Sunday afternoon snoozing

I know, the fatty girls don't really need that much grass - but someone has to eat it.

Just for a change all went to plan

The master bedroom used to look like this (fairly dire - don't think it had had skirting boards for years)

Then it looked like this for a week or two until plumbing and wiring got sorted


And this - bar the carpet which is going down on Tuesday next week - is what it looks like finished. Interestingly the gibstopper said he gibstopped this entire house in the late 1990s when he was an apprentice - I thought on the whole our walls were pretty good, that might be why.

As you can see the ensuite is too small to photograph properly.

I am impressed how well this came together. Tradesmen arrived when agreed and didn't have brainstorms about doing it differently or trouble measuring things, they came and went in a synchronised fashion so no one was waiting for anyone else.

There are minor glitches like the place that can supply the door handles we want refusing to return calls, and the doors needing to be taken off, taken outside and painted, but nothing at all major.

I don't think we even went over budget...

My last bit of work for the year just came out the other side of the audit with a clean bill of health so now I just have to make the Christmas Cake, do some other assorted Christmas baking and finish two christmas presents.

Weightlifting

I blame the school dental service for the state of my teeth. They drilled and filled and generally made a mess of them for years and now they are disintegrating, irreparable, past root canals and rebuilding thanks to bad fillings.

Some more had to leave on Monday. You have to love the drugs these dentists have, I don't remember any of it past the time he said he was injecting the stuff into my arm, until he handed husband an envelope of instructions and said I needed to take it easy for a couple of days.

48 hours passed so I figured the taking it easy bit was over and it was alright to go pick up hay last night. Not sure the dentist will approve but someone had to pick it up, it can't just sit there forever.

What a mission! The contractor hadn't had the small baler out so far this year and he did note that some of the first bales were solid. Solid! I can hoist 25kg bag of horsefeed with a minor effort - some of the first 80 bales we picked up I could not move off the ground. They were perfectly dry, as the one that broke open showed, just incredibly densely packed. We sack barrowed them to the end of the hayshed, almost winched them onto the growing stack, swore, had an argument and contemplated shooting all hay eating animals and leaving the darn hay where it sat.

Thankfully it was only the first paddock full, and we started with them so after that things improved.

This morning my mouth is fine but my back is complaining a little and the hay scratches up my arms and legs are irritating.

More to pick up tonight and if the weather holds more on Sunday.

Seachange

Something happened over the weekend that has been waiting to happen for a fair while. One of those events that you hope never comes round but really it was inevitable that it would. It was a completely emotional event (no humans or animals were physically damaged :-))

So from Saturday to Sunday things are completely different, priorities have suddenly shifted and the world has a whole new perspective.

Given two and a half hours in a car driving back from Auckland airport late last night husband and I started brainstorming about where this epiphany will lead us and how long it will take to get there. We didn't reach any conclusions but we came up with a lot of ideas that need following up. We did agree quite early in the piece to stay married for the forseeable future - which was never an issue in the first place but it is always good to establish the ground rules on life changes early in the discussion don't you think...

Somehow I think that we will be looking at some big changes in the next year or two. It feels a very positive outcome from the extremely negative event that precipated it.

And I like cows because... ummmm

The vet came out this morning to blood test and vaccinate Jack the bull. The plan went slightly awry as the little begger had broken out during the night along with the red cow Aurora and while he wasn't an issue to round up again he was feeling less than cheerful about being told where to go and was standing in the yards growling at us. So the vet showed and sorted her stuff out and we put him in the crush. All was well and we thought he would behave (he's a placid lad usually) until she offended his dignity by grasping him firmly by the tail so he practiced his showjumping and left (great scope Jack - you really should have been a horse, you'd be Olympic level for sure). So we had to do what we should have done in the first place which was grab him by the nose ring. Once that was done he behaved and it was all over in less than a minute (maybe he listened to the pep talk I gave him - "It's like this Jack - have the test, get to meet more cows, on the other hand if you don't have the test, you'll be upside down on a hook")

The rain held off until that was over.

I have been keeping an eye on the neighbours heifers who I feel are closer to calving than the neighbours do (they reckoned they weren't in calf and put them back with the bull two months later). So this morning from my window I noticed one girl flat out in their paddock. An hour later she hadn't moved and was still completely prone. I decide to investigate so out I go in the rain, over a couple of fences (complete with hotwires so needing careful negotiation) towards the heifer who hadn't moved. She waited until I was within 5 metres before leaping up and running off. Definitely springing but not calving... At least I know now.

Time flies...

This time of year is always flat out at work and this year has four deadlines spaced out over two months and all of them seem a couple of weeks too early. Still three have passed now and it is sort of downhill until Christmas (which seems to be getting rather close) after which the next round of what has to be done by when will be issued.

I was still putting the finishing touches (and the long hours) into the third deadline when husband decided he would live no longer without an ensuite so he started moving furniture out of the master bedroom and demolished the wardrobe. Leaving me no choice really but to sort through the clothes that were previously contained within and find that I am unlikely to wear most of them again. This morning we have the builder in and they are building a wall (or two as there will be a walk in wardrobe to replace the departed model) which appears to be progressing very well. My clothing collection is now so sparse that a walk in wardrobe appears overkill. Must go shopping...

We are banished to what I always considered the most unappealing room in the house - a cavernous space in the basement with ugly concrete block walls and a single set of french doors providing the only natural light. The room doesn't even have a door to close. However as it was doing nothing else at the time it seemed like the best room to move into. And now set up as a bedroom it is so cosy I may just stay there. Just goes to show furniture always helps.

Topaz the January mini foal went to a lovely new home a few weeks ago too. They report that they are delighted with her which is great as really as homes go it doesn't come much better. However due to a change in circumstances we'll be getting her mother Gemma back soon so thinking we were actually a horse down was fairly shortlived.

short cow photo

I suppose she couldn't help it....

We have a line of cows who are definitely a little intellectually challenged. The type of cow who can't quite work out where the gate is so ends up running back down the fence line bellowing that her herd have not only left her but have found fresh grass.

Bonny is the first of the line and three calves later she's still a bit aghast that she has managed to produce that small thing every time. Thankfully she does now feed them without pinning down and forcing her. Her bull calves have also been singularly thick and her daughter Amanda may be black but she's really a blond underneath.

Which is why I am sure Amanda decided to calve today in the pouring rain. Two weeks early according to my calculations and without bothering to bag up much beforehand so a little unexpected. It was fairly new and still slimy (as well as saturated in the rain) at feed time. Amanda was dithering over her baby with an aghast sort of look on her face very reminiscent of her mother, an "OMG what is this and why the hell are my instincts telling me I like it" look. They were in the most exposed paddock we have so we moved her and baby down to the run where there is some more shelter. Being her mother's daughter Amanda of course got confused about how the gateway worked and whether she should follow the calf or run back to the herd but she got her priorities right when I waved the stock stick at her and growled. Left the pair under the pine trees hopefully sorting themselves out. Was too dark and dreary to see what sex we had but I groped round and couldn't find testicles so a heifer at a guess. Fingers crossed the smart bull genes have got through in this one - I won't be holding my breath though.

No photos, it's x rated

Neighbours children are concerned "Did you know Calypso and the little black horse are doing sex in the paddock"

It's horse breeding season again. But maybe I should move them to give them some privacy... (yes it was a planned breeding - that's why I put them together last week)

Minis at the beach

It was a toss up - take Ears the old girl for a ride and Tee the yearling for a walk or put three woolly minis in the float and take them for a walk. The minis won, the big guys can go next time.

Topaz the baby didn't get in the piccie as she was firmly attached to my leg like a nervous dog for most of the time. But she was very good for a baby who had never left home before, let alone seen all that wet moving stuff and scary horse eating birds that were in the wet moving stuff, and so many dogs. Little black Ebony had obviously never been to the beach before either - she took a bit of coaxing to keep moving when she first put her feet on the sand and there was no way she was getting near the water.

Some mothers do have 'em

and chances are we are mug enough to employ them to do something and live to realise it would have been easier if we hadn't.

Actually we had a very good tradesman over the weekend - a tiler. This guy turned up when he said he would, did a brilliant job, didn't charge too much and was no problem to have round. So Silas from Kre8ive Building Solutions comes highly recommended.

The fencing contractor on the job this week is back in our usual mould though. I will give the guy he has a great work ethic, he shows up and he keeps working steadily, so no problem with that. It's the thinking this guy does when he's not paid to think. One instruction was fence along the top of the hill (not really a hill but the highest point in some rolling land). He agreed that he understood that then spent all day putting posts in three metres over the brow of the hill on the slope while no one was watching him. His reason was the theory about stock going better through gates going uphill.... yeah whatever (what are we supposed to do going the other way through the gate then?)- we envisage this fence will be around for the next 50 years, please put it where we asked. We thought we had sorted that but his next step was to move another fenceline over just a bit (about 5 metres), no reason, just felt like it... *sigh*

This morning he's very concerned that our cow is unwell as her hip bones are sticking out. Well that's Aurora, she's half jersey, she milks off her back on the very best of feed and there is no way round it - by the time we get to weaning you can see her hip bones (jersey cows aren't noted for a good fat covering of course and hips and ribs are pretty commonplace) but she raises nice calves and she recovers between weaning and calving again. He's not convinced - he's said several times she probably has some disease.

When I want an opinion on stock I'll call the vet or the stock agent okay. And I won't expect them to do fencing.

I suddenly realised

why I am so perennially slack about the bit of paperwork needed when it comes to registering home bred animals with the appropriate breed society.



It is so not a big deal - fill out the form, attach the appropriate cheque (not a large amount) put it in an envelope and send it away. In a week or two the papers will arrive back and the animal will be worth more than if I didn't go through the process.

I forever put it off until the last minute. Today I finally got round to it. If I left some of them much longer they'd be breeding stock themselves. And I realised why I don't like doing it.

The problem is I have to give them all names. It's a serious decision, whatever I call them (with or without mis-spellings) has to stick with them their entire life (which admitedly may only be until the homekill man comes). And they do tend to have names already - just Kismet Farm Sillyface and similar doesn't seem appropriate.

I'm pleased I only had two children...

It was supposed to be a fairly laid back weekend

Something went wrong with that plan.

Firstly husband had a mission. He was going to paint the woodwork in the dining room or bust. And he did it. Looks quite good too - shame about the paint smell and having to keep the windows open most of the day.

And I took the clippers to little Gemma who was supposed to go back to her owner this weekend. Except under all that fluff I found some lice. Ick ick ick. So I deloused her and said I would keep her a bit longer to make sure I have seen them all off.

Nothing for it when one horse has lice - bring them all in and delouse them all. But while doing that might as well get some wormer down their throats, and some feet could do with a trim.

So Sunday lunch looking for a new Sunday lunch place went by the bye as we hauled in horse after horse, applied lice treatment, wormer and farrier equipment to their hooves. We actually did all eight geegees in the end, which was a fairly good effort I thought. Especially as it was blowing a gale and most of the equines figured playing up was the order of the day. Even Ears who is usually a model of decorum stamped her feet and said she couldn't be bothered picking them up. The best behaved was little Eby who has been difficult with her feet since she arrived and required considerable persistance. This time for the first time ever she was perfectly behaved.

Along the way I had put the makings of a loaf of bread in the breadmaker. There was a ten second powercut at the point of about horse number 5 which didn't mean much until we took a break to improve our caffeine levels and found the breadmaker had turned off with the loaf well into its second rising. Consulting the manual and pressing all the buttons indicated that I couldn't instruct it to carry on from that point, that just isn't one of the options. So it became a quick batch of bread rolls - which stuck to the oven tray as I forgot to flour it. Reasonably edible so not all is lost. (though when keeping hens all baking failures get recycled very fast so nothing is ever wasted)

Then there was the tale of two washing machines. In the house we have one for normal things and out in the shed we have another one for farm things like horse covers, mud encrusted jackets after tackling calves in the mud, dirty rags that have served all sorts of dubious purposes, and the hair encrusted clothes I wore to clip Gemma. These clothes (the ones I wore to clip Gemma) I had dropped into a pile by the door ready to take out to the shed. Except husband dropped them in the inside washing machine. Three loads of washing later it is still spitting out clothes adorned with horse hair. Hopefully it will come off when they dry...

Now next week the cattle are due for a going over

Working harder in the recession?

It's only Wednesday morning but it has been the week of unusual phone calls. In amongst the usual HRV (no, go away) and local paper subscription (no, as you won't deliver it - you give it to the rural postie and I don't want yesterdays news) both who manage to get in a call about once a fortnight it seems.

On Monday first up was the people who sold us a generator three years ago asking if we were still happy with it (which we are). I guess the plan was to upsell us if it was proving inadequate for the task. The woman and I had a pleasant chat about power cuts and power surges and those things that plague people who live in districts with slack lines companies.

A little after that there was the people we got a kitchen quote for in April last year asking if we were going to go ahead with it! That would have been an "I guess not" to me but I suppose once in a blue moon someone may say "oh yes I was meaning to get back to you on that..."

Assuming we weren't going to go ahead with it would have been even more reasonable since we actually had this place on our shortlist and tried to negotiate a couple of things. When they wouldn't do a deal we told them at the time that we wouldn't be dealing with them and why (the fact that they wanted full payment before they started making the kitchen was our major sticking point).

Then yesterday a local real estate salesperson rang to ask if we would be interested in purchasing the local lifestyle blot on the landscape if it should come up for sale as he believes it may do so soon. (ohhh interesting gossip!). Said he would mail the details. (am guessing that we know more about the actual physical attributes of the property than he does but will wait and see if there is more disclosure of the things we don't know). Our interest would depend on the price (as most things do of course).

That was followed by an enquiry about the poisoning programme on the DOC land and whether we were happy with it. Which is interesting as I didn't know if it actually matters to them or whether they are paying lip service to local consultation. We get on fine with our local DOC guys and they are using some poison that isn't transmitted through the food chain rather than 1080 and the possum population appears to have decreased so I can't think of any reason to be unhappy.

Wondering who will ring me today...

Nostalgia

When I was fairly young we lived in a huge old villa in Taumarunui for a while.

Coming out of a near new bungalow in Nelson my mother found the big freezing old heap of a house a fair trial I believe (at the time I was too young realise that, but her comments in later years tell the story and suggest that she came very close to not coping at all during those years).

The house had a coal range. No doubt a trial in itself to operate but responsible for turning the huge kitchen into a warm and cheerful place on bleak winter afternoons when the fog settled early (and tasted of coal smoke). There was milo warming on top of that range and sometimes biscuits baked in the oven too.

Tied in with the memory of the coal range was the memory of the drying rack over it, working on a pulley system that lowered it to reachable level for hanging the clothes on it which were then hoisted back up to just under the ceiling to dry in the heat but well out of the way.

Forty years on we have our own big old villa. In a climate slightly more temperate than Taumarunui and a little smaller and a little better insulated. No coal range though (and I was tempted by Wagener stoves and Agas and the like when we did the kitchen, but in the end gas seemed a bit quicker and less tempermental). This week though we got the drying rack.

Because I have a pedantic need to know some things I hung a thermometer off it for a while and found it is 26 degrees up there under the ceiling compared to 21 degrees at light switch level (with the benefit of a fire going for several hours)

Clothes hung over it at 6pm are dry the next morning. Who needs a clothes dryer. I do feel remarkably satisfied with this, for no good reason. I guess it is nostalgia as much as anything else.

As an aside the villa in Taumarunui has been in recent years restored and modernised to the showpiece property it must have been when originally built. And the house in Nelson my mother missed so much has been a rental for quite a while and the lack of TLC is showing.

Cow breeding 101

Odd phone call of the day: "why is my cow bellowing?'

Now I'm by no means a cow expert but suggested the two things that occured to me "She's either hungry or she's bulling" (bulling being the term for being in the mood to meet a handsome bull and indulge in a little bovine slap and tickle).

The answer perplexed me "but X (who was apparently raised on a dairy farm) said she wouldn't be bulling while she still had a calf on her"

Umm hello...

So cow fact number 1 - a cow in milk can and will come into heat and will fall pregnant again. Not only do our beefy cows prove this every year if this wasn't the way it worked the dairy industry would need twice as many cows.

And I imagine if you didn't already know that you didn't really need to know that (apart from todays caller) and don't care anyway. Too bad, I thought I would tell you whether you needed to know or not. (be aware there may be a surprise test later)

Procrastination

It's a pleasant sort of day - mildly windy but the sun is shining.

Working from home I really should go out and have a bit of a ride in the middle of the day.

So it requires me to
Get changed into riding gear
Go out catch Ears, give her a cursory brush over and saddle up
Go for a ride
Come back, unsaddle, give the old girl a rapid ten minute going over with brushes and turn her out again, if I don't go fast she won't be sweaty.
Get changed
Get back to work.

I've just spent 40 minutes thinking about it and don't have time now.

Compounding errors?

First I bought six Minorca hens on the assumption that they might lay better than the ancient old girls who were churning out two or three eggs a day, given they were
1 Bred to lay
2 Considerably more youthful than the old girls

It was okay in theory.

Sold the old girls and the bitsa rooster the neighbours so generously gave us (hmmm) too - silly move should have taken an axe to the bitsa rooster and kept the old girls as the new mob lay about one egg every two days. Okay they are moulting but really they aren't going to win any awards...

As the hens were a sad disappointment it was of course perfectly logical *cough* to buy a rooster (what, pay money for a rooster, the countryside is littered with them! ) so here's Rudi, purebred Minorca and I had to bid a little bit to see off the opposition on Trademe.

He was quite impressed with his new wives and looked happy enough in his house.

Except at 5am he started crowing, and it sounded very loud! It was - given he had flown the coop and was under our bedroom window.

He didn't think going home was a good plan either - little bathplug.

Eventually one rooster got caught and had a wing clipped. He's been a little better behaved since and doesn't start crowing until 6.30am which is a little more civilised.

It's raining

Which is all good. There hasn't been a lot of rain in the last month so it won't go astray.

One of the truly nice features of our current house is something we didn't know about until we had moved in.

In the master bedroom the sound of the rain on the roof is louder than usual - hard to describe - the sound of rain falling on an iron roof transmitted through the timber ceiling lining that someone saw fit to put in that room is different somehow.

It is one of the most comforting sounds I can think of - the sound of rain on a roof when tucked cosily into bed under a feather and down duvet (between Egyptian Cotton sheets of course)

Bliss.

Making sad decisions

Despite corrective hoof trimming little Annie's legs hadn't improved and she was showing signs of being in pain. Surgery wasn't likely to be more than partially successful.

Too little too late really. If she had had treatment within the first week of her birth the outlook may have been different. Unfortunately that was beyond our control as we didn't get her until she was six weeks old.



Therefore we made the decision to put her down last week. She was a sweet little girl to the last.