After 2 hours of reading Lord of the Rings I walked back to Tina's yoga studio and decided to give my Pops a call. I was giving him the first hand account of the more gruesome aspect of the day before's goat butcher like when Sundog skinned the face of the goat so he could eat the cheeks, tongue and eyes of the goat, right as the Yoga teacher stuck her head out the door and asked me to be quiet! I felt bad at first, and apologized to the teacher after the class was over, but in retrospect it was pretty funny. Just imagine being at the end of a hard yoga class, doing the Cevasena pose, which is where you just lay on the ground and rest while peaceful music is playing, and then you hear some over eager 19 year old outside talking on the phone about peeling goat faces and blowing into the esophagus end of the lungs to make them inflate like a balloon!
After Yoga Tina had to work the San Augustine market which is from 3 to 6, so for that I again just found a place to sit and read my book! After the market, we finally went to meet Randy. He drove me back to his place and then I pitched my tent in the back yard and crashed.
Work started for me around 5:45, I told Randy that's when I would be starting and he said he would be up to help but I guess his wife turned off his alarm before it woke him up because he didn't come outside until 7ish.
He made me some eggs and then his daughter and son didn't finish their eggs in time to catch the school bus so I ate the rest of theirs as well. We went back to work and he was surprised that I had cruised through about half of the tasks he had given me the night before. Tina wasn't due to pick me up until around 3:30 and I was already half done with the work he had for me and it was just now 8:30 am. By noon I had wrapped up everything on his list and he had to scramble to come up with some more stuff for me to do before he left for school. He is getting a masters in something I guess. He paid me well and said he was pleased with my work and after he left I still finished the stuff he gave me to do around 1:30 so I texted Tina and she came to pick me up early! Of all the stuff he had me do I most enjoyed dropping the Orange tree he wanted me to take out, bucking it up into small pieces and stacking it for pick up.
Back at the farm I finished my "days off" by helping Guy with chores and winding down the day with the usual routine of a short work out and a cold "hose shower". As I write this on November 3rd it has been over 2 months now that I have had a hot shower, I am quite used to the cold hose water.
Saturday was a very long day of harvesting and washing vegetables. Now that we are up to 20 shares and growing a lot of greens like lettuce and spinach, each piece of lettuce is harvested by hand with scissors and washed by hand as well. The day started at 5:45 and we didn't end the day until around 7:30. Thankfully Tina cooked up a big pot of Goat Stew so Guy and I didn't have to worry about making ourselves dinner. It was delicious Plus Jim doesn't really like goat meat, and the kids really only like PB&J so she boxed up the left overs for Guy and I.
Sunday was Guy's day off and Tina and Jim took the kids to market so I had the farm to myself. Jim at left me with my favorite type of task, heavy manual labor! :)
He had just ripped the North east corner of the garden which was about an acre of raw land that that hadn't done anything with yet but since we are expanding to more CSA shares we need more planting space. By "ripped" I mean that Jim drove all over that land with the tractor and the "ripping" implement which is a big heavy toothed piece of metal that burrows into the ground an breaks it up! It turns out that that section of the garden was the foundations of a school at one point and he ended up breaking off a lot of the teeth on his ripper on metal pipes and big chunks of concrete! So I spent all Sunday pacing up and down and around this acre of torn up land pulling out big rocks and chunks of cement and lengths of pipe! It was a fun, but long day of lifting and throwing rocks. Something about it was very gratifying though, it is the same as why I like setting up for market because like I said in my second post ever, for some reason I love moving heavy things from point A to point B as quickly as possible. It also made me flash back to two summers ago at camp when me and two of my best friends had a rock throwing competition. There were no rules or anything we were just on the edge of the lake seeing who could chuck a big rock the farthest, it was simple and fun and we went at it for an hour at least.
I ended up having no one to compete with but myself, and I was playing the game for 8 hours instead of one, but it was still lots of fun!
Monday was spent cutting raw 20 foot lengths of rebar into 16 inch segments, I had to do this because the rebar was what we would be using in the future to stake in our hoop houses. It was a very hot day Monday, probably mid 90's. And instead of producing saw dust, when cutting metal you produce flying sparks that land all over you. When I first got to the farm and I was building the egg mobile and doing some metal cutting I would make sure I had long sleeves and gloves so that no sparks were landing on me and that was just for a couple of 10 second cuts. Now a month and half later I was out there with a shirt or gloves cutting rebar for half the day and the sparks never bothered me. They were definitely landing all over me but I have just gotten so used to it that it hardly hurts. I remembered watching Jim make cuts in short sleeves and wondering how he stood the pain, and now I know that it is like most things in life, you just need practice and experience! I was of course wearing safety goggles because no amount of practice allows you to take a molten hot metal spark in the eye with out pain. :) I was sweating so much though that about every 20 minutes I had to take off my goggles and empty the sweat that was pooling in them. The rest of the day was spent pulling out more rocks and concrete from the new acre in the garden.
Monday night was Halloween!!! The family makes the hour long drive into Tuscon each year so that the kids have a proper trick or treating experience. Since trick or treating out here would require hours of walking and not much pay off in the way of candy. Tina insisted that Guy and I dress up since she was a witch and Jim was going as a cross dresser in one of her dresses! Ha, neither Guy nor I had planned for any sort of costume when packing for this trip and had to make due with what we had. I ended up loaning Guy my overalls and a straw hat and he was a scare crow. My plan was just to wear my onezie and carry around a cow bottle and an moracca that was supposed to be a rattle and tell people that I was a baby.
We all loaded into the little Volvo and since there were only 5 seats and 6 of us, I rode in the trunk for an hour both ways! We stopped on hour way into Tuscon to go grocery shopping for me and Guy, and after already being in the trunk for half an hour I realized my costume was way to hot. As we were walking into the store, Jim in drag, Tina in witches make up and guy and I in our rather lame costumes I made the joke of wishing I had just a diaper to wear and that my onezie was to hot. Jim suggested I buy some extra large diapers in the grocery store and try to squeeze in. I ended up buy some "depends" which is an adult diaper brand that I didn't even know existed until now! And my costume was born!
It was fun trick or treating with the kids and everyone at the party got a kick out of my costume as well as lots of people on the streets. A couple of times I had complete strangers come up to me and ask to have their picture taken with me! It was a wild night!
Tuesday we were back to work on the hoop houses in the garden. Today I was cutting the 20 foot lenghts of PVC pipe into 6 1/2 foot lengths. These would be bent over the bed and slid onto the rebar that would be hammered on either side of the bed.
The PVC took all day to cut because each cut had to be measured and marked first and then cut, where as on the metal saw I just put up a stop 16 inches away from my blade and slid the rebar through until it hit the stop. But Jim wanted the PVC more accurately cut.
Wednesday, yesterday was the implementation of all the preparations that I had done the last two days. I hammered in rebar 4 ft and 4 inches wide and spaced every six feet down the lengths of all the new beds. then putting the PVC on was easy!
The final product looks like this:
The row covers get taken off in the day time and then put back on at night.
That took me about half the day and I got about half the beds done but ran out of rebar stakes so we will have to acquire more before we finish the other beds. up untill this point we have just been laying row covers over the beds and weighting them down with rocks but now with the hoops taking up slack in the fabric we have to clip them on. To buy the clips needed it would cost 400 bucks and as Jim put it, Guy and I basically cost him nothing. So the three of us set up an assembly line and manufactured the clips needed in about 3 hours.
That's pretty much all that has happened since I last posted. It is currently 10 am Thursday morning and I am waiting to hear from Tina if I have any work for today and tomorrow or not!
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