Another good week :)

Grandad arrives today, it'll be good to see him after all of these years. He's coming up from the Wairarapa to help Dad with a tonne of fencing jobs we've got. Currently, there are about three straight weeks booked, and another three weeks at a specific farm. The latter isn't booked in yet, but it has to be done by the end of the season to comply with Fonterra's regulations. We're not quite sure how long Grandad will stay for - we originally told him there would be about 10 days of solid work, but there's quite a bit more now. It's a good thing, because milking is winding down as the farmers are drying off their cows. It's coming up to the end of the season, and with this drought I'm quite surprised how some are still milking. Dad's not too keen on continuing fencing for too long. Winter is coming up and fencing in the winter is just diabolical. It gets too wet and muddy and all we make is a mess, so come end of May we'll shut it down. That, and we have to return the tractor we lease to the owner for winter/spring time. However, for now, with little in the way of milkings, it's good for the guys to have something to do. It'll be different having Grandad here though for the next little while, especially as we haven't seen him in such a long time! Hopefully all goes well :)

I was a tad disappointed last night when I read an email from the Royal Society, saying I wasn't accepted for the trip to England. I'm not surprised though. They reckon they had over 400 applications from really high calibre students, with only minimal spaces to fill. Of course they did the typical "soften the blow" email, where they explained the situation etc etc etc before finally saying I was not accepted. In other words, they didn't want to say "nah, not good enough" - I'm sure they would probably get in trouble for that too, thinking about it. The world is so PC these days, I mean, imagine offending somebody?!
     But I'm not too concerned, because it will save me money that I really need for University, also it means I will be able to go the Palmerston North Massey open day in August as I will be in the country for it. That, and Mum was stressing out about the possibility of me going overseas by myself. lol. Next Wednesday I find out whether I was accepted to go to Outdoors Pursuits Camp. I really really hope I can go to that, so that I can go somewhere interesting before the slog of uni...But of course there is a plan B for that too. If I don't get to go there I will instead go to HM Rage with my youth group! Since both activities are in May, I don't really want to abandon Mum and Dad twice!
     Another thing I want to attempt this year is Biology Scholarship. I don't know all the details about scholarship so I'm planning on calling my learning advisor on Monday to talk to her about it. Then call my Biology teacher and ask her to possibly sign me up, or tell  me the ropes. I've also been thinking about this Ag/Hort that I'm doing....I'm so not enjoying it. Don't get me wrong, it's not an absolutely horrible subject, but it is so time consuming. All these things I need to do, I seriously wonder how an urban student could do it? Anyway, I'm not liking it and I'm about two booklets behind. It's an all year course, and if I were to use it for my 14 credits in one subject I would need to do four tests and so so so much work. It's just not worth it. I would rather do Bio, Chem and Stats (which I'm doing really well on by the way!) and enjoy those subjects, and do well. Rather than suffer with a not so great subject. Anyway, I'm sure my LA will agree. I can't take up another subject because there aren't any subjects that I could do, or would suit me, or would be worth it. So it'll just be three subjects from here on out hopefully. And that means I won't be so far behind and work won't be so much of a problem.
    I did my practice test for my first stats internal the other day - finally! I've been putting it off for a while, but I spent all day last week and did everything I needed to do on Excel, then copied the graphs and forecasts and wrote up the report. It's not completely finished, I still need to add some more detail, change things around a bit but otherwise it was mostly done. So I sent it to my Statistics teacher for him to have a look over, so I knew I was doing it right. Yep, I was! He said it was a very easy achieved, and with the added detail that I still needed to do would definitely gain a higher mark. So yay! So I'll just finish that up, and he's sending me the actual test. So, finally, after 12 weeks of school, four credits (in maths of all things o.O) will be soon coming my way. Excellent.

The other day I looked through the diary and found that since the beginning of February, I have worked every weekend. So that is 10 weekends in a row I've been milking and I've done heaps of work - at one particular place - during the weekdays. I thought to myself, no wonder I am so behind in things! This weekend was meant to be my weekend off, but as my brother and Dad were milking this weekend at sole charges, and had extra work during the day, Mum and I decided to go with them and help them to get the milkings finished faster. My brother and I decided to start at 5am this morning, so I got up at four and met up with him at 4:30 when we left. We arrived at the farm to find a bit of a surprise, there was only 80 cows still milking! It is a 16 cows per side cowshed, pretty cute, and there were only just over 5 rows to do. Normally it's a one person job, but with two of us and a small number of cows, we were out of there by 6:30! Everything all done, and we were home by 7am lol. I've never had such a quick milking. I have to milk next weekend too, so my 10 weekends in a row will be upped to 12 weekends in a row. It's a bit amusing to be honest.

On Wednesday a friend of mine is coming over. It's the last youth group night for the term, so we're making cupcakes and decorating them with cute Easter bunnies :D One style that was in a supermarket catalogue is a rabbits' face, with ears, eyes, nose and whiskers. Yesterday Mum found another kind on Facebook (oh yeah, Mum and Nana have facebook!) It basically looks like a rabbit digging its face into the cupcake, and all you can see is the tail, feet and back end. They're super cute! My friend also has another idea that she's bringing with her. It's great, because her older sister left her a bucket of Fondant when she moved to Aussie. And since Fondant is what we need for the ears and feet, it's worked out great!  Hopefully they work and I'll take some pictures to show next week.

Oh yeah, and if anybody who reads is interested in cats, be sure to check out my friends blog! She's recently started her blog and is an SPCA foster mum for kittens. If you like cats, this is a cool blog with cute as pictures of the kittens! You can find her on the right hand side of my blog :)