All Fools Day, 2003

It rained on Saturday! Quite heavily. But that meant the boys & girls couldn't be sheared. Although it means the paddocks will start to rejuvenate. Yahoo! Who'd have thought a year ago such trivia would be important?

But the shearer did pop round to check out the facilities & say he'd be there Sunday morning instead. "No worries, just put them in that big pen overnight & we'll funnel them into the little pen in the morning".

Yeah right... I pointed out that this was the sticking point in the first place. But he said if it was difficult, he'd get his dog & his daughter (?) round in the morning & maybe a trailbike, and we'd get them in there pretty quickly.

And as it happened... ... I got them into the big pen all by myself. All by myself... First of all I had to make the big pen stockproof, because they just tend to slip in & out of it wherever they please. So I nailed corrugated iron to the posts, right around. And then it started to rain. And I lured them into the pen with sheep nuts (not what they sound like), and then tip toed round behind them - and they couldn't hear me because of the rain & the corrugated iron :-) And closed the gate & battened it shut for the night. I rock!

Miraculously, they were still there in the morning.

And Alan the shearer turned up, backed his ute (with a portable shearing device) right up to the small pen. And between the four of us (me, him, T & Maddie), we funnelled them into the small pen & closed that up too. Man they were nervy. All wanting to be the sheep with his/her nose right in the corner away from us. So there was a lot of jostling going on. But they were pretty well behaved through their ordeal.

And like, it was all over in 30 minutes. Although poor old Otto got a very tender part of his anatomy nicked by the shears... he was a big coffee brown wether. But underneath it all, he's a small grey wether. I didn't know sheep went grey, but they do. By golly they all look small now. I had thought they were getting fat, but they actually all look pretty lean & fit. With heads way too big for their bodies. SO I opened up the third, as yet untouched, paddock as a treat (and closed off the other so it will regenerate a bit after the rain). Nearly at the stage we can rotate them between all three - I need a water trough for the third paddock - the bath is too heavy to move from it's current position, and so it can stay where it is until I get the fencing fixed around the forest, and then I have 4 paddocks!.

Some of them did have some very minor flystrike. But no longer - got this sorted just in time it seems. And I have heard through the small farming grapevine, that it's possible to buy fly traps - specifically for the two types of fly that cause flystrike (they're the big blue-bottley ones apparently). You bait them with a small piece of liver or something similar, and all the flies in the neighbourhood head on over & drown. So I will look into this. Maybe Farmlands have them.

Forgot all about clipping their toenails, but we'll practise penning them again in a couple of weeks & maybe address that then.

And on the homefront... somehow T managed to find time to paint the WC. Hooray, it is no longer an insipid green formica. it is now a colour called "tea".