Cattle in Cloudsville

Feels like an old fashioned Winter, good for puddles and water tanks but not so good for using epoxy. The cattle are so attuned to squeezing more hay out of us that they hear the ute coming from a great distance and assemble themselves near the shed or house (whichever we park at) to press their case with massive, echoing bellows, demonstrating to us the desperation of their situation. Heifers that usually ignore us will follow us at very close quarters now, and when I quietly say "Come on" they leap and skip in their enthusiasm to get to the feed before their mothers. This is all theatre. This mob forage well, are happy to eat weeds that other breeds won't touch, and they have a double layered coat that keeps them well-insulated in our relatively mild cold season.

On Friday we were on the top edge of a huge cloud mass. I could look across the top of the cloud for hundreds of kilometres, spread as it was, right across the Western Plains of Victoria, which were blanketed in fog. Had I been able to walk on this thing, I could have taken a horizontal straight path to the southern edge of the Great Dividing Range, walking North West, and maybe ten times further if I headed West. The edge of the cloud defined a crisp, horizontal contour around the edges of our little valley- it felt good to be above it.