I am due to go to Melbourne. Next week there will be some olive oil bottles to collect. I can visit my daughter and grandson. I don't really enjoy the travel but its nice to make contact with family. I started thinking about going after this weekend.

But it has been so busy. I am reluctant to go away when there is so much on. Between now and Christmas I don't have a lot of free weekends, as most of them have a farmer's market that we have been attending for the last few months.

Markets have been good for us, and they have been getting busier and busier as we approach Christmas. Our oil gift packs sell really well, so it would be an expensive option to miss one. We are moving quite a lot of bottles of olive oil, and I need to constantly stock up from the large storage barrels.

We are lambing right now, too and its not fair to leave all that to my wife. So far it has been pretty straightforward. This year's lambs are mostly small and easily delivered by their mums. I haven't had a giant lamb/difficult birth so far. But two days ago it went off the rails...a well-intentioned but milk-less sheep hung onto her lamb and closely guarded it...just wasn't feeding it. My alarm started going off in the morning...it was very thin and I had decided if it hadn't improved by the afternoon we would take it in and feed it. Snaffling a lamb and bringing it in is the last resort. We have had the message "interfere as little as possible" soundly flogged into us.

But I was wrong, or rather, too late. In the afternoon the lamb was semi-comatose. We brought him in and tried to get some nutrition into him, but despite some positive signs and an uptake of food he died in the night. All very sad and lots of room for reflection and self-recrimination. And yesterday when we were checking them in the afternoon, we found a dead ewe with her lamb parked next to her. The lamb was in tip-top shape, well-fed and rounded out. The mum had only just died. She showed signs of anemia, which could have been worms, but I think she may have been bleeding since the birth. Maybe both,.

The lamb came with us and is in the dog cage in the loungeroom. The cage keeps the dogs from "interacting" with the lamb. Kobbie the Jack Russell would kill her if he could. Although he's relatively OK about it, and is calmly sleeping nearby ( albeit at the end of a leash fixed to the lounge chair) she agitates him when she makes a noise. He's snapped if I have not noticed him getting close when I feed her.

She was a week old, so she's been slower to take to the bottle than a new-born lamb. But once she recognizes the bottle and comes for it we'll take her back to the secure goose paddock and socialize her with the other lambs and mums.

And the corpse of the dead sheep had to be dealt with. Our Dorpers are big sheep. She would have been 60 KG, and was found next to the lake in the goose pond. That is, at the bottom of the quarried area. Too rough to bring a vehicle down, so I had to drag the carcass back up the hill then lift it into the trailer. Then bury it. Hard work on a hot day.

And then this morning I got a call from Damian, who cuts our hay, to say he was on the way to our place to do it today. I am pretty ready for that. I had already marked the wombat hole in the paddock,,,(although it turns out there was a second one I didn't know about that Damian found). Its going to be hot over the next two days and Damian thinks we will bale on Wednesday. In my hay shed are quite a few bales that I stored there temporarily. They were cut, got wet, and I got given them for free. Neither my cows nor sheep liked them though, so I left them there, stacked apart to dry out.

But now I need that space, so I have started to move them out to the far paddock that we are fixing up. They will go into the various potholes as green fill. All fine. Except the very large Eastern Brown snake under the bottom bale. No photo, you didn't see it, so you have to take my word for it...it very very big! It was asleep when I lifted the bale, and luckily for me chose to run away. But its still in the shed, and I have more bales to move.

We are expecting a decent hay crop. I'll need to lift and stack a lot of bales in the trailer, then move them into the shed. Its a hard day's work!

So, had I gone to Melbourne, all of that would have fallen onto my wife.

Post-script: After that was posted a massive tree branch from the neighbor's elm broke off, smashed about 6 metres of fence. It took two of us an afternoon to clear it all up and fix the fence. And then my brother-in-law tested positive for Covid. I had been helping him move furniture in the weekend. I tested for a few days and was clear, but there was no way I was going to Melbourne!