Just What is an Alpaca?
I guess if I’m going to have a category dedicated to our furry friends, then I should probably begin with a post that tells the uninitiated just what an alpaca is. The alpaca is a South American relative of the camel, a member of the family camelidae. Another South American camelid more familar to many is the llama. In fact, the alpaca looks like a small lama.
These creatures were raised by the Incans for their prized fleece. In the 17th century, the Spanish Conquistadors slaughtered the majority of these peaceful animals. Their intent was that by removing the livelyhood of the Incans, the Spanish could more easily control them. Fortunately, some Incans were able to escape to the Altiplano with a small group of alpca. It is from these animals that the current world herd is decended.
To round out our introduction to the alpaca, I shall blockquote an introduction from ILoveAlpacas.com:
Peru, Bolivia, and Chile are still home to the largest percentage of alpacas in the world, and alpaca breeders in the United States have learned much from their southern neighbors. Alpacas are a member of the camelid family, which also includes dromedary and Bactrian camels, llamas, vicunas, and guanacos. They are a modified ruminant and chew their cud similar to a cow, although they have three stomachs rather than the true ruminant, which has four. Alpacas selectively graze, eating pasture grasses and hay, a fact that makes feeding alpacas relatively inexpensive. A daily mineral supplement rounds out their diet.
There are two different alpacas types, the suri and the huacaya. The suri has fiber that grows quite long and forms silky, pencil-like locks. The huacaya has a shorter, dense, crimpy fleece, giving it a very woolly appearance.
Alpacas have soft padded feet, making them gentle on their pastures, and they have no top teeth in the front. The average height of an alpaca is 36″ at the withers, and they weigh from 100 to 175 pounds. Alpacas are small and gentle enough to travel short distances in the family minivan and are easily handled by most people.
Alpacas have a life span of 15 to 20 years, so you can enjoy your alpaca for a long time. Not only do they have a long reproductive life, they will provide fleece for a lifetime, making your investment long-lived.
An alpaca’s gestation period is 11 to 12 months, and they have single births (twins are extremely rare). A baby alpaca, called a cria, usually weighs between 15 and 20 pounds.
Alpaca fiber comes in 22 colors that are recognized by the textile industry, and there are many blends in addition to that. Alpacas are shorn for their wonderful fleece each year, which will produce 5 to 10 pounds of soft, warm fiber that is turned into the most luxurious garments in the world. When it comes to raising alpacas, there is something for everyone.
Project Gutenberg
If you are a reader and you haven’t seen Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), you aren’t really a reader. What is Project Gutenberg, you ask? Their description says it all:
Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts) on the Internet. Our collection of more than 15.000 eBooks was produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use
You will never read through the mountain of texts in your lifetime (even if you are a speed reader, they keep adding new content all the time). Here is just a sample of what you will find there:
- The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
- War and Peace by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
- The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version
- Moby Dick, or, the whale by Herman Melville
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- The Odyssey by Homer
- Ethics by Aristotle
- Memoirs of Napoleon — Complete by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
- and More!!!
The work is available in several formats. Since it is done entirely by volunteers, not all work is available in all formats. But for the techno saavy, you shouldn’t have too much trouble obtaining a readable version of what you’ve been dying to read.
Google Maps
Have you seen the new Google Maps? Check them out at http://maps.google.com/.
This is probably the best online map that I have used. Certainly better (IMO) than Yahoo’s or MapQuest’s. The biggest reason? It doesn’t reload the page everytime you scale/zoom or move side to side. It will continue to load new images into the map, but not the entire page. This is nice should you decide you need to hit the “back” button to return to the previous page or site. Now you won’t have to go through endless resizes, etc. of the same map.
Of course, as with any useful online map site, there are driving directions. The local search is very functional and also ties in to the driving directions. All in all, an easier interface than similar features on Yahoo or MapQuest.
The one creepy thing for me was that it is also tied in to the Google phone directory. Try typing your phone number into the main Google search (if you’re in the book, you’re in there), and you are presented map choices for Google, Yahoo, and MapQuest maps. I know it’s no big deal to look up a listed number and then find the address on a printed map, but it’s still a little spooky when you do it in a couple of clicks.
New Blog
Well, I’ve had a couple of other blogs that died for one reason or another, so we will be careful not to let this one suffer the same fate. The main reason I started this blog (similar to the others) is to test out the new version of WordPress. So far, I like it. The admin is a little cleaner and smoother.
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