Worth Fighting For

WARNING for sad post, with talk of animal and human deaths.

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This year has brought more than its fair share of loss and struggles already, and we’re only in April.

 

In January I lost my nana and my Grandad. In March, my favourite rat Squeaky. And on April 10, Jessica went to see his brother, Mr Fizzles, and found him dead. Nobody was expecting it. Mr Fizzles had been fighting a respiratory infection for quite a while, but he was bright and happy and had a good appetite. Just a few minutes earlier I’d gone to pat him and there was no indication he was about to die. We buried Mr Fizzles beside the graves of his two brothers, Squeaky and Callen.

 

Life is hard. I came into this new year, full of hope that it would be better than 2016. But it’s been worse. There is so much fear and grief and hurt, and the pervading feeling that maybe things won’t get better.

 

But then there are the good times. Taking Skuggi through Woolworths for the first time, and having him totally ace it like he did it every day. Finding out there’s an Australian organization that runs an online video/photo competition for horses every year, and they welcome cattle competitors as well. We’re about three weeks out from a Supernatural convention, which will be amazing. I will fight through this crap. I have my dogs, and my calf and my baby rat. I am not alone. They give me a reason to keep fighting.

(Unfortunately my baby rat doesn’t stay still for photos!)

Cold Front

Well, the previous forecast wasn’t entirely accurate and we still had a few more days of warmth after the predicted rain. But it finally ended quite dramatically on Monday this week - after 20*C overnight, it reached 30 by 10am with very strong, hot wind. By 11:30, the wind had turned icy cold with heavy drops of rain and the temperature had dropped ten degrees. Here is our forecast for the next seven days.

With the rain, new green shoots have broken through summer’s dying stalks, and the dust has settled into soft dirt.

 

We built a feeder for our calves this week, so they won’t have to eat their hay off the ground anymore, especially important once the winter rain arrives and turns everything to mud, and in really gross weather we can put it in the shed so they can eat in comfort. Last winter they were able to use hay nets like horses, but now that their horns have grown the risk of them getting caught in the net is too high.

 

Last Thursday Skuggi had his first mall trip, just very quickly. He didn’t do too bad. It’ll take a few tries for him to settle with the new environment though, it was pretty noisy in there even though there weren’t many people. We also did Bunnings for a bit which he was great at.

 

Unfortunately my writing program is glitching again so I can’t put the video straight into this post, but go to this link to see Skuggi’s training session - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDmaObw4SiY. And this link for a short video of our calves being happy fatties - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnm9BQzjXo.

Autumn

Winter preparation has begun. All the cows have been pregnancy tested and the new heifers have been freeze branded. Probably half the milking herd is on holiday now, fattening up and resting before calving season begins in May. With so little rain this month, the difference between our irrigated paddocks and non-irrigated is extremely obvious now. Feeding the cows after milking takes the rest of the morning to complete.

Firewood collection has started, a little late because of the heatwave and Total Fire Ban days. In the past eighteen days, eight of those have got over 30*C. For reference, in all of December we only had seven days over 30*C. In January we had ten. And February, which is usually the hottest month of the year, only gave us nine days over 30*C.

 

On Monday and Tuesday this week though they are forecasting 10-20mm of rain each day, and a temperature drop to under 25 for the following four days. We cleaned out the shed for our calves this week, two hours work spread over two days. It’s now ready for clean bedding to be laid down so our calves can be warm and dry when winter arrives.

Another Year

It’s that time of year again. It’s come around so fast. I’m trying not to fall apart but it’s hard, and life just keeps on hitting me with tragedies this year. I debate what to post, what to keep to myself, how much to reveal this year? I think each time around I just get vaguer.

 

Being “okay” is exhausting. The nights are too long, and not long enough. I am a survivor but surviving is hard. Some days I just want to give up.

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We lost one of our pet rats, 14 month old Squeaky, just before 6pm on Monday. He’d been going downhill for a while so it wasn’t a surprise. He was held and stroked gently as he took his last breaths. We buried him at the corner of the shed, beside his little brother Callen who we lost seven months and a day earlier.

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Walking is an outlet for anxiety that I’ve stopped utilising so much since moving to this farm. There’s nowhere to go really – the property is smallish with only one short piece of track and the rest is cattle and/or locust-filled paddocks, and walking out on the road isn’t an option because of the neighbour’s aggressive dogs that regularly escape their yard. But Tuesday Skuggi and me walked 20 minutes through the back streets of town and it felt so good. He’s slowly settling into his role as an assistance dog while Sparkie is spending more time at home. Last week he woke up from a deep sleep to do his anxiety alert, for a signal I’ve only just taught him.

My loyal Sparkie, who has been at my side since before the original event and helped keep me in some state resembling sanity each year. She’s letting Skuggi take over sometimes now, but she still keeps an eye on me at those times, just in case his response isn’t “proper.”

These two give me reason to keep fighting. My hero dogs.

Summer’s Last Stand

It’s the second day of Autumn and this is the weather forecast for the next seven days. It’s only the second time we’ve had three days hit 35 and over in a row and the longest run of days over 25 in the past ten months. With no aircon, it’s been a struggle.

Our two fourteen month old pet rats nearly overheated despite bottles of ice and a fan and a bowl of cool water to dip in, and we had to keep putting water on them and bringing them their water to drink where they lay squished up against the iced bottle, because they were too hot to move even to get a drink. An occasional spoonful of ice cream or some frozen fruit also helped keep them from overheating and give them some sugar for energy.

 

On Sunday Mummy and me (and of course Sparkie) went to meet up with friends in the city. After the quietness of country life, the city’s crazy is always a bit of a shock. Luckily it wasn’t too bad this time. Sparkie as always handled it all amazingly with only a few small slip ups.

Preparation

Hard to believe it’s nearly the end of February already. The last three days haven’t even reached 20*C, and yesterday we had hail. And yet one night a few weeks ago didn’t even drop under 30*C, and on Wednesday we’ll have a day of 34. It’s been an odd summer. We haven’t even been able to collect any firewood yet because all our weekends off have been either 30+ or raining.

 

Over the next few weeks, the milking herd will get their pregnancy test done and then we start sending them on their pre-calving holiday, where they get roughly two months break from producing milk to rest before the new season starts. And branding the young heifers, some of which are starting to grow tiny udders already. It will be interesting milking them though, because they haven’t had much people contact in the last nine months since we’ve been living here and are quite flighty.

 

Our pet calves are growing so fast. From the tiny, fragile babies we brought home in the back of the car to these shiny fatties, eating so much hay at the moment because the grass stopped growing this month. By the end of the month the girls and Logan will be nine months old, and the big boy Spartan is ten months.

Happy Birthday to the MySparkie/HeroDogs Blog!

Fun fact: This blog is now five years old. I first posted on 21 January 2012. 145 posts and a name change later, it’s still here!

 

It amazes me the amount of people who own/work with cattle, and yet are clueless about how to handle them. From the farmworker two farms ago who had zero patience with cows and so terrified them with his roughness and loudness, to the neighbour whose Hereford steer broke through a fence into our calf paddock the other day because he was scared and alone and being chased too hard by a motorbike. There is a fine line between too gentle and too rough with semi-tamed and mostly wild cattle, and hardly anyone seems to know where it is. Too gentle and they ignore you, too rough and they panic.

After last week’s pleasant coolness, we had a weekend heatwave. Today it was forecasted to be 30. Well, it had already hit 32 by 10am and I was soaked with sweat feeding out hay and silage to the cows even with the air-conditioning in the tractor. The temperature is finally dropping now as the rain arrives, and a cool breeze is coming in my window, carrying the beautiful smell of rain on hot ground.