Pippa

So, it's been a while since I first got my Pipsqueak, as you all know. But I don't think I've ever really done a post about just her - so here you go!

First day!

Miniature Piglet....

This is a small kid sized couch...

With Uncle Miller :)

Shoe obsession begun at a very early age...

:D

Bumble - her very first teddy...and my(her) beanbag and my (her) blankey

In desperate need of a selfie stick ;)

Loves her Bumble

Obsession with the dryer...

I love it when she sleeps

The day I stole a teddy off Nana,(my mum lol) and took it upstairs

Now I've stolen TWO teddies!

Mum found her fast asleep in a (thankfully) empty fruit basket early one morning, the old saying - if it fits, I sits is appropriate here, I think.

I'm taking my frustration out on Teddy, Just because Teddy is getting ripped to pieces doesn't mean I don't love him...

Apologies for the blurry pictures - I'm no photographer! And it's hard to get good pictures of someone who is either constantly on the move, or fast asleep. I've always wanted to get a video of her scratching, as she can't hold her tongue in at the same time. You see her have a good scratch, and then wonder around with her tongue hanging out - then you tell her, and my gosh she looks so embarrassed, it's super cute! hehe

It's hard to believe she started out as this 3 week old, flea-ridden, 300 gram bundle of bones with a skinny little rats tail thing and ears and eyes that were far too big for her head. She would always be snuggled into my neck, fast asleep.
Now, she's an 8 month old monster who still has the odd flea - as frustratingly, she reacts to every treatment we've tried on her (like, really?!) She's an independent little ratbag who spends most of her days sleeping, or attacking me. Who has destroyed my phone charger cable, and as it happens, the cable that runs from the TV to the speaker which I've now got to somehow replace.

But she's the sweetest little thing, constantly expressing that I am definitely her "person" as I come home from work to find her running high speed down the stairs, squeaking that I'm home, purring and smooching, telling me all about her day even though I've been gone only a couple of hours. Then later on she'll jump on my lap, and just to show how much she cares, she grabs hold of my leg with both paws, claws included, and bites my knee. If that's not love, I don't know what is! (notice the sarcasm?)
But she's great, because she's happy to spend time with everyone, she has cuddles with Mum, spends time with Nick and the "red dot", or shows Nick she cares by attacking his feet during dinner. Then she'll give Dad the most adoring looks, and spends time with him too.

She sits on command, I didn't even need to teach her - she taught herself. She steals her lollies, takes water from the poor, defenseless Cyclamen plants we have on the bench, and will rip their leaves up too if she's bored - extra nutrition and all that. Sleeps anywhere and everywhere, and often attends cooking and baking classes. AKA, she sits on the windowsill section of the bench, that runs in between the kitchen and lounge (see that basket picture). She's not "technically" on the bench, so she's allowed. From there she gets to watch Mum and I sort dinner, or baking, or whatever we're doing - she's a good student, learns heaps, doesn't take any food when you turn away. Next term she'll learn how to wash and dry the dishes, one hopes!

Dreaming Daze

Not too much has been happening lately on the home front. Just the good old feeding calves every day - half way through our sixth week, doing the odd milking wherever I get it, studying when I can stay awake, and trying to keep up with the blogs and emails, so life is somewhat busy but not!
I say to talk about the weather - it's been odd. Raining one moment, sunny the next, then it'll come over black again and we'll find ourselves hiding from the downpour.
I won't say no to a good amount of sun in winter though, quite often you could find me stalking the house seeking it out. On the step into the kitchen until about 10 o'clock, I fight with Pippa over a good warm spot while I have breakfast after work. Sadly though, it doesn't touch my room at this time of year, but Mum and Dads room gets infiltrated with it, thus in the afternoons I fight with both Pippa and  Frodo, over the prime postition - at least I don't need to join them ripping up the exposed underlay on the floor... o.O

Mostly, the calves are good. A little tedious every now and then but some days they can be great. There's this one calf, she reminds me of Pippa at times, she'll look over at me so I'll open up my arms and say "come here!" and she'll bounce over to me. Okay, so she sees me as someone to suck on, but she's still pretty sweet - so I won't flick her off too quickly!


I have been wondering about something lately though, and it got me thinking. There are so many high speed car accidents lately - typically from people going too fast and then losing control, but surely it can be prevented? Basically, I was thinking about portable GPS's and the inbuilt ones in cars nowadays - they can bleep and carry on when you're going over the current speed limit. So why is there not something in your car that can withhold excessive speed? If these GPS's can figure the speed limits, then surely the car could have something that does that too, also why can cars go so fast, when they're designed for day to day driving? Yes, I can understand for places like the Autobahn, but in little old NZ and similar places where our max speed limit is 100km/h, why is there not a speed break in the accelerator? Something that prevents over-speeding...? I know full well that our cars are imported, so it would be difficult to do something for one country but not for another. But they design cars for left and right side driving, why couldn't they create something that is there that can be altered by the maker for whatever country they're going to?
Or in general, why are they still designing motors in cars in this way, they're doing all this inbuilt breath testing units, and the ability to start the car by simply pressing a button. High speed accidents happen continuously, so why aren't they doing something to prevent or lower it? Just a thought.

And a quick note to Xj, while I was driving home today I suddenly remembered a dream I had last night. So jolly weird, but hey, that's my head for you! Basically for some reason, I was sitting an external English exam, that I had literally done nothing for, I didn't even know what I was meant to be doing in it. So it was the day before the exam, and you know how you can look online at the previous years exemplars? I believe they take them offline the day before the exam happens, so in my dream I couldn't even go online to get a slight gist of what I needed to do - gosh, talk about totally strung out. I knew when I was working this morning that I'd had some form of out there dream, but I couldn't remember until I was nearly back home. All I can think is that my nutty head combined the need for me to do my two assignments with what I'd read on Xj's blog that day and thought to itself, "hey! This will be funny, watch this!" and my ears lean in to have a good listen and my mouth just sits there laughing to itself. Lol

I can't wait until summer!!

#Onehundred

As of the end of this post, I have reached my first milestone of 100 posts on blogspot since beginning over 18 months ago.
So I thought, after my awesome Mum gave me the idea, of writing a post about 100 and how it relates to different things - although I'd love to manage 100, I think I'll keep it to ten!

1. 100 $1 coins will weigh only 800 grams.
   
   
2. A person can receive a letter from the Queen once they reach their 100th birthday.
   
   
3. In French, "One Hundred" is known as "cent" - might pay to be careful when talking money in France!
   
   
4. One Hundred years is a Century, but Century is also a well known term in Cricket - 100 runs in a single innings.
   
   
5. You can expect a sneeze to exceed speeds of 100mph
   
   
6. The first 10 odd numbers add up to 100.
   
   
7. (Almost) 100 years ago, Mrs. Chippy died - a cat. A well known (found male) sailing cat, adored by a carpenter, Harry McNish on the Endurance ship - set for Antarctica. When the ship was destroyed, Mrs. Chippy was shot, as a "weak member" not needed in the crew. McNish was so disgusted with this and he made it known to his crew - in later years he did not receive a "Polar Medal" like the rest of the crew at the time, due to this disagreement. However when he died, a life size bronze statue of Mrs. Chippy was placed on his grave by the NZ Antarctic Society.
   
   
8. The Roman Numeral of one hundred is - C
   
   
9. Our New Zealand $100 note has Earnest Rutherford of Nelson - who discovered the Atom.

10. Only 100 days until our Kiwi summer "officially" begins again!!

 

Ok so this is perhaps not the best tribute to 100 posts that I could manage, but when I realised it was only 100 days until summer, I thought that was pretty significant! I'm pretty sure most of these facts are true, but they were found on the internet - and everything found on the internet is definitely true, right?! ;)
100 posts on here may be a milestone, but by now I couldn't imagine how many blog posts I've actually made - when thinking back to previous school years. Although I'm pretty lucky to still have my old school mates as blogging friends - where would I be without you lot huh??

Seriously considering turning into a cat...

Quite seriously, that is. All they do is sleep, eat and play all day - save for having to go outside in the rain, and their stupid ideas about eating mice and birds etc. All I want to do is sleep!

I'm likely going to jinx it, and you'll hear about it if I do, but I'm seriously glad to have not gotten sick again this winter/spring, but the pollen allergies is driving me to distraction. We're all allergic to pollen, so sneezing and such all day long and waking up with swollen, itchy eyes sucks. Usually I'll have the odd antihistamine here and there to calm it, but even though they say they're 'non-drowsy' I get super tired 90% of the time - probably doesn't help that I'm tired in general!
So off we went to the pharmacy and were advised to try a new kind, "definitely won't make you tired, and it works the best".....hahaha, you got us! What a rip off too, more expensive for less product, and we're all getting zonked out with no lasting affects of what it's actually meant to be doing - if I wanted sleeping pills, I'd buy them, I mean come on! I had one of these "life-saver" tablets at about 6 last night, was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and I didn't wake once - unusual, and currently nearly 24 hours later I can barely keep my eyes open.
It definitely makes for driving, and working, quite interesting that's for sure...and I'm back to the shop floor in about half an hour...life is fabulous! (sarcasm lol)

Super busy with work, trying to finish my study that I'm behind in, although I'm actually learning a lot more than I expected. And I'm considering asking some people I know if they can teach me how to show cattle. After seeing it on Country Calendar the other night, I've been somewhat reminded of how keen I was to do it. Just so happens that the person I know doing it lives literally just down the road - might update on this further once I talk to her.

What's With That?

I'm an easily confused person, not all the time, but every so often there are things I simply don't get. Not that I'm a small-minded person who hasn't seen enough of the world to know what's going on, gosh no. But I think we can all agree that there is just some things in this world currently that are just a little be odd and confusing.

I'm not going to bore you with a discussion based entirely on the alterations of our National Flag and Anthem and the way the Government works as we can pretty much all agree on that. However, I have been thinking about a few things that I've seen around and heard about where it just made me stop and think - what's with that?

Take Work Safe, for instance, we've all got to wear helmets which sure, seems to be a legitimate reason - if they didn't make such a big deal about it so that people buy the helmets to wear on the occasion when Work Safe arrive on their farm, but the rest of the time it will be tied to the front of the four-wheeler.
Yet, it's shocking to know that our country is needing to employ people to clean up our roads because of all the people who throw rubbish out of their car windows. This might be the only job these people can get, it's sad that it needs to be done. What is worse, is driving past a stretch of about ten men over a few hundred metres, wearing helmets to pick up rubbish on SH1. Sure, I guess it's just a preventative measure, cars can flick stones, I understand it. Yet, how often do you see a person standing on the back of a moving rubbish collection truck wearing a helmet? Or perhaps the roadworkers who stand on the moving truck picking up cones from the road - those drivers aren't slow either. Have you ever seen them wearing a helmet? No, me neither.
Why should it be good enough for the goose, but not for the gander? Fate is fate and if something is going to happen, it will, but surely this is a dangerous job, just as dangerous as picking up rubbish on the side of a road, and riding an ATV? Thoughts?







On Sunday could you say we were lucky enough to see yet another snippet into the lives of the Gloriavale community? Possibly, but the entire concept is a bit here and there for me. In some aspects it looks as if it could be a good lifestlye to live in, in others, it seems really not that great. They say that their life is better than what we live in, they compare their lives to ours - although I do wonder how they make a comparison if they've never lived the the same way as us?
We try to look into the eyes of the people (as much as you can through the TV screen) and in many you don't see souls filled with joy like you'd expect. I guess they don't have the fear of having no work and having bills to pay - but then they also don't get freedom to do what they like and when they like.
Especially the women who are required to marry whoever asks them, and have as many children as he wants while having absolutely no say in anything at all. What struck me as awful was when one of the husband stated that if he decided that his wife was having issues during the pregnancy/birth, then he would decide if or when she needed outside help.
Moreover the thing that really baffled me was when an elderly member passed away, during the funeral session another leader stated something along the lines of, "A new body will rise from this grave!" I think that comment overwrites all of what I understand of them, forgive me if I've misunderstood, but to me this seems like some form of reincarnation statement, which they do not believe in - so where did it come from?


Finally I quickly want to touch on the dentist V. lion story. It's horrible to think that such a beautiful creature could be killed by somebody so small in retrospect. It's highly controversial, but you have to think about it in two ways. Way back when, these animals were killed without a thought, but they were killed for a purpose just like a cow, pig or deer is now. But I also like to think of the other side of the coin, where why is it good enough for us to kill a possum or a rabbit for fun, but bigger things like this shouldn't really be any different. I agree that in a situation like this, where there aren't many of some species left, it isn't right at all and killing pests is OK. But why should one animals' life be put higher up than another? Just another thought.


I'd like to hear your remarks!

Crazy Cat: - Activated

My desk is an absolute state at the moment, I honestly don't know how I let it get this far, but I do, and sometime soon I'll need to clean it up - but currently, I'm in the stage of "I-can't-be-bothered-ness" hehe. You'd be surprised how much of a mess a desktop and all it's essentials, a laptop, study material, pens, necessary desk essentials and Pippa creates, alas, I don't believe it'll clean itself up by itself!

I've got to be leaving for work again in about an hour/hour and a half, meant to be doing my assessments that I've suddenly gotten the enthusiasm to do, but Office is being a little unfriendly as of late. I thought I'd fixed the problem, that originally began with my email server - it reckoned there was an "error" of sorts, that it wanted to repair, but never did. Then suddenly it was fixed and working fine, in time for me to send out an email. Then today, I log back on, reading the reply, scrolling, scrolling "error". Darn. It took me a decent amount of time to read said email, because I had to just keep going in and out of the system, quickly scrolling down to the next section and reading it before it locked up again.
Then, without thinking the problem would be contagious, I opened up Word, and that too has the same problem. So, I quit, I can't spend all my time trying to fix the problem - whatever it is, so here I am, and I'll just be doing more of my assessment tonight - just the thing I want to be doing on a weekend, when I'm getting up early the next day! Gah.

These days I'm so jolly tired, and lacking all motivation to get things done, unless it's work, and after this morning, I definitely am losing my patience with those calves! It sort of gets to this stage once you're well over the 100 heifer replacement mark, and the weather starts getting crappy and the calves aren't looking the best because of it - they'll come right, they've just got to get used to it I guess and they should be grateful it's only rain and not snow! I think we've easily had over 200 calves come through our sheds, we've got almost 130 replacements, and by Tuesday about 90 bulls would've made their way to the sales over a stretch of just three weeks. It's definitely fast this year, much faster than normal and the sheds are beginning to struggle a bit, as they always do once they've had this many animals go through them. Tomorrow I'm needed to milk in the morning instead, is it bad that I'm feeling a little too relieved about that? I love my calves, I really do, they just test my patience some days, especially when the colostrum is getting sour.

Speaking of rain, I possibly mentioned here recently that we were getting low on water, well, we no longer are. Because, low and behold, Metservice were actually right about something - makes a nice change! And we had cats and dogs falling from the sky almost all afternoon and night one day this week just gone - no idea what day it was, only that it was as heavy as heck and sleeping upstairs is excessively noisy in that situation - thank goodness there was no wind. Not quite sure how much we had, probably a good 50 - 60mm which has made the difference, cleaned our outside calves off and turned all the paddocks into a big, slushy mess. Hey, can't have it the best of both worlds can you?


It really is crazy, after the sudden downturn of the Fonterra payout we are inundated with work, it's just mental - which is a good thing, but I'm just like omgosh, seriously? Another fully booked weekend for milkings? It's not surprising though, and I do feel for all of the dairy farmers after yesterdays' announcement of less than $4 per kilo of milksolids...(most people were budgeting no less than $5, so it's really serious). Most farmers are dropping their staff and hiring us instead - great for us, except now we're being over booked for relief milkings! So, thankfully we've pretty much found two new people to join our team - a girl a little older than me, and a woman in her 60's - Dad's just got to do a test milking with them this week, to prove they're capable, then they're straight into it from next weekend - phew.
It is a little scary that another recession might be in the very near future, but you've just got to keep on keeping on, no reason to sit around and wait for it to come aye?



Sometime last week I had a good skype conversation with a friend, Xj. I must admit, although I don't enjoy talking to people over skype, it was good to talk to her face to face, since I haven't seen her since she was up this way in December. A whole two hours later, the call was ended. Although some of that time was me arguing with Pippa and being shredded to pieces, anyone want a cat? It's like she just activates a part in her brain, that sends her absolutely wild - especially at night. Last night, after getting home and getting to be a little later than I'd like (get to that in a minute) she went psycho as per the norm at that time of the night, and being so frustrated I literally shut her out of my room, not quite slamming the door after her - so Mum had to deal with her instead (hehe). She's just absolutely mental, quite seriously.
Last night we were meant to go ten pin bowling with the Young farmers, then dinner at one of our "places" who had a live band on at the time, we left late and the weather wasn't great so we cancelled the ten pin and just went to a place somewhat closer, a Bridgehouse of sorts that I've decided I don't particularly like and I mostly regretted going the entire night.
We like to do something like ten pin every so often, cos it's just a bit of a release of the normalities of life, and it's relatively cheap too, add in a bit of competition, it's fun. But we went to this Bridgehouse that was packed with people, it too was having a live band going, and had some pool tables too. The meals were far too expensive for what they were, and you can't even hear yourself think for the noise inside. It wasn't horrible, I just didn't want to be there and I admit to falling asleep at the table - oops!
The band wasn't too bad, in my opinion, but the guys who went figured pool was better so out the back we went for them to do that while I just got to watch - it's really great when you get to the end of the night and THEN they offer you a game - like. I dunno. Not the best time I've had, probably too tired to care and we go out far too often it seems to enjoy it anymore - sort of gotten to the stage where I'm around these people too much and I want to see someone else for a change? *yawns*

Now, I want to quickly add that I want your opinions. This, I believe, is post number 97. I'm wanting to write something, different for my 100th post on here - but alas I've no clue whatsoever on what to say for it. What do you lot reckon, any ideas?