Island farming in the Falkland Islands: Internet shopping and what about the poor horses!!!!!

Used a massive amount of megabytes Internet shopping on LL Bean and Ezibuy. Decided we will have to upgrade to the gold Internet package, 3,000 megabytes for £100.00. Currently we are on a silver package which gives us 1,250 megabytes for £60.00 and we keep going over, we then pay about 13p per megabyte for every one megabyte over our quota. Expensive or what!!!! I have to say that I waste what I use on facebook and on here but Christopher uses them constructively sourcing farm and boat equipment. Anyway I now have four new pairs of jeans on the way from Ezibuy, New Zealand.
Came in yesterday and caught the end of the Grand National. Two horses died in this years race. Interesting when listening to the commentators. They felt sorry for the owners and sorry for the trainers, what about the horses!!!!! I guess asking animals to jump 30 fences which are too high while running 4 miles in under 10 minutes is such a money making event that animal welfare can be over looked!!!!. Talking about horses, we have a retired race horse that was originally imported from Chile. It was given to Tiphanie because its racing career was over. We only have two race meetings a year, a two day meeting at Christmas time in Stanley and another two day meeting during sports week in February at Goose Green farm on East Falkland. Anyway neither of our children could ride when we purchased George Island in 2000 but they both learnt pretty quickly, there are no lessons here, just get on and get on with it. Anyway Shaun was about 12 the first time he was allowed to take the ex-racer out. We saw him go off. He headed up to the grass airstrip and next thing we could see this horse racing up and down the airstrip. Christopher was getting ******* and *******. Eventually the horse tired and he arrived back at the house. The horse was covered in sweat and froth. Christopher tore a strip of Shaun, saying look at the state of the horse, its exhausted etc etc. Shaun burst into tears, "I couldn't stop it, it just raced up and down and up and down and it wouldn't stop".
Christopher is working on the tractor that we have in town. We purchased the tractor several years ago. It is secondhand and the gearbox had been taken out because it had two broken cogs in it. We eventually managed to get the cogs needed to repair it but it is far from straight forward because the previous owner took the whole gearbox to pieces and anything that could be removed was and it came to us as a box of bits. Fortunately Christopher is mechanically minded so he should be able to re-build it successfully.
This morning I wrapped up some cheap and cheerful birthday presents for Tiphanie my daughter who is currently study at uni in the UK. Tiphanie has had one birthday at home since she was 16 years old, this year she is going to be 23. That is the price you have to pay if you want to continue onto further and then higher education because it is not available in the Falklands.