LIFE IN BARRABA

This is the sequel to "The Motley Expeditions". I decided to produce a new of website to document our life after the Motley.

Please recognise that the pieces hereunder are generally opinion pieces. If I want to convey facts, I will provide citations. If I am describing my experiences, they are, of course, facts but they are not subject to citations.

A Totally Successful Escape

The sheep found a way of removing the stuff I had put on the wire netting to keep them from getting into the back lawn. The other day Jean pointed out that one of the little sheep was in the back lawn.

When I went out to get it back in they had all followed. I herded them back into the paddock and then adjusted the stuff holding the wire down to stop them repeating the escape.

We had to go to Tamworth for a couple of appointments. When we got back in the afternoon the sheep were nowhere to be seen. I found that they had moved the pallet I had used to stop the earlier gap.

I went round to the owners house to report the escape and found that the sheep were back in their own paddock. Cathy did not know how they had got back but she did say that they were "homing sheep". We assume that the sheep headed for home and that someone saw them and put them back in their own paddock.

I surprise myself now every time I go into the kitchen as I always look into the back paddock to check on the livestock.

We had a Barraba River Landcare Group market stall in Queen Street last Saturday. We were the only stall because the others had not set up as it was Barraba Show day and most of the people were at the showground.

We were selling books, cakes, and bric-a-brac and had my laptop running a DVD showing a film of the current state of the river and some brochures from the Catchment Management Authority to give away. I manned this end of the table and had quite a few people stop to talk.

I was surprised to learn some new things. One was that a lady farmer had determined that the pumping town water from the bores had affected the water in the river. The other was a report from a long time resident who remembered when there were no willow trees on the river. He said that a councillor way back had arranged to plant willows on the river bank. I was fascinated that the aim of restoring the river to its pristine condition would be well satisfied if we removed all the willows and replaced them with native trees from this area.

Posted: 10/3/10 4:52 PM

Another lesson from the sheep

When I got up this morning and looked out of the kitchen window, I saw one of the sheep feeding in the back lawn.

I went down to get some pellets to encourage the animal back and found that the other five had followed the first one into the back lawn. They all followed me into the back paddock because I had bucket of pellets. I saw that the first escapee had got under the wire netting I had put on the gate because I hadn't tied it on properly.

I got out the tie wire and the tools and got down on my knees and fixed the wire to prevent further escapes. Happily it wasn't raining but I must have looked quite odd out in my dressing gown doing fencing.

I guess I'm learning country techniques very slowly but I am improving gradually.

Posted: 3/3/10 8:51 AM

More Farm Hand Work

Just as I was about to start work on the Library, I saw the sheep in the next door paddock. Mark had left us a bucket of feed so I went down with it. The sheep recognized the bucket and ran to the gate. I opened it and they all ran back in and tried to get all the feed out of the bucket. While I was attending to the sheep, the two horses who live in the next door paddock came through the open gate and started to feed on the long grass. With Jean's help, I got the sheep away from the gate and after a lot of chasing, I got the horses back in their own paddock.

I realised that the sheep had got under the wire of the dividing fence so I bought some more tent pegs and sealed up some of the spaces. Unfortunately the hardware shop didn't have any more suitable tent pegs so I might had more escapes. We have go to Tamworth on Thursday so I will be able to get more tent pegs to seal all the spaces.

Posted: 1/3/10 1:31 PM

Another take on the 21st Century

This morning as I read my regular internet postings I came across several items that appalled me because they demonstrate that the influence of immoral behaviour in the cyber world is dramatic, socially damaging and unconstrained by the law.

The first was a piece on Comp.risks about GPS jammers which are moving towards forcing incorrect positions on GPS receivers in range. The blogger commented that the use of digital processes in todays society like rental car tracking gives rise to the invention of counter measures.

The second piece was a report of a case of a man being murdered because he was trying to defend his aunt who was being attacked by her "boyfriend" because he had found that she had a new "friend" on Facebook.

Another piece on Slashdot was about a court case in Italy in which employees of Google were indicted because Google had allowed a video to be posted that showed a group of people bullying an autistic person. Their defence that they had nothing to do with generating or posting the video was rejected by the court because the Italian defamation laws did not allow this defence.

Another piece was about the use of webcams in school supplied laptops to "spy" on children at home. The schools claim that the process they installed was designed to trace the laptops when they were stolen but there are now reports of schools punishing students for "inappropriate behaviour" at home. One of the comments in this piece was about a girl who takes her laptop with her into the bathroom when she is showering. It seems that some, perhaps most, of the iGeneration are very unaware of the results of their cyber behaviour. Stories about botnets seem to me to show that cyber crime is rampant and that law enforcement against it is sadly lacking in effectiveness. Is this the new "Wild West".

Posted: 1/3/10 6:58 AM

For other older sections of the site

Go on the Web to

A Totally Successful Escape

Another lesson from the sheep

More Farm Hand Work

Another take on the 21st Century

Archives