There's No Place Like Home

Yesterday was a day off. We woke up at 7:20am to Les roaring in on the motorbike, panicking because they had no water at the cowshed. We spent the rest of the day working with the plumber and electrician trying to fix the pump. Eventually we got it done. Problem solved. Day off? Yeah, right.

Last week we spent several hours in the yards sorting out our dry cows, finding the ones closest to calving and moving them close to the house. Good thing we did, because three days later one of the cows calved, nearly two weeks early.

 

 

We've been here for four months, and there's twelve days left before our time here is up. It's been a good learning experience, and our wallets haven't been so full in forever.

The break has done good things for the Superdogs. Everyone's keen to start again. And so far this year I've worked Sparkie up through her Novice Trick Dog title, to Intermediate Trick Dog, and the other three have got their Novice titles.

But there's no place like home, and for me, home is the open road.

The Long Shift

We’ve just finished two weeks work with no days off. I wasn’t getting up at 5am every morning with Daddy, but I was working every day from about 2:30pm to past 6pm, sometimes as late as 8pm. The daily routine of milking the cows, for two weeks without a break, was wearing me out. A few days ago I got the afternoon off, and Sparkie came up to me at 3:30 with a confused look on her face. I guess two weeks was long enough for her to realize there was a routine, and she was wondering why in the Pegasus Galaxy we were still at home today!

New jobs keep popping up around here. Calving starts at the beginning of March. The paperwork is an endless stream of tag number and dates that need to be sorted and written down. We haven’t had much rain so the grass has dried up, so every day the milking herd, dry herd, sick herd, and three mobs of calves have to have a ration of hay. This week we’ve treated the entire milking herd with a fly repellent. We’ve also treated the 40 dry cows with fly repellent and a vaccination, before sending them to the back of the farm until they are closer to calving. Meanwhile we’ll be looking in on them every couple of days.

 

We haven’t spent more than six months in one place since the beginning of 2010. So working like this is hard. Some days it’s boring, going through the same motions as the previous 70 days. Other days a cow falls off the platform, the vacuum pump shuts off in the middle of washing, the bull decides to take on another bull through the fence. I never know what to expect when I go to work.

 

On February 1 we celebrated seven years since we left our house in Gympie, with no plans and no place to sleep. It’s been an adventure, and I’m looking forward to getting back on the road again.