Always Keep Fighting

It's been a long road. Four years since the worst day of my life, and sometimes, especially near the anniversary, I still find myself lost in the memories.

Even during the "good" months, there are bad days, when the past seems too close and everything is a reminder. Those days the only thing keeping me in the present is Sparkie.

Most of you won't understand. You won't get how important Sparkie is. You might think it's unhealthy to rely on a dog so much, worry that I'm not dealing with my grief "properly." But you weren't there in my darkest hours. You never saw the moments I felt like giving up, unable to find solid ground. You didn't see my pain, didn't see me guilty and grieving and wandering through the weeks in a fog. But Sparkie did.

 

 

Sparkie's a service dog for my Asperger's Syndrome/High Functioning Autism, but she also helps with the effects of what happened on 12 March 2011.

Wherever I go now, Sparkie is with me. Whenever the memories overwhelm me, she is there. It doesn't matter if I'm in an office ten stories up in the middle of Melbourne's CBD, she will be right there to pull me back to the present. On long nights when sleep is hard to find, Sparkie lies next to me like a barrier against the nightmares. She gives me a reason to get up each morning, to keep moving forward.

I don't think the memories will ever stop hurting, but Sparkie is always there to remind me I'm not alone. I would not be here today if it wasn't for her.

 

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.

Farm Life (part 2)

In my previous post, it was 2:30pm and the heat was relentless. I still had to go to work. Readying myself to suffer through another scorching shift, I headed for the work ute. And then, at 3pm, the weather changed.

 

The sky turned dark. The wind picked up even more and turned cold, the rain close behind. Heavy drops splattered across my back. I ran for the ute, Sparkie behind me. The first roll of thunder came just after I closed the door.

The rain poured down. The windscreen wipers were barely able to keep up as we drove to the cowshed. Five minutes later, though, the rain stopped. The sky lightened. Daddy got on the motorbike, Sparkie and me on behind, and headed down to the paddock to bring the cows in. The rain had forced the temperature down, and both Sparkie and me were keen to work. And then the next band of rain arrived. I wasn’t even wearing a jacket, and my jeans and t-shirt were quickly soaked through. Water dripped off the peak of my cap – a hat better suited to the hot weather I was expecting. Thunder rumbled in front of us, and then rolled around the back, spooking Sparkie. She’s better about storms than she used to be, but the unpredictable movement of the sound made her nervous. The cows weren’t moving towards the gate anymore, too interested in staying dry under the trees. I deployed Sparkie from the back of the motorbike, giving her the command to chase the cows. To my surprise, once on the ground, she ignored the pouring rain and the thunder, going straight into chase mode. The cows moved fast once they saw her approaching.

 

Sparkie’s a heading dog – she has no interest in nipping their heels. She goes straight for the head. At Beerajondo, when Sparkie was about 18 months old, she would pick out one slow moving cow and go for the head constantly, barking, cutting the cow off whichever direction it tried to move in. Now, she’s six years old and her brain’s matured. She uses a combination of eye and heading to control the herd. If a cow stops, looking back at her, Sparkie will lower her head, stepping slowly forward, her gaze fixed on the cow. On my command, she’ll run in, straight for the nose, skidding and turning aside when the cow looks away. She doesn’t bark so often now. Just the sudden lunge is usually enough to get the cows moving. Tess is a heeler, going in low on the ankle to nip. She’d rush in, low, snap quick and then duck as she scooted back to avoid the resulting kick. Sparkie only tried it once, back at Beerajondo, but her instinct only drove her to bite, not where or how. So she rushed in and nipped the udder. I quickly put an end to that, so now Sparkie doesn’t bite the cows at all. These cows are a mix of Jersey and Friesian – not the cranky beef types of Beerajondo – so the rough approach isn’t needed. Tess has to be muzzled to protect the cows.

So by the time we got the cows in, both Sparkie and me were soaked. It was alright for Daddy, he was wearing a waterproof jacket and waterproof pants. At least the wind had dropped between the showers. I stopped off at the house on the way back to the cowshed and changed into dry clothes before we went to milk. I also grabbed a jacket. At the shed, Sparkie got towel dried and sent to her mat. “That’s Victoria for you,” said Les, one of the other farm workers, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. It’ll change.”

 

Today is a much cooler day, sunny and breezy.

Farm Life

On a dairy farm, you work on Christmas Day. You work even when it’s 40 degrees, and the motorbike seat is too hot to sit on, the water from the hose is warm and you burn your hand trying to close the gate. The flies are thick, constantly trying to get into your eyes and mouth. And the work never stops. Everyday the cows need to be milked, calves fed, roll out bales of hay into the paddock. Set up the gates for the next paddock. One of the cows is limping? You have to quickly write down her tag number so you can find her again in the herd of 360, because any injury or illness has to be checked and treated as soon as possible. The current sick/injured cows are in a separate paddock to the main herd, because several are on antibiotics, and we can’t sell their milk. You have to round them up and put them through the yards and check their numbers against the treatment records to see if they need another dose today. 

And then there’s the cats. They’re semi-wild, living up at the cowshed. There’s seven of them, and we’ve named them all, to keep track of which ones show up at feeding time and who doesn’t. There’s Jody, a tabby with white markings. She’s the friendliest, and let’s you pat her sometimes. Her kitten is Little Grey, named for his colour. “Tabby” is a solid tabby, no white. He’s getting tamer. Winter is a black and white, and pretty shy. “Queen B” is  mostly black with white markings, named for her bossy attitude towards the other cats. She’s the shyest around people though. The smallest cat is Swayze, a black kitten who just recently showed up. They all get a plate of food twice a day.

Today, when I got up at 8am to feed the calves, it was already 30 degrees. The cows didn’t want to the leave the yard, and Sparkie, who is usually super keen to chase them out, just wanted to go back to the shade. The flies kept biting her. The hot wind stirred up the dirt, and blew it straight in to my eyes. Without Sparkie’s barking, I had to make all the noise myself – yelling and stamping my feet and hitting the cows on the rump still isn’t as effective as a couple of barks from my dog. By the time we got the cows down the track, we were both covered in dust and worn out. Feeding the calves, I was sitting on the motorbike in the full sun, because if I got off the black seat would heat up so fast that within five minutes it would be too hot to sit on. The wind felt like it was burning my skin. I got back to the cowshed and gave Sparkie a drink, before drinking half a bottle of water in one go myself. Staying hydrated is important for both of us, but difficult when you’re working flat out in the heat. For some reason Sparkie only drinks the smallest amount of water to keep herself alive, so I have to take extra precautions. Sparkie got to hang back in the shade while we fed the calves, and hitch a ride of the back of the motorbike on the way back. When we got home she got a rinse in cold water before breakfast, and we’ve spent the rest of the day relaxing in the house, with air-con and cool tiles, and access to a drink – orange juice for me and cold water for Sparkie.

 

It’s now 2:30pm and 40 degrees. The air feels thick. The wind dries the sweat off your skin. The sky is hazy, but the fluffy clouds of an approaching storm are on the horizon. Hopefully we get a good dousing of rain to cool things down. I was outside for five minutes, letting Sparkie stretch her legs. When I came back inside, the metal buckle on Sparkie’s collar was nearly too hot to touch.

 

I have no idea why anyone would enjoy the summer.

(Sparkie doesn’t leave my side, even when I’m working on the farm. She rides in the tractor with me, on the motorbike, in the car. The only time we separate is during the actual milking, when she’s in the office on her mat.)

Christmas This Year

We finally got to move to the house on the farm, and we have friends staying with us for Christmas. The pile of presents under the tree is amazing!

 

As always the year seems to have flown by. We started 2014 in Benalla, VIC, struggling through weeks of over 40 degree heat. We went as far north/west as Mount Isa, and followed the east coast down to Colac, VIC.

 

It’s been another year full of ups and downs, good days and bad days, decisions, regrets, achievements, and family. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

“They said it's complicated
They said we'd never make it this far
But we are.” - Who We Are by Switchfoot

Crazy People

It’s been an interesting five weeks since my last post here. We got an interview for a job on a dairy farm, and surprise! We got it. The job was meant to be milking every weekend – Friday night, all Saturday and all Sunday. There were three other people on the farm – a couple and a single mum with two young boys.

For some reason the other workers hated us. They kept pushing down our hours, until we weren’t dong any work at all. The boss quickly gave us some maintenance work to do and put us on a good wage. Meanwhile the couple were verbally abusing him over the phone and in person, and badmouthing us to him.

The boss has a heart thing and isn’t doing so good, and all the stress was bad for him. So while we laid low he rounded up a couple of other guys, including two police officers for safety, and gave the couple their notice. Daddy’s taken over the milkings now, and hopefully we’ll get to move up to farm soon.

Meanwhile, the boss has given us the use of his ute and we are parked up at a place with space to run the dogs. We’ve even got out our agility gear again.

While all this was going on, I was trying to get Sparkie’s service dog ID. First it ended up at the wrong address, and then it got lost on the way to me. So we had to contact our trainer again and he organised another one to be sent. With our luck, at that time the only two people who could authorize it were on leave for the rest of the week. Finally, on November 17 our trainer received our ID and sent it via Express Post to me – which meant I picked it up from the post office today. We also have the videos from our Public Access Test, so hopefully at some point I’ll be able to put some of them up.

Aside from our new ID and badge, Sparkie also now has a pair of dog shoes to protect her feet from hot ground during the summer, a professional looking harness on the way, and some more patches to go on it.