Junuary in the Pacific Northwest

It is ostensibly June here, but it sure is acting like winter. In the mid 50's and lots of rain and wind. While the rest of the country gets mid-90's, tornadoes & floods!

However, the cherries are getting fatter on the bough, and just a few days ago the baby swallows on the back porch hatched! They look like they are grinning, and are so cute.

The next news is that I have found a handsome Shetland ram for our ewes! His name is Monty.


I have to go fetch him from the mainland in two weeks. He is partially a trade. I am making a pair of bronze and silver knitting needles set with paua shell to trade for him. Hooray! The woman who owns him already has one of the spinnings hooks I make from bronze.

So we are going to get serious about building some fences around here.

Meanwhile we have a HelpX person coming in by floatplane to Fish Bay tomorrow. We are looking forward to his arrival as he sounds very nice! We also have two women coming in the same day. They are WWOOFer volunteers we met because they volunteered on a nearbye farm several years ago, and we became good friends. The two women have wonderful singing voices! We hope to record some MP3's while they are here.

I have been working on an order that has lots of triskele-carved bone cabochons in it! And John is doing the carving this time. He is very good at it & likes doing it.

I have been spinning Petunia's fleece to make yarn. And also spinning some alpaca from a farm over on San Juan Island that some friends live at.

John made a gold 14 Karat yarn needle with a bent end. Its for someone in Washington State and should arrive at her door tomorrow. Or maybe even today! The US mail is wonderful. I am a big fan of it.

And an even bigger fan of libraries! I have volunteered to help be part of the library's web site advisory crew. Our library here on Lopez Island is really terrifically nice. Here is it.

Psychic Sheep Warns of Earthquake!

On Friday Petunia was bahhing like mad at the front door. Then suddenly everything began to shake! The bells we hang on the doorknobs all rang. We ran out the front door, but it stopped. We thanked Petunia for her timely warniing!
On Saturday some dogs were running loose on the farm. The sheep were very upset & John went out with a 22 and fired some shots to scare the dogs off. Then he stood and watched to make sure they did not come back on the farm. We called the other sheep farm in the valley to warn them.
That night the sheep slept right near the house instead of under shelter us usual. In the morning they had thick frost on their fleece!
Petunia is showing her age. She has white below her nose and above her eyes. John is out behind the house now in the sunshine feeding Petunia sweet feed and patting her head.
I am going to teach John how to spin! He wants to spin our sheep's fleece and crochet thick warm hats like the one I made for him years ago with fleece from the Mill's farm out on Stuart Island. (We lived out at Stuart for 5 years aboard the sloop Grace, and helped Norman with the shearing on his farm.)

The photo of Petunia shows her in her full 'psychic mode' in which she bahs for you to 'cross her palm with sweet feed'!