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A big ‘To Do’ list and Holiday Hair

It’s been a little quiet on the blogging scene this week (for me anyway) as a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff goes on to keep our lives running.

After weeks of being unable to get any cattle work done, we will try this week to get a belated start on the branding.  We have a family trip in the pipeline and one of the major chores we need to tick off the enormous ‘to do’ list is branding.

It is only JUST getting dry enough to even consider this enormous annual task.  We have bogged almost every vehicle on the place at various times – utes, graders, tractors and even horses.  THAT is how wet it is here, even though rainfall over the past few days has been reasonably light.  Poor Salina was riding Yvette in an attempted mustering expedition this week when she went down the the belly in the saturated ground.  Salina was a little shook up – bogging horses has certainly never been an issue around here much in the past 30 years!

Another issue is that we have to cross the cattle through a creek to access the facilities we need.  Normally, of course, running water is NOT a hurdle we have to face and the cattle are hardly used to wading through it. (Even though they can do this when push comes to shove or starvation).  Lack of water is usually our major problem.

I visited Big Town yesterday (and gave the kids something to look at other than this place) to get supplies for the Brand.  As I am pretty involved in the process, I have to make sure we have enough food for breakfasts, lunches, smokos and dinners for a week.  And I help muster and record information on our specialised ‘laptop’ and also match up calves with their mothers (mothering up) once all are numbered and tagged.  There is certainly no time for more grocery shopping mid-week…

Today is cooking-up day and preparing the tags and tools and getting a mountain of folding sorted out so we have some work clothes!

Our fingers are all crossed that the weather holds off for about five or six days to let us get the few hundred calves immunised, marked, recorded and mothered-up.  School starts next week too… I have to admit, I am feeling the pressure a little at the moment.

Whenever I feel a little overwhelmed at the tasks ahead, however, I catch sight of our son…

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Dash had his ‘holiday haircut’ a couple of weeks ago, when we finally made it back into town after being flooded in after Christmas.  The hairdresser asked what he wanted and he shrugged (he does that a lot) so she said she’d do something a bit ‘Dash-ish’.

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I was quite gobsmacked at the fabulous, complex design she came up with for him – some thought they could see the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Aztec designs…

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I reckoned he just needs some gel-spikes on top to look a like a pineapple…

Definitely good for a smile.

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