Day 11 - Shamrockvale

This morning Blake had something a little different to do whilst I helped Nick with the grain run. Blakes job was to help Brendan move the bull semen from one tank to another and make a note of where each sample went. I joined Blake after I finished the feeding and it was pretty cool. The semen is kept in large nitrogen tanks and when sorting the samples, Brendan moved them into a pot that he had filled with liquid nitrogen. When using liquid nitrogen back at work, as you can imagine there are a whole plethora of health and safety precautions you need to take. Not here however! Brendan just picks up the tanks, pours them out so it's splashing everywhere and even dips his hands in it. He also showed us a couple of pretty cool tricks with a piece of paper. When you put a piece of paper into a liquid, you would expect it to go soggy. Not in liquid nitrogen though! It went really hard and cold. He then did it again and crumpled the piece of paper snapped into a hundred very cold tiny pieces!

After smoko, we headed back up to the yard to help with meds and temperatures again. There weren't any cows left to do after lunch so we were sent to help Marius in the veggie patch. Luckily we managed to avoid this until now as neither of us particularly enjoy gardening. For starters I don't know the difference between a weed and a vegetable so we may have lost a few spring onions although we did manage to re-plant a few.

When we got back to our place I had a little nap as I was pooped, only to wake up when Blake had very excitedly found some chocolate someone had left outside on the BBQ. Needing a bit of a sugar boost before feeding the calves and closing up the chooks I munched my share whilst Blake put hers in the fridge to save for an after dinner treat. Around 7pm we had a knock at the door where two children dressed in Halloween get up appeared. The chocolate had been left by their mum for us to give to them... OOPS! Luckily they had lots already and Blake managed to hide from the adults that only half the chocolate left was going into the children's pots. Unlucky for Blake as she missed out on a mini snickers, mars bar and m&m's. Imagine if we had eaten both!

When we sat down for the evening, the heavens seriously opened. Shortly after we started to hear a loud ting, ting, TING sound from outside. I walked out and realised it was hailing. This was no ordinarily hail though as these stones were massive in comparison to back home!Read more