I don't gotta tell you nuthin'

Yeah well, so I didden post for a while. Wotcha gonna do about it, punk? I had more important stuff to do, a'ight? I hadda waste some Ballas, bust up some drug rings, shoot it out wit da Russian mafia and get maself some bling. And when I wasn't playing San Andreas, I hadda work. Many hours a day - or night, as the case may be.
Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, as Mark Twain once said. Mark Twain was a smartarse and everybody who quotes a smartarse is a sad sack incapable of independent thought.
Except me. I'm pretty clever, so it was obviously an ironic comment on the poor state of punditry available on the web when I quoted Twain (who you'll remember is a smartarse), not indicative of a paucity of intellect at all.

For those of you who are members of the e-generation and therefore have a phobia concerning large blocks of text owing to the fact that all of you combined would have the attention span of a retarded fish ( the Barcoo Grunter is doing fine, incidentally, thanks for asking. At least you would have asked if you'd remembered that s/he existed, which you didn't because you have the attention span of a retarded fish (the Barcoo Grunter is doing fine, incidentally, thanks for asking. At least you would have asked if you'd remembered that s/he existed, which you didn't because you have the attention span of a retarded fish. ( The Barcoo Grunter is doing Help! Help! I'm trapped inside a pointless joke and I can't find a way out! Anyhoo, because most kiddies today can't read stuff that don't got pitchas in it, here's some illustrative graphic type things. Photographs, we used to call them:
This first little gem is of the flash red tractor with the less flash blue set of offsets hooked on behind; if you look hard enough you will see that I am correct when I say this. The offsets are a type of plough, although I heard the guy who played Rimmer on Red Dwarf describe them as harrows on the telly the other day. Depends how you're using them, I guess. We were on the borderline between the two, but I'm going to err on the side of 'plough' for three very good reasons: First, we were working the ground a little too much to call it harrowing (Actually, harrowing isn't, really. Harrowing, that is. It's quite pleasant, to be honest with you.). Second, we had a prickle chain on the back of the offsets, which was doing the harrowing. Third, ploughing is a much more masculine thing for a Rough, Tough Outback Bloke™ to do.

For those of you who are still here and even a little bit interested, a prickle chain is comprised of the same sort of links as most bracelets, neckchains, etc; except that, instead of being butted into one another, the ends of the individual links overlap, extending past the main part of the link to form barbs - or prickles. It's a fair bit bigger than most bracelets as well, although some of those kiddies in Redfern...
Look at the wear on the clevis of that ram. Nevermind.

At this time of year, nightshift finishes about an hour after sunrise. This is good, because you can see the horizon start to brighten up from about four a.m. It also means that you can do your servicing in daylight, instead of by torchlight with its attendant critters. Of course, you get bigger critters in daylight, such as these emus (enlarge the photo, there's a mob in the background) who came to watch me replace a bearing.
This is a better photo of the mob for two reasons: You can see the emus more clearly and because of my exceptional photographic skill I managed to give this picture the visual quality of a still excerpt from a 1950-ish outback documentary. These fellas all got to about ten or fifteen metres away and were just hangin' around when I had to start the tractor to work the hydraulics. I didn't know emus could fly.

After you have given yourself some nice crumbly dirt to play with using the offsets, you drag a grader board all over it. As the name would imply, a grader board works in much the same way as a normal grader. The main difference is size; the blade on the average grader is roughly four to five metres wide, this one is thirteen metres wide. It's a bugger of a design though, because you can't change the angle of aggression on the blade, meaning that you can't tilt the blade forwards or backwards to change the way that you work the dirt. Good enough for wheat paddocks, though.

Once this was finished, it was back to the cotton to cultivate the only paddock that we have water for, then start cultivating the fallow country.

Remember the sheep? They've all dropped their lambs (clumsy buggers) so we've also spent a few early mornings (4.30a.m. starts) lamb marking.
As you can tell from this picture, which I took this morning from my back yard, they use rings here. These are rubber bands placed around the base of the tail and scrotum which restrict the blood flow, so that eventually the tail and testicles just fall off. Painlessly, apparently, although I can't help feeling that the males especially would have a sort of empty feeling inside.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense; it's my day off and I have lazing about to do.