Day 19: Tractor surfing, Egg-Mobiles and eating locally!

Morning chores were all by myself this morning, Tina and Jim must have had a sleep in because one of them normally come out to milk the goats around 6:30, but Tina didn't come out today until about 7:30. It was a long morning and it got hot around 9:30 which meant a hot day! Just because it's September doesn't mean it doesn't get up to 95 or 100! Which it did! While I was working on the trailer I had to make sure I didn't leave my tools in the sun otherwise they'd be too hot to touch! Anyhow, I'm getting ahead of my self, after chores ended around 8, I had breakfast, I just wasn't feeling like re-heated oatmeal today so I had 6 scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes in them, and half a quart of Goat's milk!

"That oughta' hold me!" I said to myself as pushed away from my plate to relax! Yes, I have started talking to myself a little bit here and there. It has happened before, during extended stretches of solitude! It sounds weird probably to you guys who see tons of people everyday, but 6 out of 7 days of the week I only see Jim, Tina, and the kids, and about 80% of my 16 waking hours I am alone! So yes, I have started talking to my self again. The last time this happened was when I was the winter break worker at Prin College and was mostly alone for 7 weeks.

After my delicious farm fresh eggs accompanied by farm fresh veggies, topped off by farm fresh goats milk, I felt rejuvenated and ready for the rest of the day! Breakfast really is the most important meal! I had to give the tomatoes a quick pass through but other than that I was back to work on my egg mobile by about 9:45am. I worked on it while Jim was building another implement for his tractor. I have used the word implement a couple of times now, and perhaps I should clarify what it is. An implement is just any of the different tools that a tractor can pull. So for turning the soil in the fields he has a discing implement, as well as his home made goose neck trailer hitch which is techinically an implement. Here is a picture of it, like I said yesterday, It is simple, but it gets the job done, and it is home made! 

Now he was working on building a bed leveling implement. So that he wouldn't have to hand level each of the new beds he created yesterday. He did one and half by hand and it took him about 90 minutes. Here is a picture of Jim working on the implement. He is using a oxygen and acetyl combination blow torch, which is highly combustible, with a cutting head on it which just blows the oxygen out at a high speed so it blows away the molten metal that it just melted! It is all very cool stuff, but as Jim stressed also very lethal if used improperly. 

While Jim was working on his implement I was working on the trailer, I still had to seal up the outside as well as to some weather proofing. I worked on it from about 9:45am till 5:30pm and got reaaaally close to finishing. There were a couple "breaks" in between 9:45 and 5:30 though. 

First break was actually when Jim needed help getting his implement to work so naturally he called on my expertise to get the job done. While Jim brought the smarts, ingenuity, and craftsmanship to the project he relied on me to bring my largeness and my willingness to do less than advisable gardening practices. What happened was Jim's implement worked great for the most part, and remember this is something that he came up with and designed himself which is simple, but still amazing to me. He was using the implement to level out the mounds he had made yesterday with the discing implement, into a flat bed with a slight depression in it to hold water. So he cut a piece of and "I" beam and welded it to a draw bar, which is what connects it to the tractor. The I beam was cut to the length of the desired with of the beds so that as he dragged the implement across the mounds he made yesterday, it would not only flatten them out, but leave a shallow depression 3 and a half feet wide, all the way down the length of the bed. I hope all that makes sense. The one flaw in the design, a flaw Jim foresaw but didn't have the time to do anything about, was that the I beam might not be heavy enough to make a depression at all, it might just level of the beds which Jim could have done with the shovel on the front of that tractor and saved himself the 2 hours it took him to build this experimental implement. The whole time he was building it he was saying, "I hope I'm not wasting my time." Because as I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post we are kind of behind schedule with things. 

So the implement wasn't digging into the ground the way he hoped, and for a little bit he was rather dismayed. I stated the obvious, "It just needs more weight, then it would work." Real helpful, I know.. This is not the project where my mind was able to help out that much, but Jim did come up with the solution of me being the "weight" that I so eloquently put, "would make it work." He devised a system where he would start dragging the bar across the mound and then I would run and jump on to it and hold onto the back of the tractor while he drove the length of the bed, then he would stop, I would run back to the beginning of the next bed and we would do it over again. We did it for about 8 beds, 2 times per bed. So it was a lot of tractor riding and I got good enough at it that I felt safe taking this video for you guys: 

I'm not sure why but I can't get this video to post right side up, it's not a huge deal though the video wasn't super enlightening anyways, my filming was sub par because I was still trying to surf behind a tractor and hold on with one hand!

So now you can see why I said earlier that Jim brought the brains to the table while I brought the brawn. So that was my first break from working on the trailer. It ended up being about 20 minutes of surfing behind the tractor for me. 

My second break came when I realized that a) I had not taken lunch again, and that b) I had not collected eggs because I normally collect them before my lunch break, which I had not taken. So around 1:30 I quickly ran out collect eggs in the golf cart and got 19. I accidentally cracked one when I was pulling it out, which is just as well because the carton can only collect 18 anyways. But rather than waste the egg, I ate it raw, after all, I had skipped lunch again. It was the best raw egg I have ever had which isn't saying much because the only other one I have had was in gourmet foods my sophomore year of High school on a dare. But that egg had just come out of a fridge so it was cold and slimy, where as this egg had basically just come out of a chicken and was being perched on up until the moment I cracked it and ate it, so it was warm and slimy. Neither is that good, I guess it's personal preference, but for some reason this egg wasn't actually that bad. Maybe it was because it was so fresh, where as the egg from sophomore year, well who knows how long it had been since it was laid and what journeys it had gone through to be sanitized and whatever else happens to the eggs that the masses eat. I think the only way my egg could have been any fresher was if I had squeezed the chicken until it layed the egg right into my hand. 

So I drove back to the main farm area and dropped the eggs off at the freezer and then ran back to my barn to grab my frozen chicken that I had set out to thaw so I could cook it for dinner. This is where my second break starts. I grabbed my chicken and took it into the house where Tina had said I could roast my chicken. She showed my how to stuff it, to add flavor and then you salt and pepper the outside and stick it in the oven. Pretty easy. She stuffed mine with half a lemon, and some herbs.

While I was in the house watching Tina prepare my chicken she paid me an extraordinary compliment. If you can recall way back to one of my first posts where she said that most interns make the mistake of keeping up with Jim, that puts what she said to me next into context. She said, "Well Ben, I think Jim has finally met his match!" I asked what she meant and she said, "I think he finally has someone who out works him on this farm." I was very flattered and immediately said, "Oh, well I think he still works harder than me, but thank you very much!" She just smiled and went back to my chicken. It was a very nice compliment of her and maybe in the category of just physical labor I do work a little harder that Jim, but that is understandable because he is 40 and has been doing this type of stuff his whole life, as wells as the fact that he has kids and other responsibilities like being their soccer coach. Where as I am a still growing 19 year old who has been itching to do something like this my whole life and am able to throw myself, mind, body and soul into it all. I have only been doing it for just shy of 3 weeks so it's still fresh to me, and I have no other life outside of working. No kids to tuck in that keep me up till 9:30 and no soccer games to coach. Nothing! It's just eat (some times) sleep and work for me! Well and writing this I guess. Jim also has about three times the facts, figures and logistical things running through his head than I do so in that category he definitely out works me! Not that any of it is a competition by any means, I am just dissecting and over analyzing, as I am one to do. Point is, Tina gave me a very flattering compliment that was fractionally true, but for the most part, just a nice thing she said! 

After I left the house that pretty much the end of my second and last break. Except for when a grasshopper jumped onto my arm and I ate him as a snack, after all, at this point I was running on just a raw egg, I had burned off my six eggs that I had for breakfast hours ago. So when this foolish little fella' landed on my arm, I decided he was offering himself to be eaten. So I ate him, it had a different taste than the other one I had a couple days ago. I wonder if taste depends on the species or if each one is individually flavored. I just look at all this as preparation for Thailand! If the fact that I ate a raw egg and a grass hopper for lunch makes anyone uncomfortable just pretend I'm joking! :) Because honestly, who does that.. 

So after my second break and snack of Mr. Grasshopper, which took about 5 seconds, it was back to work! Yay! At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I think now is as good a time as any to re-iterate that I love all of the work I am doing and that in no way, shape, or form is any of this meant to be complaints or seeking sympathy! I truly love it all! Yes, I even love being so hungry I'll eat raw eggs and grasshoppers! It's all part of the adventure. Okay, enough of the anti-complaint disclaimer, I'll probably bring it up again next week again anyways. 

I got really close to finishing my trailer and was even able to offer a suggestion that Jim said was a good idea, regarding weather proofing the front gate that I had chicken wired yesterday. Here is a clearer picture of what I did yesterday, as well as a picture of some of the work I did today. This first picture is a shot of the inside that shows the lay boxes and some of the boarding up I did down at the bottom.

This is a shot of some metal flashing that I screwed down all over the outside to simultaneously weather proof and skunk proof it. The white material you see is old billboard tarp which is really strong because it is made to last in the elements for months at a time on billboards. This tarp was just tied down and the bottom but Jim wanted a much tighter seal so I started screwing this metal in vertically and horizontally at a variety of different points to keep rain and skunks out! As well as chickens in!

This is a re-shoot of yesterdays work, although it didn't turn out thaaat much better than yesterday's photo.

The pictures don't really make it all seem like two full days of work because it is just the final product but there was a lot of cutting things, hauling materials to the right place, thinking things through, messing up and re-doing things. Plus I was screwing into metal the whole time which takes about 4 times as long to drill through than wood. That was the main factor in what took so long. I was using self boring screws that had a drill tip on the first 1/8 inch of the screw and then threads after that. They are quite nifty, but still it took a while to be screwing steel onto steel at some points. Screwing wood onto metal was in most cases difficult because the screw taps right through the wood in a matter of one second and then I'm trying to go through the metal, but since the screw drills and threads simultaneously it's not just a matter of drilling into the spot I need to because I can only go so far as it is between the board and the head of the screw until it stops. Then I have to reverse the drill and back my screw out, and then go forwards again until the drill tip is on the metal again, I have to repeat this over and over sometimes 15 times just to get 1 screw in. It takes a long time because even if I was just drilling straight through the metal it would take about 8-10 seconds of hard consistent pressure to get through the steel, but since I am pulsing and trying to make sure I don't bury the head of the screw in the wood, it all get complicated pretty quickly. But, I am almost finished which is all that matters!

As the day wrapped up, Jim stopped by to look over all my work since it was mostly done with out input from him. He said it looked good and then I offer my suggestion about having a roll up tarp over the gate so that we can put it down when there's rain. Then we just got to talking in general as we do, our talks aren't often but I always come away having learned something. For example today I learned that the moon is visible during the day time no matter where you are in the world. I had seen it before during the day but never consistently everyday like I do here. He said that it was either because I wasn't looking hard enough or I live near a city with smog and tall buildings or in a forest with lot's of trees. But it was funny because I asked him, "What causes that? "What?" he said, "You know, being able to see the moon in the day like that.." He looked at me for a few seconds. "Well it's like that every where in the world, Ben." Ha, I had thought that something unique about the atmosphere in Arizona or something like that caused it, but it turns out the only thing unique about it, is that it is clean!! Smog free, and in the country is definitely a recipe for great night time star gazing as well as day time moon gazing! When you see it up there during the day, it really reminds you of how it's just a big rock really, yet there wouldn't be life on earth as we know it, with out it! Whoa, that was a bit of a tangent! Jim and I also had a discussion about my developing craftsmanship and how skill comes with experience. As we were talking though be both sort of confessed to being perfectionist in a small way. Meaning we spend extra time on details that only we will ever notice once the final build is done and that the attention to detail that we have to our own projects is so acute that some times in it hinders our progress. It was fun finding out we had more in common. 

After work ended around 5:30 I went back to my room and devoured my chicken and a water melon. Here is the before shot of my chicken.

And here is the 15 minutes later shot of my chicken! It was really good!

And here is my melon, this was grown on the farm as well! Today everything I ate or drank even the water came from the farm. Because we have our own well at the farm, and all the hoses get pumped from this well. So it was a very local eating day for me

I have actually still been showering outside because the last few days have been real hot so it is still warm enough by 6:30 for me to take a hose shower. 

That's all for now! It's getting late and I can hear Asher and Shawnee starting their barking war with the coyotes which is my cue to go to sleep!