What happens when the Man of the house is away.

The Leven River.

Water may be the Giver of Life but at the moment it’s the Bane of mine. Every time John is away if there’s something that’s going to go wrong around the farm you can be sure it has something to do with water. The last couple of times it was the house water. We pump water from the river and a flood in the river moved and blocked up the foot valve on the pipe twice, leaving me with no water in the house (of course I didn’t know it was that at the time). Frantic phone call to Hubby “I don’t know what’s wrong there’s no water in the house”.  He calmly said “Well it’s probably Blah Blah Blah” and he was right. Thank goodness we had rainwater as well, so for the next couple of days I bathed in bucketed water from the rainwater tank and used lots of kettles of hot water. The next time he was away it happened again but this time before he went away he hooked up the rainwater to the house as well, just in case it happened again and all I had to do was turn a tap on and one off. Well that was easy.

Our beautiful Valley.

This time it’s water again. I went into the stables to do the nightly feed of the animals and what greeted me as I opened the door (apart from the pigs)? Yep you guessed it, water all over the floor and flooding the goose pen and the chook pen. Glad I wore my gumboots. Thankfully the pig pen was high and dry, one out of three aint bad.  We lock the poultry up at night just in case there’s a Quoll or Tassie Devil around. Right, where the heck is this water coming from? A check around and it’s the new waterer we put in for the chooks. It was spraying out everywhere. Here I am with an arm full of animal feed not knowing what to do first.  Let’s see, I’ll feed the pigs and get them out of the way first then race out and turn off the main tap on that line. That done I tackled the geese, putting grain in their feeders. Then on to the chooks, scattered their feed around and then realised whoops 2 chooks missing. Where are they? In with the geese of course so I had to try to get them out of there which was hard because they had discovered the geese grain. Got them out finally with a lot of coaxing and into their pen and locked the door.  Meanwhile, while I was doing that the pigs had discovered that I hadn’t shut the goose pen door properly and were happily in the pen eating the grain with the geese. Now this was fun trying to get 3 pigs out of a place where there was yummy food. As soon as I’d get one out the others wouldn’t move, then I got the other two out and the first one got back in again.  All the time trying not to open the door too far so the geese wouldn’t get out as well. I’d better run back up to the house for more pig food.  After a lot of swearing and coaxing with a new bucket of food I got the pigs out and locked the geese pen door. All safe and sound again, well apart from the flooded floor. Luckily the chooks had an island of dry straw to sleep on and as for the geese well I left the door to their pen open all night and crossed my fingers that they’d be safe the next morning.

Yep they were, when I woke up they were waddling their way down to the dam for a morning swim. They say never work with animals or children. Well I’ve worked with lots of children over the years and have never had this much of a problem. I must have looked hilarious racing around trying to put animals back into their right pens. A true comedy of errors, I’m sure water will be kind to me next time.   

Michelle.