Australia: Weekend is supposed to be for relaxing

Last weekend was anything but relaxing! Firstly, Saturday is a cleaning day, so definitely no relaxing going on then! In general we have to be up at 8am every single morning. Check all four stations (we used to have three but now we have four with the new chooks that still need training) each morning. Do our cleaning chores, have lunch, collect the eggs in the afternoon from each station. That takes around a couple of hours. Then it is already 5pm and around 5.45 we’d usually have to go to the new station to supervise the chooks getting on the bus for the night. They are getting better each day but it is very annoying that we start our working day at 8 and finish around 6.15-6.30pm. That’s 10 hours in total. And this is the weeeeekend!!! Last Saturday we finished around 8.30 pm because the farmer was sick, the wife was at some book club event all day, the dogs needed to be fed at the stations and nests opened on the buses, so the wife asked us to do it. It was somewhat scary considering it was completely dark outside and we could not use any lights near the stations. We always have to turn off the headlights when approaching the stations. We are allowed to use red headlights though. We wouldn’t want all the chicken to get confused and come out of the bus towards the light in the middle of the night! The funny part was feeding the dogs. We are ok feeding to the two young cute white ones (Sampson & Delilah) but there are two more that are old and look pretty scary. They are the same breed but they never come close to us and always keep their distance. We were scared shitless when we saw the reflection of two red eyes looking at us!! Both of us sitting on the ranger and keeping close to each other and trying to use the red light as much as possible to get the dog food into the bowls and leg it. Luckily the dogs didn’t come near us but it was pretty damn creepy!

Sundays are usually pretty relaxed so we decided to take a walk into Merriwa town. It is 8km away, total 16km walk along the road. The town itself is so small. We had a coffee and a cake in the local bakery, got a few things in the supermarket and then just walked back. The town was so small that every single person probably looked at us wondering where the hell we had come from. There were rarely any cars passing us on the road on the way into Merriwa. I can imagine them wondering what two girls were doing walking on an empty road in the middle of nowhere!

Of course, we had to pick up the eggs after arriving back from our long-ish walk... finished up with work at around 6.15pm again. Very tired!

We met a cute little turtle on the road and kindly helped it across. Definitely did not expect to see one on the road around here!

Did I ever mention I have now killed two chickens in total? Not pleasant but needs to be done. Poor souls often suffer because of the others who spot the weak one and then proceed to peck on it until it gets eaten to death. What a horrible way to die. I’ve got a photo taken on my phone of an instruction how to kill a chicken. Awful but may come handy when need to know the theory and put it into practice.

A new guy arrive yesterday and I would like to call him Why-Man. Every single time when we say something, there is a question WHY asked straight afterwards. I have given up explaining self-explanatory things and just referred to "because the farmer says so. If you want to know more, ask him".

And it looks like everything we do is not reasonable enough to him and he would like to change everything. Did I mention he is French? He seems to have an I-know-everything attitude. It must be something to do with the fact that two girls are teaching him and he cannot imagine taking instructions from us.

I am starting to get peed off already but it is better to keep calm. It might just be the first impression we are getting off him.

I must note I have managed to perfectly reverse a trailer into its required position.. Even the the guy was impressed since he made a comment that all girls he has ever met cannot drive a car.

I am intending to upload a couple of videos of my daily jobs at some stage.