New animal considerations, ending 2020

Mama and I have started looking at getting alpacas. One of the men in the church approached me a couple weeks ago and forwarded the idea. He had started looking at getting the alpacas for his grandkids because they are more of a pet animal than the mini-Highland cattle the family had recently bought. He wanted to know if I had ever considered raising alpacas. I had. Mama and I looked into it while we were living in West Virginia – almost thirty years ago – but had never done so because of the expense of making the initial purchase. At that time, the animals were just coming into the United Stated and were priced between $8,000 and $12,000. As it turns out, those are still the current price tags per animal. At least the animals coming from certain farms. As I researched, I found packages of four to ten animals for sale at very reasonable prices as well as individual animals for $2,500 - $4,000. That seems more doable, but still expensive. The good part of raising the alpacas is that they require little feed and very little room. You can safely raise up to five per acre with supplemental feed.

Our church brother is currently building the fencing necessary to keep the alpacas he is looking to buy. When he has his in hand, Mama and I will spend some time with them to see if they will work out for us as well. The only issue now is the same as it was thirty years ago – money. Mama and I are praying about that. We are also praying about getting two little females in the mini-Highland cattle line to go with our little bull to raise up a herd. With the Myotonic goats, which have brought us over $3,500 in sales this year and the mini-Highland cattle, a small herd of alpacas would be just right for this little farm. Mama was looking at some expensive specialty bred pigs, but I think we will pass on them for now and just raise a pig or two as needed to fill our freezer.

This is the last workday of 2020. I will have to force myself to begin defaulting to 2021 as of tomorrow. That is always a challenge when the new calendar year starts. It generally takes me a few weeks to make the date habitual, especially since I do not write many checks anymore. About the only checks I write are to the church and those needed to transfer funds from one account to another. Writing a check to make the deposit is faster than making the transfer from account to account electronically. I will have to concentrate when writing those checks over the next several weeks.

Mama and I do not have any plans for celebrating the New Year. We certainly are not going out. The weather is forecast to be miserable. The abundance of rain we are getting today will be changing to snow after dark. That is a good enough reason to stay home. The fact that this is the heaviest drinking night of the calendar year is certainly a cautionary note. Early nightfall, bad weather and drunk drivers are all good reasons to stay home. Not that we needed any additional reasons to do so. We simply like our quiet evenings. So, 2020 will end with a whimper but we made it through.

Mama was encouraged to find an action word for the new year. Just one word. She struggled with that assignment for a couple days. I had already told her days before her getting the challenge that my word for the next year is “Now”. I remember a line from Cinderella with Drew Barrymore when the Leonardo De Vinci character tells another character, “At my age, now is all I have.” That has become more true than I thought it to be at the time I first heard it, but it struck me even then. Mama’s word is “Purpose”. The two action words go together nicely. Like me and Mama. It will be interesting to see if and how those commitments to purpose and doing it now, motivate us over the next year. It certainly cannot hurt to have those kinds of focus in our daily lives – especially in Spiritual matters. Those things that do not seem to produce any tangible benefit – either financially or emotionally – tend to get put off when they can, in actuality, start in motion the chain of events that produce, in time, the very things we have been trying to attain.

But regardless of the outcomes we perceive, it will not be wrong to do what is needing to be done now, on purpose and with purpose.