Saturday 22 October 2016

Coffee, Kitten, Cars and Cattle

Hi everyone,
 
I began this post yesterday by hand with a cup of coffee on a sheet of newspaper.  Blogging by hand!   I was at the Bendigo Show and rather bored.  The old boy wanted to come over to lend support to a member of his cattle breed society in relation to a dispute with a rival society.
 
 
I'm here because he wanted to stop off on the way at the Rushworth property and blow up some tyres on machinery there.  I worry about him going to that property on his own because it's remote.  It has basically no mobile phone coverage and there's nobody to help him if he gets into strife.  Anyway, that's how I come to be here in a dining hall drinking obscenely overpriced instant coffee (there is no way Nescafe Blend 43 is worth $3.00 a cup).

A photo posted by Stephen Tuck (@sdtuc2) on

If I'm honest, at the moment things aren't going so great.  I kind of feel like I'm living life hopping from one good bit to another like a character in Mario Bros.  One good bit, for example, was Thursday.  We were called out to attend a rescue with a difference: a kitten had managed to get stuck inside the wall of a double-brick house.  I'm happy to report that we got Felix out intact.
 

 
Thursday night brought SES training.  It was road crash rescue night, which the scenario being a car on its roof.  This one was particularly challenging because the car had been used for training in the past and already had a few cuts in it (which meant its structural integrity was already compromised).  It had also been rained on so the inside was mucky and wet.  There was a lot of loose broken glass inside it.  In short, it was basically the same as operational conditions.  We did pretty well and had Fred-the-Training-Dummy out of the vehicle only about 12 minutes outside of our target time.
 

 
Once I'm away from the good bits, however, I go back to being a loser whose life is going nowhere.  Unemployment is hard, y'all.  I'd be less worried about the financial side of things if I didn't need to support Grace and Rachel; I've been too ashamed to skype with them for weeks.  I wasn't born to be a parasite, but I'm hitting such a brick wall with getting a job that for the first time in my life I don't know if I'll ever work again.  Great thing to be saying at the ripe old age of 38, isn't it?  You'll understand why the Pristiq is kind of vital for me at the moment.
 

 
Sadly, I'm looking a bit shabby at the moment too.  I haven't been able to run for ages what with the weather and being on call all the time, and I've been eating way too much.  Sleep isn't great because I just wake up tired.  I was kind of shocked to see how old I look in the mirror the other day.
 
Today I had a chance to redeem myself a bit, drafting up cows and calves for ear tagging, drenching and marking.  It came to about a hundred animals in total, and the calves had never been handled before, so you can guess how much work they were to manage.  There's a corner of the yards where the water pools; after the first 40 animals or so it was a big shin-deep pool of slurry.
 

 
Not much more to add that I can think of.  Tomorrow is Sunday.  I don't know what it's going to bring; about the best I can hope for is a callout that has me doing something valuable.  Thank God this is plasma donation week.
 
Hope all is well with you good people - sorry to be a bit of a Debbie Downer this time!
 
More tomorrow.
 

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