Good Morning

Rain forecast for today and tonight.  This balmy winter continues.  Little Valentine is doing well and I look forward to picking him up and doing some lamb snuggling over the weekend.   I have to give him a selenium shot and put the band on his scrotum.  This area is seriously selenium deficient and supplements are required.  Just my luck.  I noticed that the fleeces I brought up here with me were better quality and couldn't figure out why as I've always fed my sheep well and given vaccinations,etc.  It's the lack of selenium that does it.  Speaking of fleeces, young Knut got ahold of a new fleece in the barn and scattered it.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, it's a Bluefaced Leicester fleece and only weighed about two pounds.  I just got finished dyeing Zack's fleece, a hefty, luscious beautiful mound of wool that took two giant pots to dye.  What a joy to have so much wool come from one sheep.  He's my purebred Border Leicester ram.  I understand why Libby Llop immediately started breeding more wool into the BFL ewes she got from me.  She was amazed at the light fleeces and even suspected I was damaging the hair folicles in the womb with poor nutrition.  Au contraire - that's Bluefaced Leicester.  If you are wealthy enough to feed sheep who don't put out a lot of wool, they are fabulous sheep as the wool is exquisite...but there is not much of it to be had.  I hope to be playing with wool this weekend, in addition to soap making, sewing, tidying up the apartment, and washing the kitchen floor.  It might take some heavy equipment to scrape off the crap I track in from the barn.  Life on the farm...