Two years since I brought Swifty home. ♡ From the moment my boss brought her to the farm as a tiny puppy, I had my eye on her. She just had that something special that drew me to her. She was confident, fast, surprisingly agile for a puppy - at about four months old she climbed out the half-open window of the work ute to join me and the huntaways moving cattle. I joked about stealing her to train for agility.
When Swifty was about eleven months old, my boss had decided she was too "annoying," "destructive," and consistently "stirring up" the other older working dogs. Luckily for Swifty, the boss recognized this behavior as that of a bored, unfulfilled young working dog, and gave me the first choice to take her, or she would go to another farmer. There was no choice at all; it seemed Swifty was destined to be mine.
We had to start at the absolute basics. Swifty didn't know anything beyond sit and recall. She had to learn how to take food from my hand and play with toys. I picked her up on Friday morning, and Saturday afternoon she was meeting all my friends at agility club and being everyone's new bestie. Three days later we had a three hour round trip to collect a new trailer. She took everything in her stride. It was clear she had found her forever home. ♡
Fast forward two years. Swifty is now competing in Jumpers A and Novice/Intermediate with two wins to go to Senior. She started bikejoring this year and absolutely loves racing. She is so sweet and affectionate with people, making friends everywhere she goes. She absolutely loves a cuddle ♡ She has been my righthand girl for the last two seasons of calf rearing, the most incredible natural herder who knows exactly the level of push required for any job - from the tiniest calves needing to be guided back to their pen, to a pair of angry bulls having a standoff.
My beautiful, quirky, sometimes feral creature. My baby dog. If ever I believed in fate, it would be getting to take her home as mine after nine months of dreaming.
Time for some life updates. Buckle in, it's not an easy read.
One year ago, I was fighting to keep Zuko, Annie, and her baby Oakley, trying desperately to find a place to live we could all be together after our landlord dropped the bombshell on us that we were not allowed to keep them on the property anymore. Two weeks later I would give in to the reality that Oakley was slowly killing his mother, with not enough feed in our single leased paddock for her to sustain herself and her baby, and no way to separate them for weaning, and I was forced to sell him for the cost of another week of hay for Annie and Zuko. The following morning, I would have Sparkie put down, at 15 years old, her quality of life fading so fast as her mind deteriorated.
We would move to a new farm just four weeks later. Eight months later, someone attempted to steal Zuko and Annie in the night, resulting in Zuko being hit by a car. He was put down on the roadside. It has been just over two months since that day I got the text of my nightmares, that he was gone, and I've still not decided what choice to make about Annie. She deserves a companion; cows aren't designed for a solitary life. But after dedicating nearly ten years of my life to training a bovine for riding, just to continually have to say goodbye to them way before I was ready, I don't think I can make myself get another calf to start over.
Shortly after losing Zuko, I quit my job. Again. There were a few reasons and it had been building up for a long time but now battling depression, I just couldn't face the prospect another calving season here under the same conditions I'd fought through last season.
I had been on a waitlist for a koolie puppy in 2023, I waited for nearly a year, but a few weeks before they were born my living situation changed. I had to move back in with my parents where the rules on dogs were too strict to allow a new puppy. Fast forward to November last year, I put myself on a waitlist for a border collie puppy. But a few days before it was meant to be due, I was told the pregnancy hadn't taken. Three days and one impulsive, borderline depressed decision later, I brought home a nine week old border collie puppy from a local guy. Three months later it seems I made a good choice because Sketch has been the best thing to come out of recent events.
On the agility front, Swifty has won up to Intermediate and Jumpers A already, she is incredible. We also had our debut in bikejor racing last weekend which, while we were nowhere near winning anything, she put in a good effort and seemed to really enjoy herself so we will be doing more of that this winter. Skuggi is winding down his agility career, at 9.5 years old, he's still in great condition but it's time to ease back. He has been enjoying joining Swifty's bikejor trainings on the shorter runs.
And it seems I have a new job as a calf rearer, starting in August as per usual. Swifty will be returning to farm work with me, of course, and little Sketch will join us as much as possible.
So that is my life at the moment and what's been going on. I don't know how many people even know this blog exists anymore but mostly, I just wanted to get my thoughts written out for the catharsis. It has been so hard. Constantly missing my friends in Canterbury since now I live 4+ hours away. It really feels so isolated down here. But with rental houses so expensive now, I am just stuck with going wherever my parents go.
Hi, yes, it's been forever since I posted anything on here. Life got busy and it didn't seem like many people read blogs anymore, so it didn't feel worth the effort putting time into it when I had plenty else to do.
But anyway, some life updates since my last post nearly 2.5 years ago. I've been working at the same farm since then raising calves and relief milking. I got two new calves, Zuko and Annie; Zuko is now broke to ride while Annie is due to have a baby of her own in about six weeks or so. I moved out of my parents' place early this year - a tiny place which I love but I plan to be moving on from soon, just hoping I can find somewhere with a little bit more backyard space. I got another dog in the winter, a heading dog named Swifty who has just turned 16 months. And Skuggi has just won into Jumpers A! Our first time competing in A is coming up next month. Sparkie is 15 years old now, pretty much deaf and half blind but still going, such a tough cookie. She just had a UTI recently which is the first illness she's had since 2016. Happy she's finished her course of antibiotics as of this morning because she's such a pain to make swallow pills!
2023 has been a good and bad year as all of them are. One of my uncles passed away on New Year's Day and my mum flew back to Australia for two weeks or so to support the family. We lost some pets and we got some other pets. Did a lot of road trips - including up to Wellington in April with my dad, where he caught covid for the first time and brought it home to the family. Within three days all nine of us were crook! Thankfully it didn't hit any of us really hard though and we bounced back pretty quick.
If people are interested to start reading my blog again, I'll endeavour to post more frequently!
Well, summer is long gone now. After a long dry spell, the last three days of May brought us more than 200mm of rain, making up for the lack of decent rain since February. The usually softly flowing stream became a roaring muddy river, our dam overflowed and created a new creek in the gully behind our chook house, and the low-lying paddocks and our driveway had surface flooding. Thankfully our house is up on a hill, and we stayed warm and dry inside. Other areas weren't so fortunate. Several rivers burst their banks and washed out bridges, roads, and paddocks. For several days, there were no open roads out of Fairlie. And even after the flooding receded, we could only get as far as Timaru - all roads north to Christchurch were closed (except via the west coast which would have turned a 2.5-hour drive into an 11 hour one). Thankfully they were able to put a temporary fix on the Ashburton bridge to allow traffic to flow again, just in time for our trip to Christchurch for an agility competition.
It was an unexpectedly eventful trip, beginning our journey on Friday morning in heavy fog. Barely ten minutes down the road, I was pulled over by a police officer to be told that I was driving "too slowly" and "annoying the drivers behind me." It was a winding, hilly section of road, speed limited to 100, and I was driving 80-85 due to the poor visibility. And the drivers behind me were only him and one other guy. There were places for them to overtake me if they'd really wanted to. But this police officer told me I shouldn't drive too carefully like that, because other drivers might get antsy about it and "do stupid stuff." Okay, sure. Later in the day and closer to Christchurch, I was going along the highway doing 100kmh - the speed limit - and a car still overtook me dangerously, forcing the oncoming vehicle to take evasive action before they swerved back into the correct lane, very close to my car's nose. So, the moral of the story: people are always going to do stupid stuff no matter what speed I'm going and I should just focus on driving safely.
Despite the drama, we arrived safe and sound in Christchurch, did two amazing days of agility, Skuggi running the best he has yet. Three clear rounds - 2nd, 5th, and 6th. We wasted a bit of time on the turns which cost us higher placings but he's doing so good.
It's always a blast doing agility and getting to spend a weekend away in the city, but it's nice to get back out to the quiet country. The view from here is simply the best.
With winter upon us, the chooks have given up laying eggs. Or so we thought until we found a nest of three eggs outside the coop. Well done, Chicken, for making so much noise that led us to your hiding spot. We now sneakily collect a couple of eggs from that nest in the evenings, after the chooks have gone to bed for the night.
This month has brought us our first taste of a real winter, with several frosty nights of -6 degrees followed by single-digit temperatures during the day. We added extra bedding to the chook pen and they were fine with the cold, though by morning their water had an ice layer about 5mm thick. It has still been very dry weather, just cold, though that is potentially going to change over this weekend and through next week. I'm so grateful to have a warm, cozy house to spend the winter in this year.
In other news, I got a job! I'll be calf rearing on a farm 15 minutes away, starting in August, on the same farm where my dad has just started working. It will be great to finally get back into things after two years of frustrating unemployment.
We had a lovely family road trip to Christchurch on the weekend, taking the scenic route up through Rakaia Gorge. Such a pretty place!
Tomorrow is our last night of dog school before the winter break, starting up again in the spring. I'll miss it but it's almost too cold to be out there now, so it makes sense why they don't keep going through the winter. A couple of weeks ago it had dropped to 1 degree by the time I got back into the car after class. Brrr.
I'll leave you for now, with this video of our "team training" agility at our friend's property last week. Always a great time!
On this morning two years ago, my mum walked into my bedroom and gave me the news that my dad had been fired from his job, and we had two weeks to find somewhere else to live.
We'd been working at How Now Dairy for nearly one year, and doing our absolute best. I gave everything to this place. Late nights, hard work, in some horrid weather, and in what was quite frankly an awful work environment at times. Though technically only my dad was employed there, we all pitched in on the farm - we were expected to, and the boss gave us our own responsibilities (unpaid, of course), so when my dad got fired, in effect we all were. And to make it all so much worse, the house we were living in was part of the job as well. So not only were we left jobless, but we were also homeless. Working there was a challenge for many reasons, and I'm not supposed to go into details about those reasons, but despite how hard it was, I'm still so gutted by how it ended.
To be promised everything, and end up with nothing. We scrambled to find somewhere to go, but two weeks is hardly enough time to come to terms with bad news, let alone figure out what to do about it and make something happen. There was not enough time. My dad frantically applied for jobs and my mum was in contact with someone who had a rental house nearby but in the end, nobody would help us. And so after fourteen days, one year to the exact day that we drove up this driveway to begin the job, we drove out again, with nowhere to go but to camp on our empty property two hours away. All nine of us and five dogs and five rats and a cat and our three cattle, one of whom was heavily pregnant.
It was not supposed to end up this way. Our cow's beautiful calf was stillborn about three weeks after we left How Now. We were living in tents all through the winter. We sat on that land for a full year, getting turned down for jobs and denied houses. What was the worst was getting led on - people pretending they wanted to help and then snatching it all away, acting like it was our own fault and we were "choosing" to be homeless. As if we had any say in what was done to us.
And then, at the end of it, after a year, we gave up. We couldn't keep going like that, struggling day to day and begging for help that we now realized would never come. So we sold everything. Everything but our dogs and the cat, and moved back to New Zealand with the tiniest hope that we could find something better. Thirteen years in Australia and this is how it ended. Betrayed and abandoned and being forced to leave my whole life behind. It was heartbreaking.
I think about what I had to leave behind almost every day. My pet steer Logan, who I rescued from a dairy farm as an unwanted five-day-old calf, and had hoped to spend so much more time with him. I taught him to accept a rider and I had so many plans of what we could do next. I'll do none of it now. There was my pet rat Pixie and her sisters, all playful and adorable, each with their own little quirks and habits. I had friends, I had a life, and it's all gone now. It took me 13 years to build all that for myself, only to have it taken away in an instant by people's selfishness. It will take a long, long time to build anything like it again, and it's hard to find the strength to even try, knowing how fragile it all is.
We came back here to find something better, and I suppose, in some ways, we have. We live in a house again. My dad got a job. With all community COVID eradicated over here, I can safely go to dog club and I can compete in agility. But in other ways, it still sucks. Our landlord won't let us have pet rats. I still haven't been able to get myself a job, and that means I can't afford to raise another calf. These were the things that were keeping me focused on the future as I said goodbye to everything I loved back there.
I am grateful, but at the same time, I am grieving.
Just some rambling, because I wanted to post more this year but there's been nothing really interesting happening. April 25 marks two years since we got fired from How Now and so began the downward spiral. But anyway. That's a post for another day.
The weather was very dry last month, and the lawn-mowing I was doing for the landlord hasn't been necessary very often. We got 10mm total at the beginning of this month, but that wasn't enough to get the grass really growing again. The weather has been comfortable for the most part, with steady sunny days around 20 degrees, aside from the day and a half of 60-90kmh wind we had last week. Thankfully, while there were plenty of reports of damage in town, it did no real damage to our property, just some small branches fell on the driveway, our trampoline shifted a little bit, and our tomatoes and our cape gooseberry plants were knocked over. They seem to have survived though. There were also a lot of leaves to sweep up - a side-effect of a windstorm in the autumn.
We competed at our club's agility trial last month, and Skuggi won 4th place with his clear round in the Novice class, finally getting the hang of weaves and contacts so that was exciting. Now we have no more competitions planned until June, when my mum and I will hopefully be heading back up to Christchurch for a weekend.
Dog agility school is still fun and we've been getting the hang of some new things. It's been just the right amount of challenging for us. And most importantly, Skuggi loves going there. He gets so excited. He's so eager to get out of the car and he practically drags me over to the field, tail wagging while he carries his toy, so keen to get started. It's such a far cry from how nervous he was the last time we attempted a dog school, back when he was about a year old, and he always only ever wanted to go back to the car.
We also went on a road trip to see the Moeraki boulders a few weeks ago. It's been about four years since we last stepped foot on a beach at all, and although it was rather gloomy by the time we arrived at the boulders, we all had a fun time. We even got to see a bunch of wild seals playing and sleeping on another section of the beach, where dogs were prohibited.
