to market, to market

Hello. When I re-jigged my blog and went from being Little Miss Emma to Cinderella at Brindabella I wanted my little space on the world wide web to be more real and more about me, us, our life, and that means more posts about farming. Some of you may find this incredibly uninteresting (maybe not?) and prefer pretty pictures but it's who I am and what I do so I'm not going to be all unicorns and rainbows about it!

On Friday afternoon the second lamb sale of the season was held in Thorpdale. We sell about 1000 lambs every year through the Thorpdale yards, which I love with their old falling down wooden pens and big gum trees. Might not be the safest or best for OH&S but hey it's old school. They are far away the prettiest sheep or cattle yards I've seen, if that's possible. Much better than the cattle yards I used to work in back in Yea when I did the pencilling for Elders, and yes it is either scorching hot or pouring rain when there's a sale on, Murphy's law. Two weeks ago at the first lamb sale of the year I huddled under this tree in the pouring rain with a lot of mud underfoot whilst the auction went on.

That's Mr M checking out some of the lambs. We personally (just Mr M and I, not my Dad) sold our four old ewes that we once upon a time purchased to use for training our kelpie pup Pippa. We were going to leave them or kill them in Yea but then sheep prices went through the roof so we went to the trouble to bring them all the way to sunny Gippsland on the back of Mr M's ute when we moved. Travelling circus I tell you.

These kids were 'working' at the sale, I'm pretty sure they are under working age but I remember doing similar work at a similar age in the sheep yards. The novelty started to wear off with the 4am starts when I was a teenager though. These boys probably got unlimited cans of soft drink and some sausages for lunch as payment. Nice way to start your school holidays. Their job was basically to make sure all the lambs were looking their very best, pushed to the front of the pens for potentials buyers to have a grab to see their fat scores and make sure none were lame, injured or on the ground. I saw them struggling to get one hefty lamb up off the ground, it was going to take two of three of them to do it so I told Mr M to go help them out, nobody else was going to.

So that's a quick snapshot of what I was up to on Friday afternoon. The prices were good, steady and very unusually even throughout the whole sale. Our four ewes made $110/head which we were fairly happy about, could've been better, could've been worse.

What did you get up to on the weekend? We did a heap more gardening, which seems to be a recurring theme these days, rushed around and did some last minute Christmas shopping in a nearby town and tonight I am going to settle in to watch the Griswolds Christmas Vacation! A holiday must and Mr M has never seen it - the horror!

This week I am playing along with fat mum slim's point + shoot.