Happy holidays...

So while lying in bed the other morning, stretching out the lay in minute by minute until I needed to get up and think about packing, I grabbed my iPad and began reading Twitter. Suddenly the academic holiday tweets began. Many of them used the #ECRchat hashtag or the #academiclife hashtag and usually began with ‘Happy Holidays’ and then went on to share/ brag/ disclose/ confess the stupid amount of work completed over the holiday and university shutdown period. For example:  ‘I completed a paper and my book proposal :D’, or ‘Two papers written!’, or ‘Worked on my grant application’ or ‘Finished 3 chapters of book over Christmas period’. REALLY? All of these are written in a self-congratulatory, smug tone that makes me want to smash my screen.

So you did all of this work – IN YOUR HOLIDAY BREAK? Well, I’m sorry, I haven’t done any writing (other than this hokey little farm blog), as I’ve been too busy with plum pudding in one hand and Christmas cake in the other and that makes it a little difficult to type or hold a pen quite frankly. I’ve also been busy doing the following: walking on the beach over Christmas while wrangling the dog, sitting in a chair in the new place just gazing at the mountain while clutching a cup of tea, zooming over the paddock on the ride on mower (occasionally getting bogged and always getting hayfever), packing boxes and dreaming about how I will unpack those things in a neat, tidy and orderly fashion where there is a place for everything and there it shall remain, in an oasis of calm and organization. Despite the pile of new books I ordered and had delivered in the post, I have barely turned the pages on them (including the one on using qualitative data with a variety of theoretical approaches which I’m just itching to read). Instead I’ve flicked through the pages of Country Style, In style and Real Living. The only book I’ve spent some time doing any serious reading of is on my Kindle app and it’s Matthew Evans’ ‘The Dirty Chef’ as it documents his journey from food critic in Sydney to farmer in Cygnet, Tasmania and gives me hope that becoming an accidental farmer and landowner will turn out okay!

This is why this farm is a perfect antidote to a working life that I love, but which has some weird quirks. In academia, people see it as a badge of honour to talk about how much they worked over the holidays, how many papers they wrote, and how many grant applications they toiled over. The spoof account of ‘Shit Academics Say’ on Twitter captures it perfectly ‘I am on annual leave and will not be responding to email. Although I will probably still check it and respond within a day.’ The social media academic brigade post photos of their ‘vacation to-do lists’ and lest you wander onto Twitter on Christmas day you will see them there, arguing about terminology and methodology with others, while presumably their families (if they have them) sit wondering where their husband/ wife/ daughter/ son/ mother/ father/ brother/ sister has disappeared to. Never fear, you’ll find them in a quiet room, hunched over a laptop or illuminated in the glow of a screen, unable to let the dialogue (which is more often a diatribe) rest for even a day. I’m strangely fascinated by this lifestyle, intrigued by it and bemused by the way that when I read these ‘holiday tweets’ I’m both sickened by them and yet, feel slightly guilty that I haven’t done any work. When those feelings of guilt try to elbow in, I remind myself of one of my DVC’s who cheerily signs off from Twitter and email declaring that he is on a break and who asks for holiday reading suggestions of fiction. So the farm becomes the break from a job that can become all consuming if you enable it to, and the landscape outside the window reminds you that there is much more to life than the next paper, grant application or book.

So meanwhile, back at the farm, things continue to progress. New year’s day saw another day of work with Dave and Jane coming down from Trentham to help out yet again – what would we do without all our helpers? There is no way we would have been able to achieve this much in a short amount of time, and by now, I probably would have become paralysed with the thought of all of the work to be done! Dave and Rohan kept working on the painting of the hobby room, while the sheep looked on through the window, intrigued by what was going on on the other side of the glass. Jane began cleaning the windows and I continued to scrub cupboards until I feared I may scrub off paint. Ever since Sam our neighbor from down the road said the previous owner had chickens in the house, I’ve been slightly paranoid that he had them living in kitchen and bathroom cupboards, visualizing a house, where when you open a cupboard door, chicken feathers fly out and wild squawking ensues. Unlikely given the fact the cupboards were dirty, but not dirty enough to suggest that chickens had in fact been housed there.  Friday saw Dave, Rohan and Woody hard at work moving all the big stuff, while I continued to pack stuff into boxes as fast as I could while they grabbed them and put them on the trailer. As we sat in our emptier lounge room last night, Rohan pointed and said 'Hey remember when we got married in that corner?' All of a sudden I was weeping at the memory. Our 'surprise' wedding occurred in the first house we bought together as a housewarming and Rohan's 30th birthday celebration. In packing up the house I've been sorting through the memories of all the good and the challenging moments of life over the last 10 years, filing away the things I want to keep to mark the journey and trying to rid myself of the detritus of other parts. It's tiring and emotional work!

Thursday was internet day. Yahoo! Thank you national broadband network. The guys came and clambered over the roof, installed the box in our laundry and now we have the internet – and superfast internet at that! We also put a big, new shiny fridge in the kitchen, deciding that our old fridge which we’d had for nearly 20 years and which was kept shut with a piece of Velcro could go to fridge heaven and so we purchased one that is bigger, and which will hopefully store lots of home grown goodies. I said to Rohan Thursday night ‘I feel like we’re becoming proper grown ups, with a proper grown up house and a proper grown up fridge’. See what happens when you turn 40? Maryann called over after work to check out the new place and was the first person to identify one of our mystery fruit trees, telling us that she knew the name and it would come to her later. Sure enough it did and at 10.30 Thursday night she sent through the text telling us it was a medlar. I’d never heard of it but with Mr. Google as my friend I was able to discover it. This article from The Age (Strange Fruit) suggests that it may be a fine line between fruit that is good for eating and resembles rotting fruit, and fruit which is actually just rotting and therefore disgusting. Here’s hoping I can find the balance or it may be a short lived love affair with the medlar tree when it comes to fruit ripening/ rotting season.

I also realized that I had failed at the very first hurdle of a new farm challenge. With my new found love for the Weekly Times, I’d got not one, but two, rainfall charts and I vowed over Christmas that I would fill out the rainfall chart religiously so we knew how much rain was falling at Innisfree. Rohan (he of little faith or astute knower of my personality depending on how you look at it) was convinced that I wouldn’t make it through a month. Turns out I didn’t make it through a day. New year’s day and the rain came tumbling down. Did I collect any rainfall so I could measure how much fell? Nope. Did I fill out the rainfall chart? Nope. As I sat eating breakfast on Thursday I looked at the rainfall chart lying in pristine condition and muttered a hearty ‘shit’. Rohan meanwhile began grinning like a cheshire cat and fistpumping in the air. Maybe this doesn’t bode well for my life as a farmer or a farmer’s wife, but the Catholic in me believes that there is always hope for redemption.

Today our neighbour Michael is going to begin slashing our paddocks for our first lot of hay and I'm setting up my inside study - can't wait for this to be done!