2016: Zooming On Past

It's been a whole year since my Pippa arrived! So, I sorta celebrated her birthday today, actually well yes and no. I didn't wrap her up in a birthday suit, but I gave her a little more attention than normal.

Actually I wandered out to the compost bin today, via the garden and discovered a good handful of beautifully red strawberries - honestly I would say they're the best looking ones we've had all season. Then turned around and realised how many tomatoes were ready, I kid you not, the tomato plants basically died and we pretty much gave up on them. Now we're inundated with these massive tomatoes of a few different varieties, so much so that without my neighbour Sam, knowing, I dropped some off at his house on my way to work the other week - then texted him to say they were there. So I kinda didn't give him the opportunity to say no, lol, the tomatoes needed a home!!
It's funny really, tomatoes are the one thing in our garden that I eat and always have eaten, without a second thought. So long as they're red, I'll chuck 'em on anything. Everything else I'm concerned about bugs and slugs being inside them somewhere....lol. Yeah I'm kinda living off tomatoes at the moment, there are worse things to be eating!

Anyway, we've also got a whole heap of buttercup pumpkins growing, another lot of seedlings that we left in their pots and never got around to planting them out properly, until one day I kinda went a little mental and said it's ridiculous growing things if we're not gonna actually give them a fighting chance. (It was more the fact that the garden was already overburdened and we didn't really know where to put them!) So into a garden they went, and I had the brilliant idea of putting the lawn clippings around them to keep them moist, well, now they're going ballistic and are known as "Kayger's buttercups" haha. I keep pulling off the unnecessary flowers but today I realised how many massive bumble bees were in there, so I grabbed my phone and took heaps of photos. The Young Farmer Grand Final contest includes a photography section in the awards, among other things where you can put your club and region out there a bit more in front of the nation, so I'm gonna enter a few categories and see what happens. Zooming in on bumble bees inside massive yellow flowers is pretty fun!
But Pippa was helping me so I got some of her too....and then she and her buddy Jackson chilled out under the barbeque.
 



Life is, pretty basic these days. They say we'll get hit with a cyclone...maybe. They say the humidity will pass, lol that's a Tui ad! I got nicely tanned up again yesterday while I helped Dad and Nick with some fencing, I'm very lucky (touch wood) to have not gotten overly burnt this year - just a nice, crisp brown. The weather is painfully hot at midday, which is typically when you want to be out of the sun, but that's when we're working in it. Lovely. And milking in this heat certainly isn't pleasant either, what with the heat, humidity and a few hundred massive cows crammed into a concreted area with concrete walls surrounding you, plenty of sun gets through (especially with that skylight plastic roofing) but hardly any air-flow, yep, it's great.
But I'm not complaining, the work is good. It's taken me a bit to get back into the swing of it, but these days it's easy to get up just after 4am, as once I'm up I'm generally awake. If I have the odd sleep in here and there I wake up at the same time anyway, go back to sleep and wake up after 7 feeling worse. Fantastic! No, work is good.

Trying to get my assignments done is more of a problem, as these days I'm filling myself up on antihistamines to stop the sneezing, which then makes me sleepy, which then makes reading particularly difficult. I really shouldn't do this to myself, leave most of my study to the last month and a half, but it's painfully boring!!
What's worse is that this is my last lot of the course, thus needing to be finalised by end of February. One assignment completed and sent away, one lot of reading material almost finished and one assignment half completed which is now at a standstill as they missed out a heap of information in the reading material (quite literally, half a sentence and then a blank page) which is needed in the assessment and I've absolutely no clue how to do it. Waiting for them to get back to me. Ha!

I've also recently discovered that the next course I plan to do - Agribusiness Management Level 5, is in fact just another "certificate" qualification, not the Diploma I thought it was, and it's basically a lead in teaching on being self employed. Which, I dunno. I kinda feel the need to keep on studying while I'm young, but then I also don't want to spend $700 on another year long course (I admit, it's cheap really) if it's not what I want to learn and will I get anything out of it anyway? Argh, decisions. I don't want to look like one of those people who spends a lot of time and money doing things that might come in handy, when really on a C.V. it just shows that I'm one of those people who has no clue what to do and has the potential to be yet another 'career changer'. Meh, no clue, whatsoever.



In saying that, I'm going to apply for an exchange trip to Scotland for June/July in 2017. The Young Farmers organise the exchange for one accepted Young Farmer member, and (so far) provide $500 towards the costs and farming host families in Scotland cover your accommodation expenses. Well I don't know all that much about it, other than the fact it's a 6 week exchange trip where you meet with heaps of other young farmers in that general area, you get hosted on farms and you get to learn about their ways, and such forth. Scotland is somewhere I've always wanted to go, so I'm determined to apply and hopefully meet the criteria as best I can - with the intention of getting over there before I'm 25 (if I don't get accepted in the first couple years of applying). I looked at one of the previous years' applications of the guy who was accepted and he seemed to be a real industry 'big-wig', I guess is the best way to describe him (out of admiration, rather than being judgmental).
He had worked his way up in his farming career, heaps of qualifications and within the Young Farmers club and region he was involved in, he'd had a lot of roles in the executive committee, and such. So I figured, okay, looks like you have to be pretty awesome to be given the opportunity, thus I started planning.

We had our young farmers regional AGM on Tuesday night, where all the new executive committee members are elected for our region, I had previously been put up for Secretary but unfortunately didn't get enough votes. I thought, if I can go up in the roles each year and prove myself as a willing, hard working, fully involved member then it will increase my chances. But I did get my Publicity Officer role back again partly I think, because it's one of those roles where nobody else wants to do it, and partly because I showed last year that I was more than capable of getting things done well in a timely fashion. So, yeah ok, kinda bummed that I was beaten to the post of secretary again, but hey - sitting typing minutes and not really being part of a meeting is kinda lame anyway!
However, Duncan, a guy from the national Head Office was there on the night, he mentioned the exchange trip (mostly because a Scottish lass or lad will be coming over here and will need to bunnyhop between member's farms across the country for 6 weeks), so I asked him about it later on. Apparently, so it seems, in a good year only three (yes, 3) people apply for the trip. THREE?! WHAT?! So my chances of getting in are exceptionally high, not only but also, the criteria is simply to be a good member of young farmers - heard straight from the horses' mouth. Like, huh? Duncan basically said to just get in and apply, definitely. But perhaps give it a couple years as he was working on the young farmer big wigs to provide more money, such as to cover the airfares at least.

I mean, wow OK. Here I was thinking I needed to push, push, push, get good work references and look good in the club and all that. Now here is something to definitely look forward to!

I Have the Chocolate...Mwhahahaha

It's Mum's birthday today - Happy Birthday Mum!! Along with a book, I got her a box of Roses chocolates, which admittedly, were opened quite quickly ;) Now though, she and Dad are headed off to Mitre 10 in anticipation to wander around the garden centre - will likely come back with trees and plants we have nowhere to put but that's not the important thing I'm getting at here. I am HOME ALONE, with chocolate - that isn't mine. Sense a bit of mischievous behaviour going on? Absolutely not, hehehe

So we've had quite a busy week - apologies if I haven't gotten around to replying to comments, emails or texts and all that. Just, yeah. Busy. Chaotic. All of the above. You know?

With Young Farmers, there is a competition - now called FMG Young Farmer of the Year, it happens every year, starts off with District contest, the top competitors moving up to Regional and then the overall winner of each region competes in the National Contest.
So, our region we have two District finals, as our five clubs are kinda all over the show. Last Saturday we had our district competition which was fantastic, 10 competitors, seven of whom were from our club and my brother convened it (so he had to come up with all the modules, how they'd be run, organising materials and judges etc etc).
The day was jolly hot, I can imagine everyone got sunburned - myself included. I was helping out with judging the livestock module. (If you haven't really heard of it too much before, in the Districts the competitors rotate from one module to the next and so on, each module takes 20 minutes and you've only got a couple minutes to do a quick mark up before the next person arrives).

With the livestock, Tim and I were in the stock yards all day,  with not really anywhere to sit and there was absolutely no shade, bit of a shocker really when everyone else had some form of gazebo. But yeah, it was certainly interesting watching different styles of handling stock. From those people who weren't really involved with animals having the most difficulty, to those who handled sheep more than cattle having a few problems and those who handle cattle every day having the easiest job.
They had to draft out, single handedly, the six heaviest heifers from the group of 10, just by looking at them - not the most easiest as they were all around about the same size. Put them through the race, work out how to use the scales and weigh them. Check the teeth on one animal, and work out its age (some people cheated and looked at the eartag...) and then name breeds of New Zealand beef and sheep from the pictures provided. But yeah, having not participated in the contest before, it gave me a good insight for when I enter it next year as a competitor.
But it was really hard for me, to stand there and watch them struggle to draft the animals on their own, watch them set up the yards prior to drafting (or not doing it at all!) and thinking in my head, nope I would've done that differently! I found it seriously frustrating to stand there and watch, because you can't help unless they ask for it, thus losing them points.

So yeah, the day went without a hitch - kudos to my brother for his brilliant organisational skills, and sadly I missed the judging because I had to go back and milk that afternoon, but hey. The important part, the top four contestants who are moving up to regional level include three of our club members - blimmen awesome!


On Monday Mum and I checked in at the hair dressers for our annual(ish) hair appointment. Me, just a tidy up. $40 later. Pathetic though, she asked if I was still at school? It would've been $25 if that was the case. If I'd known that, I would've said yes! Why? Because all these years I've gone there and they've never, ever asked. So. Annoying.
Mum and Dad are off to Wellington on the weekend, just a quick trip for my Great Aunties' (Twins) 70th birthday party. I don't even think they're down there for 24 hours lol, but trying to get cheap flights means you need to earlier and later flights...and Nick is also somewhat away for the weekend - trekking it up to the Bay of Islands for the other district final contest.


Mostly, life is good. Busy, Chaotic, I think I mentioned it all a little earlier! It is stinking hot, over 20 degrees most days, the ground is bone dry and the little rain we get is a bit of a misty thing every now and again. We had yet another truckload of house water arrive today, our second one already doesn't bode too well. Fingers are all crossed for, I dunno, a cyclone to come through bringing with it heaps of rain?
I'm working pretty much full time, seven days a week for the next three weeks at least, covering about four different farms each week and it gets to the stage I need to look at the calendar each day to figure out where I'm going, how the fuel situation is looking (the windy roads use so much more fuel...) whether I can leave my milking gear at the shed, or am I somewhere else the next day? Why is all this happening? Because yet again, staff are hurting our clients, pulling out of their jobs and leaving them high and dry. The third one this season for one of our favourite farms, you feel so stink for them but all you can do is help them milk the cows. It's great, I don't mind the work and I certainly don't mind the income - it's just those start times at it again, it really mucks up all your sleeping system, especially the 5am starts, which need 20 minutes just to drive there...up I get just after 4 o'clock.... :(
During the day, I need to get the study in, just three and a half months left to go (bring on end of Feb!), I've stuffed around the last two months and now have three assignments to finish and send in the by the end of the month - I don't know why I do it to myself. Just like, seriously kid, get your A into G (as mum would say!). But you have those confidence/enthusiasm boosts, when the one paper you sent in gets returned with, and I quote, "difficult to find faults" comment. Perfect!


I popped into youth group for the first time since around May, last night. It was nice to go back, but it's definitely changed, however it was nice to be back and just get my mind ticking along with what Jeff was talking about. I kinda want to go back more often (helpful when term is almost finished), because, I dunno you feel a little more, alive when you leave? But I'm somewhat considering now going along and trying the Bible study that some older people I know go to, just to try it. It's awkward, being in that inbetween age. Too old for youth group when everyone's still early/mid teens, but too young to go to this other group when the people you've spoken to are a little younger than your parents. But hey, it might be good. I just have to try it :)