More shearing!
May. 31st, 2024 08:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeMiddle of the week was packed.
Tuesday, I checked traps, dropped supplies south to a coworker, went home for an hour and answered emails, then ran west to pick up 4h kids plants (turns out you can fit 15 flats of plants into a toyota corolla if you're good), and did the 4h stuff. Day ended at 8:30pm when I got home.
Wednesday I dropped the fleet car to be serviced. It has terrible brakes and no AC. That afternoon, the dealer called and said the fleet person was hemming and hawwing on what to do, and fleet guy sent me an email about giving me a call about it which I didn't see until after he had left for the day. I helped set up a laser scarecrow in blueberries and then we looked at some sweet potato slips which we'll plant out next week probably.
Thursday, yesterday, was shearing day. We went back to a farm from last year that I just never wrote about (big farm, commercial meat sheep, I did 14 last year, oh here I wrote one sentence about it) and there was ~65 sheep to shear. This farm is in the middle of nowhere up a hill with no cell service and J is apparently not that good at navigation so we got lost again and were late arriving.
This year, J caught all the sheep for me and either flipped them on the way out of the pen and I dragged them over to my shearing spot, or handed them over and I flipped them. I'm pretty bad at catching sheep to be honest, so this was great. It took me a couple sheep to get moving and at one point, I did an easy sheep (clean belly, no poop around tail) and did it in the same time as J did! But the sheep had been on green pasture and were gross and poopy and so I got a lot of experience with that. I've definitely improved my technique, I was able to do the necks properly on all the sheep, I only had J do the poopy butt on one ewe where the poop was embedded down to the skin, I improved on rolling the sheep on the second side and shearing down as I go. I also worked on making sure I extended the belly blows all the way to the sides since I've had to go and clean those up later as I do the sides of the sheep.
All in all, I did sixteen sheep! Number 15 was the biggest, of course, but she only got out of my grip once and was really well behaved. For a while as I was shearing, I was working 2-1 with J, where he'd hand a sheep to me, catch his own, he'd finish that one and do another as I finished up mine, so I could jump on a sheep when he went to catch his next sheep. Once I hit 8 sheep or so, I started slowing down once my back started to get sore, so it was 3-1. I munched some food between shears, wish I had brought more cucumber because it was really nice to eat. Lots of sips of water.
The nerves are my biggest problem with shearing currently, I'm nervous the night before, which upsets my stomach, which makes me nauseous and I don't want to eat breakfast. I usually can manage to get it down but not anything else, so usually two hours into shearing, I'm really hungry. I was really anxious about being lost trying to find the farm. Once I settle into the work, the nerves are completely gone but I have bad thoughts about nicking sheep on the udders and teats, or slicing them open badly or letting one go and it runs over J while he's shearing. Irrational. Now that I'm done, I'm starving and have been shoveling food like there's no tomorrow.
But anyway, it went well, I'm pretty sore today and I kept waking up overnight as I moved around in my sleep and made my back hurt. That's probably the last big job for the year, J has some more small flocks and stuff but it isn't always worth me tagging along to those. I'm working from home today with few to no tasks, so I'm taking the afternoon off as comp time for tuesdays long day and puttering around the house. I'm usually too sore to do anything the day after but I might try patching some of the carpenter bee holes.
Tomorrow I'm hitting the farmers market, the co-op and *whispers in horror* the mall. I need nice clothes to go to a friend's engagement party next weekend and no longer own even vaguely nice clothes that fit and are gender-good, so I have to brave the mall. The last time I was in a mall was March of 2020.
Tuesday, I checked traps, dropped supplies south to a coworker, went home for an hour and answered emails, then ran west to pick up 4h kids plants (turns out you can fit 15 flats of plants into a toyota corolla if you're good), and did the 4h stuff. Day ended at 8:30pm when I got home.
Wednesday I dropped the fleet car to be serviced. It has terrible brakes and no AC. That afternoon, the dealer called and said the fleet person was hemming and hawwing on what to do, and fleet guy sent me an email about giving me a call about it which I didn't see until after he had left for the day. I helped set up a laser scarecrow in blueberries and then we looked at some sweet potato slips which we'll plant out next week probably.
Thursday, yesterday, was shearing day. We went back to a farm from last year that I just never wrote about (big farm, commercial meat sheep, I did 14 last year, oh here I wrote one sentence about it) and there was ~65 sheep to shear. This farm is in the middle of nowhere up a hill with no cell service and J is apparently not that good at navigation so we got lost again and were late arriving.
This year, J caught all the sheep for me and either flipped them on the way out of the pen and I dragged them over to my shearing spot, or handed them over and I flipped them. I'm pretty bad at catching sheep to be honest, so this was great. It took me a couple sheep to get moving and at one point, I did an easy sheep (clean belly, no poop around tail) and did it in the same time as J did! But the sheep had been on green pasture and were gross and poopy and so I got a lot of experience with that. I've definitely improved my technique, I was able to do the necks properly on all the sheep, I only had J do the poopy butt on one ewe where the poop was embedded down to the skin, I improved on rolling the sheep on the second side and shearing down as I go. I also worked on making sure I extended the belly blows all the way to the sides since I've had to go and clean those up later as I do the sides of the sheep.
All in all, I did sixteen sheep! Number 15 was the biggest, of course, but she only got out of my grip once and was really well behaved. For a while as I was shearing, I was working 2-1 with J, where he'd hand a sheep to me, catch his own, he'd finish that one and do another as I finished up mine, so I could jump on a sheep when he went to catch his next sheep. Once I hit 8 sheep or so, I started slowing down once my back started to get sore, so it was 3-1. I munched some food between shears, wish I had brought more cucumber because it was really nice to eat. Lots of sips of water.
The nerves are my biggest problem with shearing currently, I'm nervous the night before, which upsets my stomach, which makes me nauseous and I don't want to eat breakfast. I usually can manage to get it down but not anything else, so usually two hours into shearing, I'm really hungry. I was really anxious about being lost trying to find the farm. Once I settle into the work, the nerves are completely gone but I have bad thoughts about nicking sheep on the udders and teats, or slicing them open badly or letting one go and it runs over J while he's shearing. Irrational. Now that I'm done, I'm starving and have been shoveling food like there's no tomorrow.
But anyway, it went well, I'm pretty sore today and I kept waking up overnight as I moved around in my sleep and made my back hurt. That's probably the last big job for the year, J has some more small flocks and stuff but it isn't always worth me tagging along to those. I'm working from home today with few to no tasks, so I'm taking the afternoon off as comp time for tuesdays long day and puttering around the house. I'm usually too sore to do anything the day after but I might try patching some of the carpenter bee holes.
Tomorrow I'm hitting the farmers market, the co-op and *whispers in horror* the mall. I need nice clothes to go to a friend's engagement party next weekend and no longer own even vaguely nice clothes that fit and are gender-good, so I have to brave the mall. The last time I was in a mall was March of 2020.
no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 03:04 pm (UTC)One of the really great discoveries for me, during my working life, was that, on very formal events, I could wear a tux instead of a skirt. Working in either is stupid, but working in a skirt can be dangerous. It mirrored my high school experience of being able to wear a "pants suit" to classes at my boarding school instead of dresses. Hope you can find something comfortable that lets you be you and still is appropriate.
no subject
Date: 2024-06-01 05:40 pm (UTC)I definitely like suits and I did find something that works!
no subject
Date: 2024-05-31 05:09 pm (UTC)Very best of luck with the mall!
Osmand does offline navigation; your phone gets GPS signals without needing cell service, and they use OpenMap maps and you can subscribe for frequent driving updates if you want those. Otherwise it's monthly updates and you can get topo map data and so on in addition to the street maps if you want it. And OpenMap subdivides maps to the state or smaller, so you can pick what you want to store.
I used to get a lot of use out of it birding (cell service not being a thing at many good birding locations) and have had it gamely try to do ground track for an airplane. (There's no math in it for "you are way up in the air", so I got a track, just not an entirely accurate track.)
no subject
Date: 2024-06-01 05:40 pm (UTC)