Not completely devoid of knitting content

Though I will admit that I've lost my sense of urgency for warm woolies once the temperatures hit the 70s every day...

I'm still plugging along on my Bramblewood vest, though not without problems.

Right now it's sitting in timeout.  (Actually, I'm the one who should be in timeout, but it's not big enough to send me, so there.)  Things were going smoothly round and round until the last time I got to the cable section on the center back.  Something didn't look right.  I checked the cable section at center front and discovered that this round should have been a cable round, but I'd knitted a plain one.  Drat!  I started tinking back to the center front to have another go at it.
Unfortunately, I got interrupted.  No idea what it was, but the upshot is that I dropped my knitting into the basket and wandered off.  The next time I reached for the knitting, I forgot that I was supposed to be going in reverse and just blithely started knitting away.  Until I got to the cable section at the center back again.  Double drat!  Drat drat drat in mighty drattiness!  So I started tinking back again, and (you guessed it) got interrupted again.
But hey!  I'm getting smarter - I only knit a couple of inches the third time before I realized I should STILL be going in reverse...

So, let's talk about alpacas instead!
Saturday was the big shearing day for Wicked Good Stepmother's alpacas.  The shearers, consisting of a mom, a dad, and the three kids, arrived with mats and muscles and got down to business.

The muscles came in handy.

Not that alpacas are stubborn or anything.  Or dumb.  Unh unh. 

Lovely cooperative intelligent creatures, each and every one.

(We won't talk about the fact that this gray one peed on the girl's leg while she was trying to hold it steady...)

  Soon all four had their new spring haircuts and were looking pretty spiffy.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any pics of them at the spiffy stage, since they all had a good roll in the dirt as soon as they were released back in their pasture.  At that point they just looked like four big dustballs, so I went back to helping gather up fleece.
I really need to get that spinning wheel going, don't I?