Well, where do I begin?
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by Phil, who runs a BBQ business and was looking for suckling piglets.
We had five boys left and he said he’d take them. Great! I even sent him a photo of our cool room showing the last lot of pigs we’d had processed.
Apparently, this is where the confusion started.
Last Thursday, Phil arrived… in a car.
To our surprise, he wasn’t there to collect processed pigs. He thought the pigs in the photo were the actual pigs he was buying. My mistake, I should have made it clearer they weren’t processed yet.
A few days later he contacted me and said he could do them himself and hang them in our cool room.
Not ideal, especially considering we were leaving for three weeks and trying to prepare the farm for our house sitter.
This all unfolded the day before we were due to leave.
David already had a long list of jobs to do, including dropping linen off to the Airbnbs, while I had an early birthday lunch with my family followed by birthday cake at Mum’s.
Originally, Phil said he’d leave Footscray around 10:30am, meaning he’d arrive by about 1:00pm. David resigned himself to missing lunch with my family so he could stay home and meet him.
Then, at 11:00am, I received a text.
“Still in Melbourne. Another hour here. Hope to leave at 12.”
So much for the plan.
Phil eventually arrived after 2:00pm. I got home around 4:00pm after being out since 11:30am and still had packing, cleaning and a hundred other jobs to do before we left.
Instead, I walked into pig-processing chaos.
They were pouring boiling water over a pig and pulling the hair off by hand. Then I got recruited because one of my pots boiled water faster than the other.
This was still the FIRST pig.
I was being sent in every direction.
“Where’s the thermometer?”
“Can we get more hot water?”
“The gas bottle’s empty.”
“Have you got another knife?”
The knife he brought had already gone blunt and, to be honest, it didn’t feel like there was much of a plan.
Meanwhile, when the pigs were loaded up, one was dispatched and the squealing from the others sent Golding and Ginger crashing through fences trying to investigate what was happening.
Suddenly there were pigs running everywhere and the decision was made to stop after just one.
At 5:30pm I was feeding animals and they were STILL working on that single pig.
I was completely exasperated and probably not hiding it very well.
When it finally went into the cool room, it wasn’t even fully de-haired. Phil decided he’d come back on Monday with a flame gun to finish the job.
Meanwhile, David now had to dig a hole with the tractor and bury the offal, which was another job added to an already overflowing list.
All I could think about was the cleaning, packing and house handover that still hadn’t happened.
The house was nowhere near ready.
We’d already spent the morning working in the cool room and boning room, and now the day had completely disappeared.
At that point I told Phil the remaining four boys would have to wait until we returned from holidays.
There was absolutely no way I was leaving our house sitter, Jo, to deal with that level of chaos.
I’ve also decided there will be a few new rules next time.
Rule number one:
No 2:00pm starts.
As I write this, I’m waiting for enough daylight to start washing floors, vacuuming and finally packing.
Last night I was pretty cranky because I’d convinced myself all five pigs would be processed before we left, meaning less work for Jo while we were away.
Not to be.
Anyway, hopefully after a holiday and a change of scenery I’ll be in a much better mood.