• Normal people have to change their clothes when they get baby vomit on them. I just had to change my shirt because I nearly went out with cow snot all down my back. True story.
• Covered nipples to knee in the sloppiest and smelliest duck poop you’ve ever seen or smelled. And all before 8:30 in the morning.
  I used to think that the best shower in the world was the one you take after the flight between Australia and the US. I now know better.
• In the paddock loading a sheep up when the pigs decide to give Linhda some love:
  Linhda: “Pigs! Stop it!”

<pigs completely ignore Linhda and keep loving up on her>
Linhda: “Pigs! I said STOP!”
I swear, sometimes it’s like those pigs don’t understand English.

• Officially a member of “The Diggers Club” and have ordered a metric butt-load of seeds and plants.
  I’d talk about it more, but the first rule of Diggers Club…
• Real farmers keep Purell in their car to sanitize their hands after dropping off or picking up chooks from “The Other Farm” right? Right?!
• Just went to check the menagerie and found that one of them (I suspect the shifty goat) had lifted a latch into a pig run, and that the boy and girl pigs were free-ranging together. The boys were fairly freaking ecstatic, the girls didn’t know what to make of the attention, and I was terrified.
  After judicious use of our excellently designed stock race (patent pending), many sloppy and muddy pig kisses, and the biggest boot I’ve ever received off an electric fence, they’re again separated.
  And now I all kinds of need a shower.
• Put the babies into the veggie bed to clean out two spent beds, but forgot that I’d buried a couple of chickens in one of the beds last week. The babies found the very ripe chooks within about 10 minutes. What ensued is both the grossest sounding and smelling thing I’ve ever been around. /shudder
• In my delirium last night after many big weeks and not much sleep, I may have bought a pig off the interweb. I think somebody may be delivering it here on Monday.
  Don’t tell dad or Linhda…
• Spent a couple of very hot hours tracking down a short in the electric fence that was letting one of the babies (Smoked) squeeze under the fence and into the back yard. Finally found it, get her back into The Patch, turn the fence on, get a full signal, and she still squeezes under ignoring the zap. Apparently my dry old lawn is worth that much pain.
  On a related note, David I think we need to run an earth wire along the bottom of that fence tonight…
• Just tattoo-branded my pigs. It’s as easy as hitting them with a hammer-type implement. Apparently the hard part is getting them on the correct shoulder though (right = bought pig, left = home-bred pig). I’m sitting at 3 out of 5 correct, and in the beginning was 1 out of 3.
  Seriously, I’m really not a stupid man…
• Got our first proper (i.e. not spit-sized) pig back today. He dressed out to 55kg, or about 120 pounds for my American brothers and sisters. We spent the morning cutting him into many roast joints, chops, and boning out bits to make sausages. We’re also starting our first bacon tonight, and are experimenting on the belly bits and cheeks. And all for a small fraction of the cost of unethical pork let alone the gucci free-ranged stuff.

We now have a sheep that is excess to our needs and we might sell him on (seriously, all of our freezers are full). We can take him to the butcher and they’ll do the entire thing, thereby making it kosher (euphemistically) and legal. Anybody interested in buying a whole, free-ranged sheep?

• Note to self: when testing the new home-made smoker, you should situate said smoker outside of the shed. Smoke billowing from a shed has the potential to scare passers-by.
• I got one of the rats that has been running around my shed. Weirdly, I felt like a big-game hunter as I held it up in triumph this morning…

Miss March