Shopping

Which is also the title of a really crappy British fillum.

So, all this week I've been doing fifteen hour days on the cultivator in order to get it all done before irrigation, which is due to commence tomorrow, although as I type, it is pissing down rain so maybe the irrigation will be put back a day or so. This is a shorter, less cumbersome sentence. We finished the cultivation on Friday afternoon, with a new personal record of 440ha in seven days. To celebrate, we went to the pub (What did you expect, an audience with the Pope?). This time of year a few of the seasonal workers are starting to move into the area. In larger centres, a lot of these are locals who divide their year up into cotton chipping, module building, stick-picking etc., etc. Here, the majority of them appear to be uni students, backpackers and kids travelling around. I'm surprised more people don't do it, really. It's a cheap way to travel and you get to meet a lot of interesting people.

Saturday morning I was a bit average when the stockman and I went to the Ridge to do a bit of shopping. We did a few touro things as the stockman had never had much of a look around the Ridge, Art Galleries and the like. I also rescued a little puppy that fell off a woman's lap as she was riding her motor-scooter. Actually, he looked pretty funny skidding along on his nose with his arse in the air. No harm done, though. We did some shopping and decided to come home via the tourist route. We headed towards Collarenebri, then north for a while to a property that the stockman had done about 1,000 acres of selective clearing on with a blade plough. Removing all of the Sandalwood, Dogwood, Cypress and the smaller Wilga, Coolibah and Belah had increased the carrying capacity of the paddock by about 1,000%, with 750 cattle grazing on it for about six months, with the silk sorghum still three feet high in places and the buffel just starting to take off. While we were there, we were having a look at the bloke's sheep and noticed that he had a lot of lambs and ewes that were in a bad way. Some of them were wormy, but more of them were blown. None of the crookies had a chance of survival. We didn't take any guns with us, so it took an extra half-hour to get off the property as we stopped each time we saw really crook sheep and knocked the lamb's head on a rock or cut the ewe's throat.

I don't know if we were still on country owned by the same bloke or not, but about five kays down the road we went through a mob of ewes and lambs. The ewes were all fat and lively and the lambs were all frisky and recently marked and mulesed (they were still scabbed over). Have I told you that PETA are fuckwits?

Meanwhile, it was about five o'clock by this time, so we decided to go the back way to Dirran and have a feed at the pub before heading home. Rain had made the black-soil road a bit of a challenge and it took us about an hour and a half to go the sixty kays into Dirran.

Food, more beer, then home by eleven. A very pleasant day. I only regret that I forgot to take my camera so you urban-dwellers could see the cruelty that PETA would like little baa-lambs to suffer.

-Meanwhile, can anyone stop that Pigeon?