Mission Succeeded

Whew. Today was an adventure. We went up to Eugene, picked up the computer, then went to Cafe Yumm! which is an amazing mostly vegetarian restaurant and I got a Jazzy Bowl, which has jasmine rice, black beans, sour cream, cheese, salsa, tomatoes and some other kind of sauce. It was delicious.

After lunch we went to pick up the alpaca. He was already in their catch pen, so it took me and Tim all of 5 minutes to get him haltered, then maybe 10 to get him loaded and comfortable. It wasn't so bad and he is a real sweetie pie. He didn't have a name, so on the way home we were talking about names, maybe Lightning Bug or Greased Lightning and several other names. But what we came up with fits him perfectly. We named him Marley after Bob Marley because of his beautiful dreadlocks. He is a suri alpaca, which is a different type than what we already have, which is huacaya. The difference is in their fleece, where a suri has a heavier fiber looking like dreadlocks, the huacayas have a softer fiber looking like a teddy bear.

When we got him home, it was crazy. We let him in the pen with our other boys because I thought they were going to break down the fence trying to get to him, then the dominance games started. For a bit I was a little worried that Marley was actually a girl. (He's not, we rechecked). We were out there for about an hour while poor Marley was mounted by Kodiak and then Shiloh. At least Zachary and Professor X didn't want to mount him. After they were all done with dominance challenges I was able to get them fed and everything calmed down just fine. Until we tried to take the halter off of Marley. That's when I knew he had been accepted into the herd. We chased him around trying to corner him for about half an hour, and kept getting thwarted by the other boys who were trying to protect him. Finally we cornered him and got the halter off. Things are calmed down again and I thing Marley is really happy to finally have a herd.