2016. What a year this one has been. Very few positive highlights this time around.
At the beginning January I was in contact with a koolie breeder and on February 3 we made the trip to Melbourne to pick up nine week old Skuggi. Calving season started, and we woke up one morning to find the boss had taken all our new calves to a new home. We never got to say goodbye. On March 11, a cow stood on Freya and snapped both bones in her foreleg. That was a long, long weekend. She came home on March 17 and started the long road to recovery - twelve weeks before she was allowed to run again. On March 23 I went into the city with Sparkie to meet up with some friends, but everyone canceled. On the train home, I recieved news that our farm had been sold and we had four weeks left in our house. On April 21 we said goodbye to our beautiful calves that we'd raised and trained.
On May 1, we went to the Dog Lover's Show with some friends and Sparkie behaved perfectly. Six days later we moved into our new house. On May 17 Sparkie became very ill. It was one week before she was allowed to come home. We didn't get a diagnosis until the end of that week - inflammatory bowel disease. With a careful diet she recovered and was finally able to go back to work a month later.
While Sparkie was in recovery, we brought four calves of our own. We lost one to scours within a week. We brought another one to replace him, and we lost that one to pneumonia within the same time frame. The third replacement calf got coccidiosis and it was close for a while, but he survived.
On July 4, the day before we lost the second calf, Daddy came home from work and said he'd been laid off, because the boss couldn't afford to pay him anymore. We ended up working only on weekends to cover the rent.
Things continued to go downhill. Us kids were told we could have hay, grain, and milk for our calves as payment for our work at the farm. Well of course eventually we weaned our calves so milk wasn't needed. And within a few months he stopped providing hay, and by the end of October there was no more grain either.
We tried to find a new job, but nobody would take us on with our five dogs, four calves, rats, and a cat. Daddy got a part time job on another farm nearby but now they can't afford to pay us weekly as promised, and they're suggesting monthly payments. Which we can't live on.
I wrote this on a dark, dark day, when everything looked so hopeless. The following morning, we got a call from our boss/landlord, offering us our job back. Maybe this is the upswing, finally. We will see. These last few days of 2016 are hanging on though, and it’s not just us that are struggling. The deaths of people I knew through movies and TV and even books are hard to hear of, gone too young and my heart breaks for their families left behind. May 2017 be better for all of us.
VIDEO “2016 || A Year In Review” (click for video)
