its killing them. It’s because they love it.

My cousin Cyndi was a smoker and I used to tell her that I wanted her to quit because I loved her. Her reply was always “Don’t love me so much.” That pretty much sums up my feelings about quitting Diet Pepsi.

But I am a rational person. I recognize that I can’t keep this up. I have been remarkably healthy but I’m 37-years-old, and my luck can’t last forever. My poor kidneys deserve a little R&R. So I made the decision to quit. This time, I decided to cut myself some slack and taper off slowly. I am down to one bottle a day and have been for a couple of weeks. I am going to go down to zero next week.

The thing is though, I have replaced my DP addition with a tea addiction. I was never a big fan of hot tea, although I probably drank swimming pools of iced tea growing up in the South. Down there, we call it Sweet Tea and, if you’ve never tried it, you are depriving yourself of one of mankind’s masterpieces. It’s no good drinking some North-ified New York or Chicago version. Real Sweet Tea is made by good Southern women with two first names and a deep and abiding love of Jesus.

(Thinking about Sweet Tea always reminds me of the time years and years ago when my Aunt Cricket ordered ice tea at a New York City restaurant and was told that it wasn’t “iced tea season.”)

Anyway, I digress. Hot tea was never my thing. Until now. I have been making up my caffeine deficit with a variety of teas and I am hooked. My favorite is Mighty Leaf Tea, especially the Bombay Chai that I mentioned in a previous post, but all of their teas are amazing. I was a meeting at a hotel on Monday and they had a little box with a variety of Mighty Leaf Teas to choose from AND I ACTUALLY STOLE SOME. Only two tea bags, but still. I mean, it was a business meeting! I couldn’t help myself though. No one on the Island sells the retail packs, you can only get it in restaurants, and I was desperate.

I just ordered some tea from the Mighty Leaf website. I thought it best to nip my pending career as a serial tea bag thief in the bud before I find myself in the “Court Report” section of the Martha’s Vineyard Times. But here’s the thing- this tea is Mighty Expensive! $44.50 for 100 teas bags strikes me as insanely expensive yet 100% justifiable at the same time. I mean, it is really, really good tea.

Check back here in January of 2009. I’ll be trying to kick the tea habit.

Socks! Again!

Wed, 9 Jan 2008 11:06:15 -0500

It took forever but I finally got the socks up in my etsy store. The problem was the photos. So many of the sellers on etsy take amazing product shots and I didn’t want to put up anything that looks unprofessional.
The lighting is the tricky part. I even ordered a light box but it didn’t come with instructions and there was a lot of trial and error involved. The pictures I ended up putting up aren’t great but they are a world better than the first ones I took! And since I’ve got a gagillion dollar sock inventory I decided it was time to put them up.
The other problem was a serious lack of size smalls. My angel of a mother bought a bunch before Christmas to send to all of my aunts and uncles. (She is so supportive!) I have ordered more smalls and I’ll put them up as soon as possible.
You can check out my just okay sock photography here.
If you are a member of ravelry you might want to check out the group Lisa started for friends of our farm. You can find it here.