First of all, I don't know how I got this old.  I really don't.

Secondly, birthdays really aren't all that bad.  A tradition in our family is that birthday person chooses the dinner of their choice, no matter how ridiculous or insane.  An example would be the year my daughter chose blue box macaroni and cheese, hot dogs and peanut and butter jelly sandwiches.  The entire family, including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all enjoyed this dinner together for her birthday celebration!  Good times.  

My choice this year was a potato bar.  MM, Mmm.  It had been a while since I had a really good, totally stuffed baked potato.  It was awesome!  For desert, I had my favorite:  strawberry shortcake.  It makes growing another year older all worth it.

I'm still working on clearing out my stash, so I decided to make the Stitch N' Bitch Lil' Devil Pants out of some left overs I had.  Honestly, I don't know what else I would make with this wacky yarn.  They're going to be more like Baby Clown Pants! 

I did make some changes to the pattern though, because I'm like that.  The pattern calls for cutting the yarn and then rejoining during the formation of the button hole.  Nope, I'm not doing it.  The fewer loose ends the better, and it's just a waste of time, so I fixed that.  They also want me to sew the drawstring waist band pocket AFTER doing the knitting.  That ain't happening either!  I don't enjoy the finishing part of knitting, so I fixed the pattern where I have a seamless join to form the band without ever breaking thread or having to sew later.

Oh, I'm also not putting the devil tail on at the end.  That just creeps me out.  

So we've been doing the Alpaca thing for about 6 years or so now, right?  Well, unfortunately we've not had the experience that we had hoped for and have decided to move on.  We still have family with Alpaca's though, so we'll still be able to offer nice fibers & rovings; That's the good news!  

Right now, we're just taking a break to figure out where we want to go next in our endeavors.  We've looked at Icelandic sheep and that may happen at some point. They're good for wool, meat and milk and we're really trying to live more and more self-sufficiently as we go on until at some point we can be mostly off the grid, so to speak.  Goats are a consideration as well for the same reasons. Mike has even looked into pigs and chickens but I'm not as enthusiastic about those.  ;)  I'm not a big fan of birds so I think chickens might be just too gross for me, and the pigs, well I'm afraid I would fall in love with the babies and have a hard time when it was time to slaughter. I just don't know if my heart could take it even if my head knew it was not a bad thing.

I still plan to keep the store open.  Over the years, I've totally fallen in love with the fiber community, and all aspects of the textile arts.  What I'm hoping for now is that I'll have the chance to really expand that avenue for myself and for the store without feeling as restricted as I had before, with our Alpaca focus.  It's one door closing, but a new and exciting door opening and I'm really looking forward to what it will bring!