aaaaaah, blissful weekend....

Saturday was a day of rest, Sunday was a day of riding the bike, nice loop around thru Nelson and home and now the man is out in my paddock cutting my hay :)

Life is good

Spring is the time of plenty...

when the earth shows off her bounty and we get to put stuff aside for the leaner drought prone months or winter.  I rang the hay man yesterday and said we were ready for hay to be cut, way too much for 2 of my fatties out there, might as well be baled and in the shed!!!

Took the dogs and Izzy (the goat) for a walk around the paddock this morning, can tell we are finally getting the soil nutrients right, I've got clover up to my knees in some places, gonna be gorgeous hay!

Have decided that I better get my shit together and lose 10kgs too, this pancakes for breakfast in the weekends with maple syrup etc has taken it's toll on my lazy butt, so gone back to the "original keto" that I did prior to Marcus coming along, the Atkin's Diet.  They never had a website way back then, so easy to find info and recipes and shit now!!!  And with keto being the new fad, the range of products around already sorted is amazing, I no longer have to find a bakery who can bake "pana decasa" bread for us (9grams of carbs in the entire loaf!) as there is keto bread already in the supermarkets but FUCK ME DEAD,  THE PRICE OF IT!!!!!!  Holy shit!!!!!  over $10 for a tiny loaf!!!!!  Lucky when you're eating right, you're a lot less hungry!!!!   Soooooooooo sick of eggs for breakfast, was lovely having toast this morning LOL

And Christmas is no longer inching in on us, it's roaring in at breakneck speed, only a month to go and less than a month of work left!!!!!!  YEEfreakingHAAAA!!!!!

Better start planning what we're gonna do over the Xmas break and get animals sorted to be fed!!!

Gone, each taking a piece of my heart, but never forgotten....

Lets see who is in this list.... I came to Blenheim in 2000.

First was a itty bitty little stray kitten that somehow arrived in a shed on the property the ex and I were renting.  Must have been 2001 or 2002.  Little Stumpy (was so young when I found him in the shed his little tail and legs were all stumpy and little) was killed about a month after I found him and started feeding him and taming him down in the shed by Joe my Long Coat Shepherd.  I was devastated :(  Didn't dare get a cat after that episode.  Had 2 dogs and Coke my old horse at that stage.

Shifted to our own property just down the road about 2003 and by then we had 5 dogs and 2 horses and Lilly Bing the first goat kid coming with us.

And inevitably the losses began. And of course more and more came home with me too...

But this list is remembering my precious babies, some of whom I had for such a short time :(

Coke, horse bought when I was about 16, 2004
Elmo, bull mastiff puppy, pound rescue, had him 3 mths, 2005
Speights, horse, 2005 (he got me preggers, long story LOL)
Tai, Great Dane, 2007
Joe, Long Coat GSD, rehome, 2008
Velcro, Black Ram, 2010
Karma, Ridgeback x, rescue, 2011
Phoenix, Bull Mastiff, 2012
Dozer, Bull Mastiff, 2014
Zak, pound rescue, 2016
Lilly Bing, goat, 2017
Ruger, cat, 2018
Abby, mum's horse, 2018
Bird, 5 week old kitten, hand raised from 1 week old, 2019
Phoenix, last of about 20 chooks collected in 2 years, was about 9 yrs old, 2019
Sooty, goat, 2019

Crikey this property is a bit of a pet cemetery!!!  Especially all the chooks, gosh they are a bit fragile in life, fall off the perch quite literally a lot!!!

I keep thinking I've forgotten someone!

And those that are left in the land of the living at present are:

Leo, pound rescue, aged 12 1/2
Vada, Great Dane rehome, aged 7 1/2
Cassidy, cat found in the middle of the road at about 4 weeks of age, now 7 1/2 yrs
Tom, Marcus's cat, 6 3/4
Remington, brother of Ruger, cat, will be 4 in 10 days.
Bear, cat, rescued with his brother Bird and a little sister who died the first night here Feb this year
Izzy Bee the horror goat, who must be 12ish
Barney the pig, 5 1/2
Roger, horse, 24
Mac, horse and most beloved, 18
Smokey, Kaimanawa horse, mustered 2008, same age as Marcus, 13

Still lots to have to farewell.... My babies, no matter how short a time they were here

Rest in Peace Sooty Toots...

Once upon a time, a long long time ago I got my first little orphan wild goat kid, it would have been 2001.  Little Lilly Bing was so cute, got old old photos of her snuggled up in front of the fire, of her standing on my back, more personality than many of my dogs if I'm completely honest.  I lost her last year or the year before, not sure exactly when anymore, it was recorded on FB and well, we all know what happened to all of that!!!  She would have been about 16.  She hailed from East Lane, Kekerengu way.

A couple of years after I got Lilly we obtained Sooty who was about 10 mths old by the time she came to us.  Her owners had got her as a wee orphan when her mother was shot, they lived and worked on Molesworth Station but when they shifted into town they got hold of me and I took on goat #2.

The third of the Billy goats gruff (except they were all females) was Izzy Bee.  She too was only about a year old when she got rehomed to us, she was a spoiled little Wairau Valley orphan and must be close to Marcus's age, so maybe 12 now?  She quickly became a stroppy bitch in the paddock and used to give Marcus assholes.  She has been rather unbalanced in her hormones for a good few years now and after Lilly Bing died, she became the undisputed queen of the paddock.  She never gave ME assholes, but anybody else out there was fair game.  She has a HUGE lump in her throat and sometimes she struggles to eat and can't fit her tongue in her mouth and a couple of times now she has randomly dropped out nearly her whole coat.  Certainly not the most healthy specimen in the paddock.  To the point I actually got my darling neighbour to dig me a hole about 18mths ago because I didn't think she would get thru the winter back then!  But the bitch rallied and is still here, hole still there too!  More recently she's been bloody aggro to Sooty and yesterday it just went far too far.... :(

I went out to shift tape for the horses and Sooty was lying in the grass only a couple of metres away from their tape, flat out on her side, not moving.  I thought she was dead, but she wasn't.  One horn had been torn right off and was just a bleeding inside part stump left, her head was tilted right back like she had lockjaw and she couldn't get up.  Marcus and I carried her into the back yard by the garage, put her in the shelter there, put Abby's old cover over her 'cause she was cold and shivering and left her safe at least.

This morning she was no better, head still stuck back with a stiff neck and she cried out a few times (she HATES being alone) and it was not a pretty call, she was in pain and still couldn't move or get up, so she was put in the back of the car and she was taken to the vet to end that pain and suffering for my timid old soft natured Sooty who only liked to be touched once a year when she was shedding her winter coat and would want me to pull out the tufts of cashmere for her...

She is now in Izzy's hole, but parked beside her best friend Lilly Bing.  Rest easy my girl, you didn't want much to do with me, ever, but I will miss you in the paddock sweety.

It got me thinking how many goodbyes I've had to make since I've been down in Blenheim.... seems like way too many but I guess that comes with time passing and having lots of babies :( 

Might do that list... maybe...

You Ever Have Patches of "It Just Feels Like a Dream"???

I do.... not a bad dream, just when you think you had everything figured out, you saw the map that was your life stretching out ahead of you and suddenly things change, and it's like the map has suddenly become that of a different country so altho the path hasn't changed a lot, where you are and where you will be suddenly seems drastically different.

So dad died a couple of months back right?  Well since then we've heard from one of his long time mates who is the executor of his will that the property he had (which my money savvy mother had gotten for us as the family many many years ago as a house converted to flats) is going to be sold in the new year and the money coming to us 3 kids.  Hell, we'd never counted on anything from him so while I admit it more than crossed my mind after I heard he had died, it was still something you didn't actually factor into your life, but you know what?  I have been factoring it in and altho you shouldn't count your chickens before they hatch, god damn I have just r...e...l...a...x...e...d... about my finances!  Mumma taught me well and I've been banging that mortgage away as fast as possible, no point having too much money in savings when it's earning no interest and I'm paying it on a mortgage right?! Next year sometime when the property is sold it'll be the end of my mortgage!!! Doesn't matter if I end up getting fuck all from it, if he had other debts (pretty sure he didn't tho LOL) cause the mortgage ain't huge anyway, but it'll be gone!!!!  The house can get finished!!!  I'm getting a sidecar for the bike for the dog before he dies (hell I was planning on doing that next year anyway but I would have been doing it cheap LOL) and I'm gonna be able to take my "sister to another mother" on a trip we promised to each other 15 yrs after the promise was made.

A chicky babe who has overcome such crap in her life, who has grown, who has shown such courage confronting so many demons on so many levels, who I am PROUD to include in my family and I made a deal that after she was sober for 5 yrs we would take a trip to Egypt.  Well, next year it will have been 15 yrs since she took the last drink that broke that addiction... She no longer runs away from her life or her past and tries to escape it and I am so sooooooooooo proud of her, and so next year, she and I and Marcus are going to Egypt and we're gonna do a safari in Africa on the way home which I've always wanted to do and I just know my old man is gonna be buzzing that he got to help me out with the house, that I won't have to work as many hours as I can possibly scratch up to get ahead, that I can stop breaking my body thru that work and that I will get to take Marcus overseas like that.  He would have absolutely approved of all of it.  Probably even the sidecar cause it'd mean I was less likely to tip the bike over LMAO.

And at the same time I have made the call to leave my twin flame/soul mate/dearest person to me to do his own thing... when you go up there to celebrate a birthday with them and you get ignored completely, even while staying in the house.... well.... it was an easy decision to make eh?  I don't force my company on anyone.  So, you know.... changes I wasn't expecting, like the landscape has changed so abruptly it has to be a dream, but not one I feel the need to wake up from, just one where it seems "strange," not-real, dream-like... like that new tangent, or direction hasn't been made my own yet the brain is still wrapping itself around the idea.

I thank my mother nearly every day for the financial savvy she imparted on me, means I've never NEEDED anyone to help me out, and I thank her for having her shit together enough it meant dad ended up with what he had cause now that's coming full circle.  Dad loved being able to help me out, always buying clothes and stuff for Marcus and sending them down, he had a thing about socks, having grown up, walking barefoot to school and ending up with chillblains that he complained about right thru to him leaving, so I still have socks in the packets here that I'll be using for years to come LOL.  He loved being able to do that, I know he'll be so happy to be able to help out so much more now.

He wasn't a good dad when he should have been, but he always thought he was dad still....

You know what???  I think I'm gonna take pretty much ALL of January off with the boy and we're gonna go explore :)