Sun, silage and shows

Hold on tight everyone, because this is a CRAZY time of year.

Yes, silage season has hit us and a little bit early this year too. We are into it now, with most of the home farm cut and raked and waiting for the contractors to arrive tomorrow morning. The paddocks over the road will be started tomorrow and the contractors will be in them and most likely finished by Friday. I remember when I first arrived at Craiglands about 9 year ago, that silage used to take nearly 2 weeks. Now, if we get good weather, it is all over and done with in about 3 - 4 days and that includes covering the stacks. Improved machinery, different technologies and management have attributed to this. But it is a crazy 4 days still!

And it is just as well that it will be all pretty well finished by the weekend, because Mark has a date for his back operation. He is booked in for Monday 9th November at Epworth in Melbourne. he'll be in hossie for about 3 - 4 days and then will be discharged home in an ambulance (because he cannot sit up) where he'll be useless...ahem, I mean recuperating, for a month. During this time, he is not allowed to sit in a car, do too much walking, absolutely no work, no lifting....nothing. It will be heaven for him, hell for me. After the first month,. he'll be able to start to resume some light activity, and then after another month get into moderate activity and then he should be ok about 12 weeks after the op. So, if anyone is in Melbourne on the 10th - 13th November, give him a call and drop in and see him. I'm sure he'll be grateful for the visitors.

But before he goes under the knife, we are showing cows at Colac show. We are training 3 cows at the moment; 1 from last year who has slotted back into it all quite nicely, and 2 newies. Although I must say that the 2yo we are training has already been halter broken as a calf (never made it to the show though), so she is a piece of cake. She did however stand on my foot yesterday when I was leading her around and I think she may have done a bit of damage as my little toe is PURPLE. Nice one. The other cow we have is a right tart. Is taking a stronger person than me to break her (thanks Huthy!). Hopefully she'll shape up in a couple of days.

So I am in the midst of leading cows, washing cows and specialty feeding cows as well as everything else. And I just remembered that the BAS is due at the end of the week. Good grief.