Has it really been 3+ months?

Ok, I'm sorry already.

Plenty has happened since the last blog.

Bose broke his leg. The sensible thing would have been to put him down, but it WAS little Bosie, so $500 later and the cast is off and he is ok although the leg will always be smaller than the other three.

We have a jersey cow, Clover, who is a darling. She does this head-nodding, swaying dance thing when I take her molasses down to her, so she is "our incredible dancing cow."

We are now back to two pigs: Dolly and Tilley remain and the last of the minis are gone. Aidan agreed that it was best for him to swap Goldie for Tilley as it gives him his best option of making a dollar.

In October we had 24 deg C and then, two days later, we had snow, and two days after that back to 22 C. Just after Christmas, we had snow down to 600 metres: midsummer snow in Oz!

We are digging potatoes regularly at the moment and working at building up the organic material in the veggie patch for next year.

I had an interesting school camp involving a face-plant on my part when my ticker decided to go aryhthmic on me. While getting that sorted out, they found that I am the proud owner of a 10mm kidney stone that will take surgery to remove. Now if I had descovered it before leaving the international teaching scene, the comprehensive medical cover would have been very helpful. As it is, I have to wait for an opening in the public system.

Aidan is powering on, working hard at school and at home and growing like bamboo in a swamp. He has become one of the most popular kids in our school, which is a great encouragement to him. He's home with his Mum and siblings at present, and sorely missed down here.

Next post I will add piccies.

Cocoa didn't make it. He was struggling while we had him inside and not taking the bottle, so I tried him out with his mother. He suckled enthusiastically, and managed to get back on his feet. However, he didn't get through the night. He was a real little fighter, but just too weak to cope.

We buried him and planted a silver birch over the top of him. Normally, I wouldn't bother, but this little guy really got to us both.

Good news and bad.

First the bad news: Lulu lost all three of her kids. They were all stillborn. The problem was caused by the first, very large, kid having one leg tucked back along its body which was enough to block the birth canal. So the vet removed all three in the back of my car while it was in the parking lot. Lulu is exhausted, understandably, and I am giving her a couple of hours to recuperate before trying to milk her out.

So we are left with 2 out of 7 kids.

Good news: Lulu has survived, so far. Cocoa's leg seems ok now, according to the vet, and he is noisily wobbling around the goat shelter, harassing his mother. Bose, the other kid, has started to suckle. Bose got his name because he comes in black and white and is bloody loud!

Sue is quite taken with Cocoa, whom I wanted to name Capretto, and she is insisting that he is a keeper. She carried him in her arms all the way back from the vet, snuggled up against her grandmotherly boobs.

On turning 60 and bottle feeding in the middle of the night

Well folks....I turned 60 a few weeks ago and received a surprise visit from Josh and Leah and Xaviah and Che, Rachel and Duncan and Alexandra. They had managed to keep the visit a surprise and just turned up two days before my birthday. I will admit to shedding the odd tear or three.

Duncan could only stay overnight, but we had a great time. Unfortunately, we had

no snow for Xaviah and Che, so the whole thing was

a bit anti-climactic for them.

They did get to Cockle Creek while they were here. It's a thriving metropolis, as you can see, but has the distinction of being as far South as you can drive a car in Australia.

We had some problems shifting the slips

(piglets) that Janice and Reagan had produced. A consortium of other staff from school have bought one, which they are supporting until it's ready to kill and Aidan has his: Goldie. These had to be separated from the others which were for general sale, so they were scragged by one black leg and put over the fence.

They did not appreciate the indignity, promptly broke

back in with their peers, and having been caught like this several times now, and watching all their litter-mates scragged, are now very wary indeed.

The once-little saddlebacks are

turning into real chunkers.

However, none of this is the real excitement. Today, we had baby goats, at last.

Lulu has been showing signs of going into labour for about 36 hours: not straining, just getting ready. But today, during a visit from my boss and a friend, Miriam surprised everyone by producing quads!

The first one was fine, and was a beautiful little buck with a chocolate bum.

Next came a little doe, but we couldn't get it breathing despite massage and mouth-to mouth. It was very upsetting

to have a heartbeat, but no breath.Then Miriam pulled her party trick for the day: two at once, and one of them breach. We made a very hurried call to Bennie, a friend of Sue's and one of

the goat gurus of the area. She turned up just in time for the delivery. The breach kid also failed to start breathing despite a heartbeat and more mouth-to-mouth. The other kid was just fine.

We managed to get doe and kids into shelter, as rain was forecast and we thought all

would be ok, but Miriam has shown no sign of being interested in letting her milk down. So the kids are in a box with us, being bottle fed. Miriam will have to either accept the kids, or we'll have to hand-milk her to get the colostrum for them and to prevent mastitis.

Lulu has advanced in her labour, but still no kids (0230 hrs) so

it looks like a trip to the vet's in the morning. To compound things, the first little buck appears to have hyper

-extended its knee on one leg in a fall, so may not make it.

We'll see what the vet says in the

morning.

Better go, the kids are letting me know that they're hungry...again.

No, I'm not dead...just been a little busy.

It's been about 5 months since the last posting, so a lot has happened.

Aidan is living with us full-time and attending the school I teach at. He's going well, and so are Sue and I.

The goats are in their new home which has a reciprocating roof: no centre post. It certainly makes it easy to move about inside, but it's a real pig of a thing to get roofing on. The corro for the roof and the roller-door walls are all courtesy of the local tip-shops.

The goats are enjoying having a lot more browse

in their new paddock and are certainly cleaning up the woody weeds and blackberry.

A condition of our school is that secondary students have Mac laptops. Aidan graciously accepted his. Strange: I never realised that Need For Speed and Grand Theft Auto were part of the curriculum.

We bought two Wessex Saddleback x Berkshires and moved them in. They should fill out to be about twice the size of our mini sows.

When we unloaded the piglets, we put them in their prepared run. But...I didn't realise that they had not been trained to respect an electric fence. Straight through it they went and into the enclosure of janice and Reagan. They promptly chased the saddlebacks, who pushed through the hingelock fencing and ran free, with much squealing on the way. Copping about 7200 volts across the bum would make you squeal too.

We cornered them in the old chook run (fowl run) and Sue kept them busy with snacks of sliced apple while I did a very rapid bit of fencing. After the fence was up, I managed to get a plastic tub over one of the piglets and Sue then sat on the upturned tub while I caught the other. Finally, we got both of them where they needed to be.

Sue is getting much more confident with the animals and has decided to get to know the saddlebacks before they become giants like their

mother.

The pigs are in the old goat enclosure. The goats had eaten the bracken and blackberry back fairly well and the pigs enjoy getting at the roots and eating them. This picture is of Janice: up to her eyeballs in the ground, rooting out a ball of blackberry root.

We had our two miniature sows mated a few months ago and Regan was the first to have a litter: 13 of them with 11 surviving. This is one of them on its first day. Regan had an easy labour. She was restless most of the day, and quite swollen about the vulva, but there was no fuss about her. I just found a bunch of piglets feeding happily when I went to feed her in the morning. So the pig herd suddenly increased from 4 to 15.

She had a variety of colours: black, dark brown, honey coloured, striped, solid, spotted.

Aidan and Alex, who was down for a visit, were fairly impressed as you can see.

Aidan is holding "Goldie," his little gilt that he is going to raise with the intention of breeding her next year and selling her offspring to get himself some extra cash.

He's taking some real responsibility on.

If Regan's was an easy labour, Janice had to be different. She was moaning all day, just two days later, and obviously in some distress. By 6 pm, she was lying in the hay in her shelter woofing and groaning and beginning to strain. I sat with her and rubbed her back and side for an hour or so and was getting worried that she might have a bad presentation. I took a break from duty to eat dinner and went back down having decided that if there was no movement I would break out the vaseline and do a bit of an investigation.

9 piglets! All of hers survived, although she was crushing one between her back and the

shelter wall when I got there. She allowed me in to free the baby and get it to a nipple.

Next day, she was highly protective. I was checking her babies, something that Regan hadn't been at all concerned about, when she let out a "whoof," raised her hackles and ran at me. I was in the shelter, so had nowhere to go, so just raised a hand and spoke quietly to her, avoiding eye contact as I sidled out. It was just a warning, but a firm one.

So the pig herd had gone from 4 to 24 in 48 hours.

Just before the Janice and Reagan did their thing, Sue did hers: she broke her arm while I was at school.

There is only one ambulance for our area, and it was on an emergency, so Sue had to sit around for 3/4 of an hour for me to drive home and take her to the hospital to have it put in a cast.

She insisted on a red cast. Those of you who know her will be saying, "of course."

That's about it for the updates.

I'll try not to be so slack in future.