Meredith Shayne

They say you learn something new every day.

Today’s lesson: how to pregnancy test a cow. My life, honestly.

However, as I just said to empty_tea, if getting my main character to stick his hand up a hundred cow’s rectums is going to get him laid, then so be it. It’s all for a good cause!

Saviours and saints, devils and heathens alike

It’s noisy in New Zealand today. I’ve got diggers in the next door neighbour’s yard, my landlord dismantling the fence at the back of my place to allow a digger in there. Diggers to the left of me, diggers to the right. I’m waiting for them all to STFU so that I can get some writing done. Theoretically I could go to the library to write, but I really can’t be arsed. Although I should, since my goal for today is 3000 words. But honestly, I doubt I’ll reach that, so I’ll be happy with 1500 after a week of nothing – yay for self-defeating low expectations.

These days I have a little folder full of bookmarks for research, and it occurred to me the other day that it would be pretty easy to guess what I’m working on at the moment just based on them. There are links to websites with info on:

Campdrafting
Tentpegging (if you look at the link you’ll see it’s a sport, not something where you take your partner away to the bush to play with sex toys 😉 )
Australian stock horses
The design of Australian stock saddles
The NSW Mounted Police
Cattle stations/cattle farming in Australia
Agriculture in Australia
Various events being held in northern NSW country towns
Horse stud farms
Australian place names of aboriginal origin
Australian geographical name derivations

I’ve also got saved on my hard drive documents on how to castrate calves and lambs, worming cattle, veterinary involvement in large animal farming in Australia. There are definitely no prizes for guessing what the story’s about, although hopefully when it’s done all these links won’t be all it’s about.

Another thing that can be said about all that is: god bless the internet! One of the tentpegging rule books even has a diagram with the layout of the field, for god’s sake. How on earth did we all find this information when it wasn’t at our fingertips?