Saturday came along and I was mentally gearing up for a long day of snipping lettuce greens washing lettuce greens and then drying lettuce greens. It never came! Tina told me that there was a mesquite milling festival in Arivaca, the little artist community town a couple miles away and that they were having lots of vendors and wanted Walking J Farm to be there. So we drove down to Arivaca and I set up shop, Tina didn't expect me to make more $30 because its just a real small place. We got there early and it was pretty dead and after having set up and being the only vendor there for 40 minutes it was still dead. If you had been there you would have seen a small adobe plaster community center with a fenced in playground and lawn area out its front doors with a side walk leading from them to the parking lot with just one 19 year old kid set up with a stand trying to sell meat. It was a pretty interesting day. I was there from 10 till 4. What happened was that the man who owns the mesquite bean mill broke it and didn't want to pay for the repairs so he told the guy who organized the festival that he wasn't coming until 2 days before the festival. So the festival never really happened but plenty of people still came buy for the fundraiser buffet of home cooked meals for just $5. It smelled really good from outside in the chilly wind and around 11, Peter the man running the show came out and told me I could eat there too. I feasted on around 3 plates just then at 11 o'clock and then 2 more around 3:30. I had planned on calling Tina around 11:30 because she had said too call if it was super slow. however it was right around 11:15 that I started making sales enough to keep me around for the whole day and I ended up pulling in $150. So even though the festival never happened and none of the other vendors came, I made over 4 times what Tina expected and I got 2 free meals out of it! :)
Sunday was a fairly regular fun day at the market! I am starting to get to know our regular customers now which is cool to have a micro relationship with these people who were complete strangers before but over the last 2 months have become friends through the social setting that is a farmers market.
Monday was a turkey butcher day, in preparation for Thanksgiving, and then the first half of Tuesday was bagging all the turkeys. The butcher day was pretty interesting. I caught and killed a few but was mostly just picking feathers all day. It was an incredibly cold winding rainy day with driving rain for about 15 minutes that got us all nice and soaked, except for Sundog of course who was dressed for a blizzard. The more notable events of the butcher were when a few of the Turkeys had such nerve spasms after being killed that they kicked their way out of the kill cone and starting trying to run away. It gave whole new meaning to the phrase "running around like a chicken with its head cut off" except these were turkeys! The other interesting thing was when Sundog was gutting one of the the birds and he pulled a fully developed egg out of her as well as a sack of egg yolks that were about to turn into eggs. And Sundog being Sundog he took the egg and the egg sack home with him for dinner along with all the Turkey heads that we cut off that day! What a crazy guy!
As I said early Tuesday was just bagging all the birds which took about half the day, the latter part of the day was spent pulling up all the Tomato plants that got wiped out in the frost that finally came!
Wednesday I was screening compost all day, it made me think of one of my earlier posts from when I first got here and was screening compost by hand thinking about how quickly the tractor could be doing the task. Well today I got to use the tractor! And in the same amount of time as when I was doing it by hand, I screened 10 times the amount with the tractor.
I took half my lunch break to just lay in the sun and stubs and Guy joined me about the same time so Guy snapped this cuddle picture.
Wednesday night I took off to Tuscon with Tina to go to Maggie's dance recital and then get dropped off in a parking lot to be picked up by Randy, the same guy I worked for two weeks ago to get started building his tool shed.
I slept great in Randy's backyard it was a nice full moon to stare at until I fell asleep. Thursday morning he and I went to home depot and dropped $1000 on supplies, it was two hours of shopping. We drove it home and got straight to work! It was a good productive day and at the end of the day we had the base, floor and 4 wall frames up! I didn't end up taking a picture until well after sundown and we were working by spot light.
The next morning we nailed down some paneling on the two side walls and put on the rafters and the over hanging gable inns. I forgot to take a picture of it though. A neighbor of Randy's came by to help, his name was Gill and he was an ex-marine and was now starting to do MMA so he and I had plenty to talk about. It was a fun project to be working on, I had never built anything that big before so it was very gratifying!
I think tonight was my last cold shower, I know I have said that before and it's been almost 2 and a half months now of hose showers but the water temperature and air temperature are both so cold now that it isn't smart to continue getting wet and cold once the sun is down. It might be another story if we had a heated room but by 8 pm our room is almost air temperature and considering we have had a couple nights of 22 degrees I would say that cold showers are off the menu from here on out.
Here is some beautiful Arizona landscape!
Oh also we got two puppies! :)
Dotty is on the left, because of the dot on her head and the other one is still un-named!
Tonight is game night with some friends of Jim and Tina, and the interns are included! It should be a fun time!
That's all for now!
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