It seems that the sheep were here for a good time, not a long time!

The feed on the ground has been greatly reduced after a month of chewing by fifty hungry mouths, so with working dog running around, a couple of neighbours controlled the mob and drove them slowly down the road.

Their next destination is a shearing shed a couple of kilometres over the hill where they will get a tidy up before heading to another paddock of feed.

The interesting thing for me is the expected turn around for the pasture in our paddock. Our neighbour commented that it should be back up in a month or so. Considering the rainfall over the last few months, I think that I can actually see this happening.

It makes me think a little more about fencing another paddock for grazing. We have two areas that I’m thinking about; one is fairly wooded but accessible and is about 10 - 15 acres and the other is steep but has good feed and is around 30 acres.

I’ve always thought that fencing was the issue holding me back here, but I think that I can break it down further than that to putting in posts for the fencing.

We have a heap of posts ready to go, but I need to either hire a contractor or find a post hole digger from a neighbour or friend. After doing my fair share of digging around the property, I’m not even considering digging the holes manually…

Eventually the idea will be to have enough pasture to carry our own stock year round, but I think that we are a year or two away from that. In the time being, we’ll just have to let others graze their stock in exchange for cash, meat or services.

We’ve had a few colds starts lately, but this morning we were up well before first light for a trip and really experienced the cold of winter.

The strange thing was that the shower didn’t really bother us. Showering outside can be cold, but with no wind blowing the warmth of the hot water stays around longer.

The shock came when I went to Meg’s car and the back door opened after significant force with a CRACK! The ice splintered and fell to the ground as I looked and saw ice covering the windows and thick on the windscreen.

Figuring that hot water was a bad idea, I got a bucket of tap water and poured it over just before we left. Unfortunately that froze as well and the ice on the windscreen was even thicker.

I reversed with the door open so that I would miss the tree and then drove forward, hoping that the windscreen would start to defrost with the friction of the motion. Obviously this was a stupid idea as I drove a little off of the driveway on the way to the gate and stopped before running into a tree.

We stopped at the main dirt road and I scratched off a porthole sized area of ice with my fingernails while the car idled, struggling to warm up and get the heater going.

With some warmth inside the car, sheets of ice moved across the windscreen as I cornered before it was all over and the ice was gone.

It is great to be reminded of the elements of the earth and I’m glad that we have technology of some sort to deal with them…

It has been getting closer and closer of previous months – the $200 fill of diesel in the Patrol.

Sometimes issues need to reach a certain threshold before they appear as problems; $3 for a pie, $4 beer at the pub, $20 for a decent steak or maybe $2 per litre of fuel. Is this the point at which buying such things turn into luxury? Or is it just a fact of life that it all gets more expensive?

Today I filled up after a few weeks driving around seeing clients, friends and family. The diesel was $1.85 per litre and I put in about 108 litres, completely filling both tanks and resulting in a bill of $199.97!

Mileage had increased to the highest for a while as well, at 12.5L/100km, but I can put this down to driving some very muddy roads in 4WD and towing a couple of tons of firewood uphill in low range 4WD.

I see that the price of oil has dropped significantly from just below the $150 / barrel mark down to mid $120 / barrel and I’m wondering how much of this will be passed on?

Will diesel actually reduce in price or just petrol? There seems to be an ever increasing proportional price difference between them that has been passed off as “demand”, but I thought that worldwide demand had dropped, resulting in a wholesale price drop as described above?

We will see… and I will drive a little less… oh yeah, and plant some more potatoes. I wonder how I can get firewood uphill in a different way? Conveyor belt? Horse and cart? Visiting children?