My Quarantine Week, April 19-25

I feel like this has been a “2 steps forward, 1 step back” kind of week. The governor announced that businesses can start reopening soon (yay!) and we’ve been getting a lot of farm projects done.

Everything was going great until Thursday… more about that later.

Our bottle baby, Ivan, is thriving! I reduced him to 2 bottles a day on Sunday, and he was HANGRY at the evening feeding! He sucked that bottle down with wild abandon, but he’s now adjusted to the new schedule and I saw him eating plants in the woods one afternoon.

I’m surprised by how busy our little gravel road has been. It seems like folks just want to get out and drive. I’ve also seen a pedestrian, a family of bicyclists, and a lot of 4-wheelers.

More Cashmere!

On Sunday, I spent a few hours at the pasture because Ephrata was shedding her cashmere. We must have forgotten to comb it out in March when we did the other goats.

After I finished combing and doing the rest of the regular maintenance on Ephrata, I worked on a few other goats that needed attention. It was a beautiful day to be outside!

If we don’t comb the cashmere out, the goats rub it off on anything they can, like this fence:

Farm Beautification

If you’ve read my first or second Quarantine post, you know we’ve been doing a lot of outside chores.

One I’m particularly excited about is fixing up our campfire ring area. Brett raked and leveled (mostly) the area and I planted grass seed. Hopefully in a few weeks, it’ll be ready for entertaining!

1-Step-Back Thursday

We had a lazy Thursday morning. We slept in, ate breakfast, I bottle-fed Ivan, and Brett fed the rest of the animals. Then the day went haywire!

Brett discovered 6 goat kids were missing from our pasture. He found a blue flashlight in the pasture, but it had been rained on, so any prints that might have been on it were washed away.

I spent several hours that afternoon talking to my neighbor who lives across from the pasture (whose dump truck was vandalized a few days prior); filing a police report; calling all the local feed stores, veterinarians, and animal shelters; emailing my insurance agent; and posting on every local FB group I’m in.

On Friday, I called the area livestock auctions and started monitoring Craigslist. Sadly, none of these efforts reaped any reward… The kids are still missing.

Follow us on Facebook if you want to keep up with this saga. I’ll post updates on our Facebook page.

Reopening the Store

Sometimes you need a contrast to open your eyes to what you’ve been experiencing. This month of “quarantine” has done that for me. I’ve been able to finish projects that have been on the back burner for years!

For years, I was focused on “keeping all the balls in the air” and never realized how much stress that was causing me – until this break.

While I LOVE the store and our customers, the sad fact is that the level of business we do in our store does not justify the amount of time I put into it. Therefore, I’ve decided that we will reopen the store on Saturday, May 2, and we will only be open on Saturdays, 10am-4pm, and by appointment.

If you’re craving socialization, I invite you to bring whatever you are working on and join us for our free Stitch & Spin each Saturday morning, 10am-noon. We gather in the store and work on our projects, enjoy a cup of tea, and go where the conversation leads us.

If the weather is nice, we can sit outside in the pavilion and listen to the creek while we stitch away.

Final Thoughts

As I sit at my desk writing this and looking out the window, I can see some of our goats playing, birds flitting about, a dogwood blooming, and the woods getting greener by the minute. I love living in the country!

Fall is my favorite season – I just LOVE sitting around a campfire in a cozy sweater roasting weenies and toasting marshmallows for s’mores!

But this Spring day gives me hope for the future. My life will change because of the pandemic, but just like the trees, I will bloom again!

And you will, too! If you are local, join us in the store on Saturdays to share your story with – and be inspired by – our wonderful community of knitters, crocheters, and spinners.