Shearing

Not your usual Christmas eve activity, but then things around here are far from usual!
We were initially not going to bother shearing today as it rained yesterday, but we noticed this morning that they were dry (somehow), so a quick phonecall to Paul, and afew hours later he turned up. In between we moved the lambs from our paddock into Jennies paddock ('cause she has heaps of grass). I thought that with four of us it would be easy (Ken and Jenny are down for Christmas). We stationed Ken and Steph over at Jennies, and I, with the bike brought them up. This almost worked, but just before the gate, they balked and scattered. To cut a long chase short we ended up getting 20 of the 23 through the gate and into the driveway, and whilst we were trying to coax the last three through the 20 decided to jump the cattlegrid onto the main road! You have newer seen me run so fast, I'm glad we had the race, made getting down the farm much easier. Jumping fences in gumboots (wellington boots) and jeans in the sun is not much fun, I jumped the last fence onto the road verge and collasped to see the sheep going past. Thankfully just at that moment one of our neighbours was going for a walk, and just happened to be in the right spot to stop the sheep, in a matter of minutes we had the sheep back in the driveway. I must admit once they got on the driveway, my first thought was "So this is why we have public liability insurance!"
Once they had calmed down and had wandered up to the other gate, the other three lambs joined them comparatorly easily.
Just as we were all recovering, Paul turned up. Shearing the alpacas this time was reasonably uneventfull (thankfully), no blood etc.
Mum and Dad turned up whilst we were shearing and unfortunatly we didn't get to speak to them much.

In the afternoon we all just collapsed and went vegetative!