Shearing the sheep

It's been a good week. About 10 days ago, I bought my very first sheep: three icelandic girls and a boy to go with them. They have beautiful fleeces and sweet temperaments. They will come close enough to let me pet them, and yet they're not so friendly as to make me nervous. They still get that they're sheep (and that I'm not).



I wanted to get them sheared as soon as possible so they'd have time to regrow their fleeces before it starts to get cold. A local shearer came this morning to do the job. It was really fun to watch. He tucked a sheep between his legs, turned on his trimmer and then starting with the belly hair--which he said was no good--stripped the sheep of their fleeces in just a few minutes. (The world's record is somewhere under 45 seconds.)



Laika really wanted to be in on the fun, but could only look on from beyond the barn door:



We talked a little after he was done. He told us he was going to New Zealand in the winter to learn more about his trade. I was very impressed. I love it when people follow their dreams!



As for me, just having sheep of my own has been a dream a long time in the making. Right now I can see them out my studio window, grazing in the new bit of pasture that we fenced in for them the other day. They look utterly content. It makes me happy. (Course, that's my pumpkin/gourd patch in the background.)

Ashfield Hardware: Anything Practical, Practically Anything

I'm proud to announce that my five-minute short that I entered in the Ashfield Film Fest won the "Ashfield Resident" prize. If you didn't get a chance to come to the film fest, here it is. (You can see a higher quality version on YouTube itself as long as you click "watch in high quality" at the right under the movie on YouTube--though I'm still trying to figure out how to get the best quality possible up there. Currently it's nowhere near the original.)

Dying gourds

I tried shoe polish, I tried watercolors, and the results were less than I'd hoped for. Now, I bought myself some specialty "ink dyes" designed specifically for gourds (only in America :), and they are beautiful. I feel like my dream of several years ago of creating beautiful gourd-based containers is finally coming true. Not that they're that great yet, but I'm feeling hopeful. Here are my first experiments:



Do you ever find that when you are learning something new, you think it's a small subject, and then you start to scratch a little and you find that it goes on forever and ever and that there is so much to learn. I guess it's what makes life interesting. Anyways, I'm learning about woodworking (since gourds are really not so different from wood), about sanding and drills, about dyes and waxes, and I can see that pretty soon, probably about photographing crafts...

Blogging Flickr photos (part 3)

It seems crazy that I have now spent huge amounts of time explaining how to blog Flickr photos using two methods that I practicallly never use. The first method, using Flickr's Blog This button is great for blogging about a single photo when you don't need to add a lot of extra formatting. The second method, using Blogger's Insert Images button is best if you haven't already uploaded your photos or if you're not interested in linking them back to your Flickr site.

But the truth is, I want people who read my blog to go browse my Flickr images (and I want people who browse my Flickr images to read my blog :). While the first method described above will create a link to my photo's Flickr page, I can't deal with the limited formatting and only being able to include a single photo. So, I'll explain my favorite method of blogging Flickr photos.

First, go to the Flickr page of the first photo that you want to write about. Click the All Sizes button above the photo:



On the Available Sizes page, choose the size with the width that is closest to the final size that you want to display the photo at. I'm going to display my photos 400 pixels wide, so I choose the Medium size which is 500 pixels wide.



A 500-pixel wide version of your photo will be displayed. Below the image itself, you'll find a chunk of HTML code that displays the image and creates a link to the image's Flickr page.



Copy that chunk of code.

Now, switch to Blogger and paste the HTML code into your post. Notice the width and height attributes near the end of the code.



You can now adjust the width to the desired number of pixels (400 in our example). Get rid of the height attribute altogether; the height will be calculated by the browser automatically, depending on what you put in for width.



Why is there so much code there? The a tag is the link part that will bring visitors to your Flickr page when they click the image. The title attribute within the a tag displays descriptive text when your visitor hovers over the image. The text is generated automatically from the title of your Flickr photo, and then your Flickr name is added. I generally remove "by Liz Castro on Flickr", mostly because it takes up too much room. You can edit it as desired.

The img tag is what displays the image itself. The alt attribute will also display when visitors hover over the image but is overridden by the a tag's title attribute described in the previous paragraph. Why use both? The alt attribute is required for validation and also for Internet Explorer 5.

It seems like rather a lot to get photos into your Blogger post, but I'm pretty sure it's the easiest and best way. Add a comment if you've got a better method.

(Earlier, I described how to use Flickr's Blog This button to add Flickr photos to your Blogger posts. In part 2 of this series, I showed how you could use Blogger's Insert Images button to add Flickr photos to your Blogger posts. The method that I prefer is the one described in the post you're reading now.)

The Key to a Cow's Heart

We got a Dexter cow in May, just before we left for Barcelona. We walked her every day for a month, trying to get her used to us. She only barely tolerated it, and never seemed any more comfortable with us. There was no taming her.

When we returned after a month in Barcelona, it was like starting from scratch. This time, I tried reading in her paddock so she would get used to me again. She finally got so she wouldn't jump when I looked in her direction, but she never came to see what I was doing, nor would she investigate the can of grain I kept always by my side.

As the summer got busier and the grass in the paddock shorter, we decided to put her in the bigger field with the goats. She was happy out there but immediately lost all interest in coming anywhere near us. Frankly, we were tired of trying. After very few days, it was next to impossible to even get close to her.

Until yesterday. We have an apple tree that is positively falling over (branch by branch) because it is so full of apples. I'm sure we should be doing something that we're not, and I hope it survives. Meanwhile, though, we are inundated with apples. We eat them at all hours of the day--they're crisp and sharp and the big ones aren't too sour--but we're not making a dent. So, I've been collecting the ones that fall to the ground and bringing them to the pigs. They don't go crazy over them, but they do eat them all.

So a few days ago I tried giving a couple to the goats. They declined. But Xana, our cow, looked interested. She wouldn't come near me so I threw her the apple. She sniffed at it, and then ate it. I was a little worried she might choke on it, but she pinned it to the ground so she could take bites from it until it was all gone.

Yesterday morning, I brought a couple of apples directly to her. The goats came right over, and sniffed to see if I had brought anything more interesting. Disappointed again, they left, but not before they had piqued Xana's curiosity. She looked at me, and then at the apple. But this time instead of throwing it, I just kept holding it out. I was on the outside of the fence, and I think that helped. Finally, she got close enough to take it, but I didn't let go. She really wanted it and kept trying to take it. I held on until she took a couple of bites. I reached out with my other hand and touched her head, and she bolted off. But a couple of seconds later she was back, looking for the apple.

In the afternoon, I brought a couple of apples with me into the field. I was amazed to see her get up and come over to me. I handed her the apple and she took a couple of bites from it before she took the whole thing. I held out another apple and as she tried to take it, I started petting her. And she let me. I was sure aliens had invaded our cow! Who was this docile creature? I let the apple go and she still stayed right there and let me brush her all over. Then I started walking off with the last apple and she followed me. Absolutely unprecedented.

I was afraid to Google whether it's ok to feed apples to your cows. With good reason. It turns out that cows can get bloat from eating apples, but mostly if pieces of the apple get stuck in their digestive system. So, I'll be careful to give her small pieces. But there were also many accounts of people happily feeding apples to their bovine friends with no adverse effects--even one story of a cow who protected her apples by chasing a bear away from her apple tree!

As for me, I finally think there might be hope of getting close enough to Xana to milk her someday (hopefully next year when she calves).