Monday, June 10, 2013

A New Alpaca Cria and No Reply Bloggers

Have you become disenfranchised with Google and all that used to be great? I know I have. I love Google iReader and now that is going away. I also love the convenience of iGoogle and now that is going away too! I am finding that there will soon be no reason to use Google at all. I haven't cared much for Google+ since it came out and I see no benefits to using it for my business and it also causes issues for anyone that has a Blogger hosted blog. They push and push for you to connect your Blogger blog to your Google+ account and when you do, you become a No Reply Blogger! This has been going on for quite some time now, so it would seem that Google has lost touch with its users and they have lost their focus! I guess they feel we are no longer needed because they have made the big move to cell phones and they think we all want to use our cell phones to blog, etc. Well, I for one do not! How about you?

On to happier thoughts....

Two weeks before Mother's Day we had our first cria born on the farm.

Charity's Angel wearing an XL cria coat.
The two boys born before her were born on the farm where we were agisting our little herd before they came home to live at Old Cedar Knoll. And I have to tell you that it was a real roller coaster ride! Our Dam Charity was the expectant mother and this baby came out at a whopping 21 lbs., which is large by Alpaca standards. She was weak because she was so tall, but she soon gained the strength she would need for the next three weeks of her early life. Charity's Angel - that was my husband's pick - was born without a vaginal opening so we quickly became old hats at all things Cria; hand expressing urine (doesn't that sound like a load of fun) administering twice daily antibiotic shots and trips to the vet's office with an Alpaca in the back of my Explorer. We have a farm vet that comes out to the farm, but this little girl needed surgery to create a vaginal opening so she could urinate on her own and there was no other way to get her there because our trailer was much too large for her to travel in all alone.

Mama was very unhappy the day we took her, but thank goodness the surgery went well and she was back in a few hours and she is thriving! So much so that she is already half the size of our yearling Ice Star and she is already grazing, eating Orchard Grass and a little grain in the mornings when I feed. And she is quite the little bugger. She loves to run and pronk and tease you into thinking she is going to come see you, but just at that split second that you reach out to touch her, she takes off!
A proud Mama eating some grass for energy.


5 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. It makes all the hard work really worthwhile, Jane!

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  2. Hi Beth, thanks for this... I'd been wondering about connecting my blog to Google+. Your post led me to check out the no reply problem and I came across this... no idea if it will be helpful or not, but maybe: http://www.venustrappedinmars.com/2013/06/google-ultimate-no-reply-blogger.html Love seeing your alpacas!

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    Replies
    1. Thanks, Ann. I had tried that several times, but I keep popping up a no reply blogger anyway, so I finally gave up. It was also causing my blog posts to post twice, once without a name and once under "no reply blogger" and I never could figure out the fix for that.

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    2. Aw bummer, I'm sorry to hear that.

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