All mod cons

11.9.2010
My ! Have I really not written anything for this long! It must be a symptom of kidding time. I now have 14 hungry babies in the shed in various stages of adaptation to bottle-feeding. Only 5 goats have kidded and we still have two to go! It was only meant to be one but Erin tricked us by getting the buck to jump over the fence to her.

Edd did an amazing job of welding up a new base for the milking bale. He even cleaned off the burnt old one and started to repaint it so that it is now in use with a new shiny aluminium floor. This is all set up in the proper place in the new milking parlour with new gates and yards to the sleeping shed. All this makes twice daily milking so easy.

Better still the plumber came and connected the water to the milk room. I have my washing machine in there and a disk washer for the milking jugs and buckets. It is pretty easy to carry over the plates from the house too. I hardly know myself with all these luxuries. If I wasn’t so busy caring for the kids I might even have spare time!

I am especially busy this week because Edd is on holiday in Alice Springs. He is staying with friends for a break before building starts on the house. (If it ever does). I just hope it works as rest for him. I have friends coming over from the UK in October so by then I should have settled all my animals new and old into a routine and may be able to have a break then. At least I have the animals to think about.

The house situation is taking forever. The problem is trying to get a five star rating for our design, which is the standard now. Our house should be much more energy efficient but the computer program designed to work the rating out was not made able to cope with earth covered houses. This seems an extraordinary situation to cause weeks hold up but that’s what it does!

Mean while we now have a huge solar system on the shed roof that generates our own power. We now need an input/export meter so we can get credit for electricity we donate to the grid. The young men who installed the system did a great job but had difficulty with the boggy conditions. A big truck arrived at 7am with a large four-wheel drive scaffold machine. When the driver tried to turn he got off the road and got his truck bogged. We had to get Dave out of bed with flu to pull him out with his digger because the tractor was not strong enough.

By the time this was done and Dave had gone home the blokes had bogged the scaffold machine by trying to drive across my new lawn rather than go round the shed on the road. Once again the tractor was not enough so Edd fetched Craig’s big machine (they all look like Tonka toys to me), and we rescued them that way. The blokes were all young and probably this is their first experience of wet conditions. After that things went much better and the job looks very neat.