April 9, 2008: All Work and No Play this Week.
It's been a hectic week. Lambing has started so the sheep have been gathered in, dosed, jagged, and those having twins shed off and put in respective in-bye fields. Tina has been an invaluable addition to Kelvin's team. She is a real natural and is learning her job very quickly. She is very good with lambs and their mothers, and is unfazed by any ewes who challenge her. What Tina lacks in size, she makes up for in heart. Blade and Tina work well together and between them, they have decided which side they want to work. Perhaps they'd make a good brace team in trials!

Kelvin had an exciting time putting the bull to sleep this week in order to trim its feet. Bulls have much bigger feet than sheep and the bulls weighs about a ton. Putting bulls to sleep is done very carefully. They are first given a calming drug, and after 10-15 minutes, they can be quite docile. Once sufficiently docile, the bull is then given a sedative. This results in a slow buckling of the knees...and everyone jumps to make sure they are not in the way of a falling bull. Once asleep, bulls snore loudly and drool to their heart's content. Kelvin had to sit on the bull's head to make sure it didn't shake it's head around while asleep - not that Kelvin would do much good if the bull did shake it's head. He'd likely be thrown into next week.

While Kelvin was out working on the farm, Angie galavanted off to London for a few days. Unfortunately it was all work and no play. London is big, noisy, busy, and there are no sheep there (and fresh air is a rare commodity). But it is wonderfully cosmopolitan and the architecture is spectacular.

One cool building close to Angie's London office is the "Gherkin," a rather oddly named erotic looking building. This building has 24,000 square metres - or the equivilent of 5 football pitches - of glass cladding, has 40 floors, and it's restaurant is 165 metres high (officially the highest in London). A spectacular sight. Some trivia: * 378 people can be vertically transported through the building at up to 6 metres per second. * The building is made of 10,000 tonnes of structural steel, which is the equivilent of 71 double-decker buses!

Now if only London had sheep. You know you're a farmer at heart when you look at sports fields and think about how many sheep could be grazing on them.

Our work on the World Trial seems to have accelerated in the last week or so. It's fun stuff so it doesn't really feel like work. The photo contest finished at the beginning of the month. That was busy! Lots of people submitted photos, especially in the last two days, which made for a mad rush to get all the photos ready for the judges. Just when we thought that was complete, we got lots of emails asking for another contest just for puppy photos. Although it is a lot of work to organize this, it is so much fun to see the terrific photos coming in that we agreed to run the puppy one as well. Needless to say, photos are streaming in from all over the world. Many of the photos will be featuring in the World Trial souvenir program, a full-size calendar for 2009, and a smaller desk-top calendar (CD-sized) just of pup photos. The World Trial souvenir program will have a truly international flavour.

Well, that's it for another week. We are not attending any trials this week. Sigh!