Dreams, Moments, Travels
We visited the Southwest Regional Alpaca Show held at the Arizona State Fairgrounds today and saw quite literally a few tons of some mighty pretty alpaca.
After tending to alpaca all day, you can see the exhaustion on the chief alpaca inspector as she’s ready to call it quits and head home.
The other day it was Caroline’s mom Jutta bottle-feeding a kid, now it’s my wife’s turn. Somehow this looks easier for her than if she’d decided to have children and one of them feeding off of her. By the way, we are at Chile Acres out in Tonopah and the milk is fed from a repurposed bottle of “Liebfraumilch” wine.
This trip has been nothing if it’s not been about pulling Jutta into our everyday life. Her other vacations to America are typically jam-packed with travels that run her down, this time we wanted to run her down with activities that are a part of our normal routine. Not that we go to drumming workshops all the time…
…but if we did, it would only be with Frank Thompson as he’s got this down. Frank, Caroline, and I worked together nearly 10 years ago in a computer manufacturers business.
That’s Jerry Roberts on the left, Rob Lazzarotto in middle, and of course my mother-in-law Jutta Engelhardt on the right. The team is preparing onions for the weekend market.
While Rob and Jerry are off tending to other tasks, Jutta is cleaning up the oranges.
Before leaving the Tonopah area, we stop in on Jimmy and Celia at Chile Acres where Jutta lends a hand to bottle-feed a kid. I don’t this German lady ever imagined going to America and spending so much time on farms.
Good, cheap migrant labor isn’t always easy to come by, but when you have a German mother-in-law spending time with you, it’s easy to sell her on working for nothing if you package it as part of the American experience.
Out at Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona this evening Jutta and Caroline began the first night of lessons with Shari Monsam to learn how to make a Navajo rug. The first step is learning how to set up a loom, no easy task. This is Jutta’s first-class ever taken with her daughter but won’t be the last as there are another couple of workshops I set up for the mother-in-law to do while on this visit to the United States. The hardest part for Jutta was listening to the instructions in English and learning specific technical weaving terms she wasn’t familiar with.