Mayanup Christmas Bash… sorry, AGM

To avoid my recently habitual sin of plastering Facebook with my photos, I’m going to use my blog for its original intended purpose: on-line diary and photo repository. Yesterday was an enjoyable day of sheepdog political biffo discussion, followed by a few hours of messing around with young dogs, followed by the consumption of very tasty food and booze and exchange of gifts. It was a nice intermission to our final week of harvesting.

Photos of Dogs!

Yvonne Haynes’ Tarn

Pete Doherty’s young dog

Pete demonstrating some tips from a Greg Prince school.

An unidentified kelpie

An unidentified collie

Our Zen’s litter sister (Sadie?)

Ken Atherton working a young kelpie

Kriszty Cumming’s Rosi

And Shimmer

Another unidentified kelpie

Photos of Kids!

The Littlest Sheepdog Trialler (Hayden and Shelby’s babe). I couldn’t hold him, he made my ovaries hurt so much I wanted to cry.

My beautiful boy My scruffy but also beautiful girlMy two beautiful children!

“Plaster THIS all over Facebook!”

Almost, sweetheart.

Photos of Dogs who think they’re Kids!

Totally thrilled about coming to stay with us while their “parents” flit about overseas getting married and what-have-you:

Ink (“I had my bridesmaid’s dress all picked out!”)Rosi

Photos, Photos, Photos!

Oh, playing with cameras! Endless fun! One of the benefits of using only manual lenses is that it really makes me think about every single thing I’m doing, dredging up memories of those Year 9 Media classes (Oh, Mrs McMahon! Where are you when I need you?!) and requiring entirely new levels of concentration, short term memory and occasionally even creativity. The joy of digital photography is that my many, many total failures can be instantly deleted to make way for… well, more total failures.

Here’s a beer bottle on a fence. I took a lot of photos of this, trying to some sort of balanced exposure of the bright sky, the darkly shaded fence and the colour of the stubby holder, and maybe even to work out the whole white balance mystery. Not successful, but I liked this one.

“You left the aperture wide open AGAIN?! Sheesh, Mum!”

“Please tell me she’s not hoping to correct this with post-processing…”

Messing around with the gee gees

Evenings are getting longer and lighter.

Rather than dodging darkness and downpours to dispense food and apply rugs, we can take our time to enjoy messing around with the gee gees.

Horse phobia is apparently not genetic.

Jarrah is R’s horse.

R thinks Blade also belongs to him.

But according to the Ginger Biscuit, Ginger Blade (aka “The Racing Horse”) is her, ALL hers.

And so are all the carrots.

While Toffee has been sort of outgrown, and Dancer is convalescing, Dave is the Farmboy’s steed of choice.

But Farmboy has his eye on the newest arrival, Rosie.

She’s Blade’s half-sister and Jarrah’s niece (or something similar- horse pedigrees are still largely beyond me).

Farmboy says she’s going to be his showjumping horse.

I’m told that she’s at the “ugly duckling” stage, and she will grow out of it.

We can only hope.

Royal Show 2012

It’s that time of year again. Two hyper-excited kids, unpredictable weather and a generous dose of gastro thrown into the mix: classic Perth Royal Show.

I didn’t qualify this year, which is not unexpected because I haven’t done much trialling (and also because I’m not very good). It was also handy to have one of us totally free to child-wrangle and tote showbags.

R was competing in the yards this year with Tom and JJ, who are both relatively new trial dogs but handled the show environment well. Showing off in front of a fast-food dispensing audience of easily impressed city people? I think Tom may have absolutely loved it. He even managed to survive being handled in one demonstration run (when R was driving the porcelain bus to Gastroville) by R’s totally incompetent lady friend, who kept trying to make him do things that were unbecoming (and also forgot to open various gates in the correct and crucial order). He only just survived though, because I really wanted to strangle him by the end of the run.

Gordon Curtis’ Binnaburra Johnny (White’s Tex x Binnaburra Jess – I think!) doing a duck demo:

On the first day R was competing/demonstrating with Grant Cooke, and on the second day with Gordon Curtis, so a mix of collies and kelpies.

Grant Cooke’s Grassvalley Skye (Grassvalley Moss x Pendalup Candy):

Skye backing the race:

In the force:Unloading the truck:

Torbay Tom (Boylee Fred x Tig 265467)

Tom in his judged run (Lance Clifford from Tasmania judging). Scored an 89, which wasn’t too shabby for his first Royal.

Winning yard run was Hayden Harries’ Olboa Ben (Kiwi Knight x Boylee Kelly) with a 94.

Tom emptying the race. Might have gone a little bit too far forward…

Tom and R drafting

R and Tom at the truck

JJ didn’t do too badly, considering that he’s inexperienced, can be a bit of a handful and it’s an unusual environment, but unfortunately he tore his foot in one of his last demo runs and had to scratch from his judged run.

Mac’s JJ (Boylee Fred x Fly 281821) backing the race.

JJ backing up the truck ramp

The GingerBiscuit really wanted to run her new dog, but he just turned tail and barked.

So we went and rode elephants instead.

Those riding lessons have been paying off!

I’d like to pretend I don’t know who this haggard, wrinkled old woman is, but she’s carrying my kid (in my Girasol shorty, for the babywearers), so I should probably just plead 2 days of nasty gastro and not very much sleep…

So I really needed our relatively relaxing few days in the city, where we caught up with family and friends, showed our wide-eyed young farm dogs some of the local attractions, like walking along the river…

Mac’s Blue (Grassvalley Moss x Mac’s Gem), all wide eyed at the edge of a very, very big dam

And best of all, we did a lot of this.