All's Right with the World and Sheep Dipping

Sometimes you have days where everything just feels right with the world. This morning when I went to the farm to do the hens and do the calves, I stood in the small holding just looking out onto the paddock and the fields beyond that. It was sunny but not too hot. The sky was blue. It was bright and it was quite quiet. and very peaceful and I just had that sense of, well the only way I can describe it is everything's right with the world and it followed me around as I went to feed the calves and I went in the orchard, went to check on the apples and the plums and I went to see how many blackberries I've been doing some filming which I'll tell you about in a minute but yeah, just, everything just felt amazing and it that kind of energy and vibe that you just want to be able to hang on to so yesterday I went with Phil the farmer and we went to a place called Melton Mowbray in the UK It's famous for pies and he was dipping yesterday. So he dipped, I think he said about 470 ewes. So these were shearlings, which means that this year is the first time that they've been sheared. So they all go through the dip and it prevents flies laying eggs on them and growing maggots, which can eat into the fleece and ultimately into the flesh of the sheep. So by dipping them, it prevents that happening. So yeah, we spent most of the afternoon yesterday doing that. I was doing some filming. I did help a bit, but the two farmers were quite happy to do it themselves. And I think they thought that I hadn't had much experience with sheep and you do get a bit jostled. But anyway I was happy just to go along with what they wanted and I just helped push some of the sheep up the race and I made sure that all the sheep were coming out the other end when Phil opened the gate and shooed them all into the nearby field. So yeah, I just did a few bits and bats. But what I was doing, I was filming for a day tomorrow, which is hashtag Farm24, and it's to show the general public and anybody who's not involved with farming what actually goes on in 24 hours for a farmer. So yeah, my little bit is just the sort of stuff I do. So I'm not technically a farmer. I call myself a part-time farmhand or a part-time shepherd. I go and help out. I do bits and pieces with Phil. and I see you next time I said I go and help him with that anyway So we be doing that at some point And that will involve checking everybody feet teeth general well and health and the state of their teats, or as farmers tend to call them, bags. So unfortunately, I think Dot Dot, who is one of my favourite sheep, Phil thinks that her bag has blown so she won't be able to be a mother again or go to the tub so yeah I'm going to go and check on her and see whether he's identified her correctly or not he's usually pretty good on that so yeah I'm just going to edit some of the footage together and just talk a little bit about what I do, feeding the calves and doing the hens and checking on things around the farm and doing the dipping. So, yeah, I need to spend the afternoon putting that together. Yeah, so at the minute, I've got a bit of a downer on Substack. I don't know, it's changed like a lot of these platforms do, and it's evolved from the Substack that I knew, I can't remember how many years going back, but when it was just a simple newsletter site, I used it then and then it started evolving. And of course now they're looking at ads and commercialising it to make money. But I already feel that it's changed. There's been lots of big hitters have come on the site. So if you look at the list of the top 10 posts or the top 10 in whatever category, there'll be lots of familiar names and the smaller, more indie writers are not on that list so much anymore. So yeah, I've been thinking about it for a while and what I wanted to do. I always liked digital gardens and stuff like that So I decided to set up a blog again I set up my first blog probably I just trying to think 96, 97 maybe something like that and I actually might have been earlier I'm getting my decades confused here. I was thinking it was when I came back from Paris but that was 84, 85. So anyway, it was sometime in the 90s, I set up a blog and started blogging and building websites and doing HTML and all that sort of stuff. And it was such a great time. Blogs were very creative. People were writing about what they did, how they were creative, The things that they made, the writing they did, photography It was a time when I came across a lot of names and some of them are still online now And yeah, they were very much the forerunners and the visionaries I think for this type of thing And then of course it all changed We went from being anonymous online We all had names for our blogs and yeah then we started using our own names and moving on from there But I kind of hanker after those good old days of blogging, so I've decided to start writing. I'm using a blog site called Scribbles, which is really nice, quite simple. I've set up all sorts of things like little newsletters and contact forms, tracking and analytics, all that sort of stuff. So it's very customizable, but it's not going to involve me spending as much time as I have on WordPress. and I've been tweaking it, creating a new site every now and again so I've been setting that up and a very very simple newsletter called Recur Email and I don't know if you can hear, there's a dog going nuts out there somewhere and it massively simple and that what I wanted almost a sort of analogue online presence and it made a big difference I actually felt more like writing I probably won't have much of an audience but that's fine I've also been using another site called alto.so which is kind of a blog but more like a micro blog and I can use that from Apple Notes so I can just write loads of stuff in Apple Notes and then when I'm back on my Mac I can publish stuff and he has another tool called Public.me which just uses iPhone messages so I'm kind of using that instead of social media but yeah, it's just quite good and not being a little fish in a big pond but just having my own little platforms so I'm enjoying that and I've just set up the integration on voice notes with Notion. I haven't used Notion much for a while but I want to be able to get all my voice notes that are sort of content related, blog related. They're all hashtagged content into Notion. And then I can use it a bit like a Zettelkasten again. So yeah, lots of changes, lots of new stuff, lots of old stuff still going on in the background. I still love Twos and I use that every day. And I'm hoping, fingers crossed, that I get onto the alpha testing. which is due to launch soon. Parker has been rebuilding Twos and I think it's going to look quite different. All the good old stuff but also some new things and a new look as well. So I'm very excited about that. And yeah, if the Alpha Gods can look down on me and get me onto that, I'll be very grateful. Anyway, thanks for listening. Have a great day. Bye