Not much to report yet on our cattle station experience. We’re both still settling in, and haven’t as yet had a chance to take any photos.

For me, I’m enjoying being back in a kitchen, especially a kitchen as well equiped as this one. The cool room alone is bigger than most commercial kitchens I’ve ever worked in. The only complaint I could make about the equipment is that the oven doesn’t get up to temperature, and in fact sometimes barely gets hot at all. But I have a good electric frypan and a good deep fryer – both of which came to the rescue the other day when the oven went decidedly cool in the middle of my first roast dinner. The next day, the oven was fine again, so I guess it’s a bit temperamental – not unlike myself.

Pauls on a big learning curve, driving a few sorts of machinery he’s never driven before. He’s out in the heat, and still finding his feet, but he thinks he’s going to like it. I can see he’s enjoying being back with boys. The comaradie men at work seem to enjoy.

Technology, or rather, lack of technology is going to be the hardest thing to take. I’m only able to write this as we have the week end off, so are staying overnight in Karumba. We”ll be catching up with emails while we’re here, and Paul will phone his dad tonight. At the station we don’t have any phone cover at all, and email is appalling. At the beginning of last week we were managing to download emails, but each one was taking around 20 minutes to fully download. By yesterday nothing would come through at all. I believe the Internet at the station is renewed on the 14th of each month though, and runs faster just after renewal, so hopefully we’ll have a couple if trouble free weeks coming up.

We’re both still definitely finding our feet. The money – if converted to an hourly rate is woeful. Neither of us can remember a time when we earned such a low hourly rate. But, then again, we can’t spend anything either, and our keep is included. So, we can’t remember a time when our outgoings have been this low either.

At the end of the day, it won’t be a monetary job worth writing about, but taking incoming and outgoings into consideration it’ll even out ok. The biggest thing for us is that at the end of our days – when we’re looking back over our road travelled, it’s going to be a Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve experience, that we will be able say,  yes we took that opportunity, we did that! One of life’s little experiences that will have helped us live a full, rich life, and that’s what’s it’s all about.

Juries still out though as to whether or not we can actually say, ‘what a pleasure’. Watch the space – I think it’s coming….