And then there were 9

Today was a sad day. When we checked on the little ones this morning i could only see 9. i then checked the barrel and saw one small, bedraggled goat. Very still. I checked over the others and couldn't see JY so assumed this poor, wee sodden kid was him. He was alive, just, so we took him inside for the bath treatment. Little jy had 3 hot baths but after a few feeble mews he left us too. What a way to go - frozen in wee. We had decided last night that we'd light another fire today so at least little jy didn't have to sit around being eaten. We gathered wood and took it to the burning pile which was smelling particularly rancid today, more so than usual which is saying something. I was a little bit sad and not in the best of moods this morning. My constantly cold and increasingly chapped hands topped off with my favourite goat dying because he was weed on did not start my day off well. My patience was especially short with the hounds who were sat eating rank bits of rank goats at various stages of decay and charring then trying to lick my face which is so not cool.

On we got with our daily farm chores and then we started on goat proofing the concrete pen outside the old dairy. This involved moving gates and using tie wire (my plier skills still need some fine tuning). There is a ramp up the side of the pen that leads the goats into a lorry and a gate at the bottom to control them. Alex decided to move a rubber mat that had slid down the ramp which uncovered several australian sized woodlice, a few centipedes, many beetles and a redback spider (spotted by eagle eye 6th sensed K). I retreated up the ramp a little while Alex squashed it then spotted the same sort of hand sized monster we had spotted on the post the day before. At this point K and I were both on this ramp. 'Oh my god' said I as I scrambled passed. 'what are we oh my godding at' said K on repeat as the two of us screeched our way past each other and launched ourselves off the top of this thing...it is about 5 ft high and I jumped (yes, I jumped) from the end of it. It's the most athletic I've been for a while. It was a chilly and windy day so I kept the little ones in the pen most of the day to keep warm. We also did a bit of roofing (my involvement was limited to Measuring and sending up a few sheets of corrugated tin) and I changed my first tyre so I could use the ute to move things around the yard to make it look a bit tidier. I also had my first trip to Murrabit village centre which consists of one shop-post office-pub with the supermarket value range items at vastly inflated prices.

In the evening a new backpacker arrived - German Alex. As it turns out Scottish Alex has a German mother and worked in Germany for a year so is pretty fluent and so far I think German Alex is enjoying my fluency too.  I've told him all about my familien haus, what I do in meine freizeit and what my leiblingsfacher are. Es ist sehr gut. He has arrived with VERY white trainers and looks even more city than I did on my arrival so we'll see how he gets on. My next few posts might be auf deutsch. Ja.