There’s one thing about the bigwet we’ve been experiencing recently, it sure keeps everyone busy. With Moree still recovering from the flood that swept through the town a good ten days ago and our own Boomi-Garah Road (the one we need to take to get to Moree) only officially opened yesterday, it was a fairly lengthy detour that I needed to take to get back from Sydney last week. My brother Scott cadged a lift with me to give a helping hand at home and I eventually dropped him off at the main homestead at 9.30 pm last tuesday night. By the time David and I did the ‘change vehicles’ routine to get through the flood water into our place it was 11 pm. Exhaustion was definately the word. We ended up with around 15,000 acres going under again from the Whalan Creek and there is currently about 7-8,000 acres still submerged. Thursday through Sunday we walked cattle out of flood water to different sets of yards to try and complete our branding. It was a slow process. Driving livestock through mud and foot deep water is tiring for both man and beast. Next week on my video-blog I’ll have footage to show everyone. However I’m definately still on my video ‘L’ plates. I quickly realised that it is nigh impossible to ride a quad bike through water and high grass while mustering and trying to video with your left hand!

We’ve been cultivating country we can get too, aerial spraying others and generally waiting for flood water to move on, and/or dry up.

Of course while I’ve been out mustering and working in the cattle yards the editing of the Absolution Creek manuscript has, to say the least, taken second place. The ms has travelled about 100 kms in the last few days, however, I keep hoping I’ll get a moment to do some editing on it!  This afternoon is my window for that-I hope. In the meantime part 2 of the writing fundamentals course will be posted tomorrow and I’ve nearly finished reading Atonement for the National Year of Reading reviews I’ll be doing every month during 2012.

If you haven’t caught my latest posting on youtube check out https://www.youtube.com/nicolealexandertv Mother nature really kept us on our toes last year so I decided to do a picture slide show to show what happened during the year. And yes, there isn’t any sound on this one for those of you wondering. It’s taking a while for me to come to grips with the technology! Happy Valentine’s Day.