"What Would I Write About If Nothing Went Wrong?"

You know, there was a moment earlier in the week when I had inspected my last cow pat (more on that later), that an interesting thought crossed my mind. It had to do with the content of this blog and just how I could keep it interesting if nothing of particular note happened. What would I write about if nothing went wrong, or we didn’t face any challenges? Of course, we don’t really want to face too many challenges, or have things go wrong, but we do want to keep things entertaining for all of you. But before I had time to really indulge my catch 22 quandary, fate, the dirty little minx that it is, rolled the dice. And as it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

But first; the cowpats. As previously reported, a pesky cow managed to munch up some string from a bale of hay last week and so we thought we’d better keep an eye out for an irregular looking pile of faecal matter. Not exactly something I saw in my future as a bright eyed child, but not everything goes to plan I guess.

I think this photo of Jo sums it all up really:

I didn't make her do it all of course:

In the end we didn't find anything out of the ordinary.

So we moved on to plan b, which was to do some surveillance:

I welcome your thoughts on what the caption for that photo could be.

Luckily for you (because I would have taken a photo of it), but unluckily for us, there were no bowel movements to speak of.

We decided that we were probably (or hopefully) overreacting a little bit because the cow is still eating and still doing what cows do. And something has to be making all of that mess.

So that was Monday. And it wasn't until Friday that things went particularly pear shaped.

All we wanted to do was go and check on the animals, making sure they had enough water and grass to keep them going for another couple of days and then go and have our lunch. Happy with how things looked, Jo and I stood around taking it all in and feeling particularly smug about what great farmers we were. Which was right about when Kupe took off after the lambs for no particular reason and scared them so much that they ran straight through the electric fence like it was, well, not an electric fence. When the commotion died down, there were lambs in three different paddocks, including one in with the sheep. That was not good. I'm not 100% sure why, but I just know that it's not. Cue the swearing. Lots and lots of swearing.

Our task was clear: separate one lamb from 12 sheep. And 3 HOURS AND ALMOST THE END OF A RELATIONSHIP LATER we succeeded in doing that. We're not so smug any more.

The weekend saw Jo go back to Christchurch for her nephew's christening and me babysit my one and a half year old cousin Samantha. I don't know why everyone thinks looking after children is so hard. I spent a whole 4 hours with her and had nary a problem. The trick? Give them something shiny and then go about your business. In Samantha's case it was a mobile phone and an ipod. Easy. What is not so easy is figuring out car seats. Three seat belts? Who's idea was that? I wasted 10 minutes just to go and get some McDonald's. I would have gotten something healthier, but I needed somewhere with a drive-through, lest I have to contend with the car seat again.

And that's the week that was really. Today I had to fix a water trough that was leaking, but that didn't turn out to be the nightmare it could have been. Mainly because Richard came and did the majority of the work. I did try to do it myself, but it seems that fixing water troughs is another life lesson that passed me by. I did manage to complete half the job, which is better than nothing. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

Now it's time to see what this week has in store for us.