Bring on the Rain!!!

It’s about time for an update. It's a bit of a long one. We will start with last week. Monday afternoon, after mowing the lawn and getting rid of weeds, Stuart (our awesome housemate) and I headed down to the part of the farm with orange trees, lemon trees and nut trees to help Darryl and David plant some lime trees. Darryl sent Stuart to get some stakes to put up netting around the trees and Darryl had left David and I to finish off the last of the lime trees. About 15 minutes later, just as we were finishing up Darryl called out to us to come back in as a NURSE is needed. My first thought was, “uh-oh, Stuart has been bitten by a red-back spider.” Not being able to handle people being hurt or bleeding very well I sort of took my time (but ran) to get to the house. When I got there Stuart was sitting there holding his arm waiting for someone to drive him to Lancelin to get it looked at. It wasn’t a red back but a huge splinter lodged into his arm. I stayed back at the farm with Darryl while the boys went off. About an hour and a half later Darryl called up the medi-clinic to see how things were going. It looked like it was lodged in too far and he had to go to the nearest hospital in Perth, which was Joondalup. Since I was going to be home alone at the farm Darryl invited me over to spend the night with him and Donna. We found out that Stuart had to get an ultrasound (the x-ray didn’t pick anything up) and that he would have to come back bright and early the next day.

The next morning we got up to head back to the farm and Darryl went to check on his mango trees. He has had some bad luck with them, one year frost, one year heat, this year CROWS and sure enough a group of crows were surrounded the bottom of a tree.. Well we went right back to the house and I hung out with Donna while Darryl went to go hunting….he was unsuccessful. When we got to the farm we had an update on Stuart, they sat and waited for 3 hours to find out that Stuart would be having surgery that night around 9pm. Unlucky Stuart ended being told about 10 minutes before 9 that it was cancelled and after starving him all day they decided to bring him some sandwiches with the news.

Wednesday morning the operated on him and we assumed that maybe he would be let out later that day but they wanted to keep him an extra night. So what we thought would be just a little procedure ended up being a huge ordeal. Because he is British though, it was free. I would not have been so lucky. In the beginning Darryl had offered to take it out in the beginning, good thing that didn’t happen.

Wednesday is also the day that harvesting of olives has officially started. We now start work at 9 and work until 5. Hard life, I know. We have these huge upside-down umbrellas that go under the tree and then we hand pick the olives and they fall into the umbrella down to a box. After we have managed to get 2 crates worth of olives we head to the cool room where we dump them into the sinks and then sort them and remove the leaves and stems. They are then put into a barrel and sent into the cool room to wait until 2012/13 to be sorted and packed into jars or buckets. We then go out for the rest of the afternoon and repeat everything over again.

Another exciting job that we had the opportunity to do was work at the Gingin Observatory, we went there before Christmas, Donna co-owns and runs it. They were short staff so I offered my services to Donna and it ended up being a good idea. What a great night it was as well. David and I each got our own telescope and the lady who was working the telescopes (she is getting her PH.D in Astronomy) would point our telescopes to a certain star or nebula, tell us some info to tell the people and then leave us on our own. I learned soooo much in just a little amount of time…mostly because it was pretty cloudy in the earlier part of the night and the cloud seemed to like to follow around my telescope. So every time we had something to look at the cloud would cover it up and we would have to move to another location. I had to be on the ball with the names and facts. They may ask us back in the future! Fascinating, for anyone who knows my love of constellations and stars they would understand my excitement. I have my dad and Neil McCall to thank for that.

Last night, Western Australia has had their first rainfall/massive storm of the year. 80 some days of no rain. This happens every year. We spent the evening sitting on the porch watching lightning from all areas of the sky. The storms surrounded us. We were later on joined by a german couple and another german girl who will be spending a few weeks with us working at the farm. We enjoyed supper with them. The couple are looking forward to learning more English, we are looking forward to getting to know all three of them. It will be a fun couple of weeks. Stephanie also arrives in a week today!!! She is going to get to see the farm and work here for a week and then we are going to head off and see the beautiful South Western Australia. It’s going to be exciting.
Today we started work at about 9 am and it was hot and humid, we stopped for a quick lunch break and fit in another hour of work before it started to storm again. We knocked off at about 2:30 (The power went out so we couldn’t pick or work in the cool room.)and watched more storms clouds come in. At one point there was a cloud coming in from the distance. It was so low and massive (it started past the farm and went all the way down past Darryl’s house) and it was moving in really fast, even Darryl was impressed. We have photos of it, we will have to show you because I really do not know how to explain it. It was brilliant!!! So it is now 4:30 and we are sat here on the patio watching it storm and lightning waiting for the power to come on. I love the farm life.

I believe that is all for now, thanks to those who read. Some people tell us every once in awhile that they keep up to date. It means a lot to us. It is was keeps us motivated to keep writing the blogs.

Holly and David