Part Deux: Day 1

I woke up at 730 this morning because I had to be out the door by 8, and I am not a big breakfast eater at all.  The leftover pop tarts I had in my backpack from New York came up clutch this morning.  I pulled the crumb filled wrappers out of the bottom of my backpack, and went to town.  I was downstairs by 755 and waited until 805 for Harold to come down and show me how the mornings went.  I stood in the kitchen pretty awkwardly, and waited while Troy and Ross were eating breakfast in silence.  When Harold came down he told me that the morning is usually started with chicken chores.  Sounded a lot like the morning rounds to me.  But wait!  There was only three coops, and Harold mentioned that the total egg count was 100 yesterday!  Party in the USA.  At Whitmore I was collecting and washing around 300 eggs a day.  So we went in to each coop, I collected eggs fed the birds ( and their feed was conveniently in a trashcan by each feeder ), and checked the water supply.  The "morning rounds" in Maine took me all of 15 minutes...now thats classic.  So after I checked on the birds, I fed the turkeys.  How insane is that, they have turkeys, yea pretty badass.  They make obnoxiously hilarious sounds too.  So I went back in the house put down the embarrassing number of eggs, and went back out with Harold to go collect some cale.  The chard they grow here is marvelous.  Some the most vibrant colors I have ever seen on a stem.  It is insane, yellow, orange, red, pink.  Such a strong natural beauty.  We picked that and some red cale for a while, and bunched them with rubber bands and put them in a box to be sold.  After that Harold told me and the puerto rican girl to work in the green house.  Now I don't know if you can grasp how classic this is, but when I wrote that she was Josh's girlfriend I literally had no idea what I was talking about.  Noelli ( I don't know if that is how you spell it ) is basically a woofer from Puerto Rico.  She has been traveling all over the the country for about a year now working on different farms.  She is one of those people that you connect with immediately, super down to earth, and super open minded.  Their is a little language barrier, but that is the only discrepancy; otherwise we are on the same page, she is even ahead of me on some things.  Harold told us to take down two rows of tomatoes in the greenhouse, and take down the yarn that held the plants up from 8 ft from the ground.  So Noelli had done this before, so I guess he didn't think he had to explain, how wrong he was.  Harold left to go bring a cow to the butcher, so we were on our own.  We started our task, and we were talking the whole time about life, and what my plans were, what hers were, philosophies, and it was classic.  I guess we were talking so much that she forgot to tell me how to do the task, and I was just free styling.  Turns out by the end we had the yarn in a enormous tangled mess.  Harold came back after he dropped the cow off, and was kind of surprised, and angry.  How dod this happen?  Well we kind of just were careless I guess, Sorry.  Yea, but I have never seen anyone do this before, how did this happen?  This questioning went of for a good 5 minutes, and each time I was blaming myself, because the truth was that I had messed up, but the greater truth was that no one taught me what to do.  Quite frankly I was a little pissed off because he never told me how to do it, or what the most efficient way was.  He thought that Noelli knew and would teach me, but she forgot I guess.  It was a blame game, and kind of dumb, but it was a classic case of my first mistake.  So we did our best to untangle the mess and finish one row of tomatoes, and then it was time for lunch.  We went in, and after another classic grace we ate some leftovers from the week.  They weren't leftovers for me because I had never had them, so that was nice.  I had some beef stew type deal, and tried some chicken, that was as tough as cardboard.  The first night we got to London this summer for my high school Europe trip we ate some meat that was as tough as cardboard, and this ranks up with that.  I took one bite, after trying to cut a piece off for a minute, and could barely swallow it.  After we went back out and cleared up our tangled mess in the greenhouse, and at three o clock Noelli and I went back into the house to cook a little bit.  Laura, the wife, cooks just about everything, even bread, and makes the cheese.  So we came in and got a tutorial of how to make bagels.  It was super interesting, because I never really thought about how to make bagels, it kind of just falls under the bread category, but there are certain techniques you have to use.  After you form the dough you boil it for a minute and a half and then bake it in the oven.  The boiling puffs the dough up, and gives it that bagel look, that we all know and love.  And after that we helped make Mozzarella cheese that they make from the cows.  Mozzarella before it is cooked and salted tastes extremely spongy, and bland.  It is a pretty tasteless cheese though.  When you cook it you pour hot water onto the cheese, and then slowly it becomes softer and more flimsy like taffy taffy almost.  After you raise the cheese up with one spoon and let it drop into a bowl about 6 times, it is ready to be refrigerated.  That was a pretty awesome experience I thought.  After cooking with Laura we went back out and did the "afternoon rounds".  Classic misconception.  This took even shorter than the morning rounds.  I do have some criticism though.  They don't really allow their chickens to range freely, as opposed to Whitmore.  I don't get why they expand the gates they have, because they have so much unused land.  I asked Harold, and he gave me some BS 5 minute long response.  After I fed the chickens and Noelli washed the eggs, I asked Harold if there was anything else that needed to be done, and he said not really.  Thats when I asked about the wood chopping.  I was pretty interested in it, because it sounded like some hard work, which I was in for.  He told me that it was actually a good idea to learn now because his back hurt less in the afternoon.  Harold takes a very very long time explaining anything, moreover, showing you where things are located.  Often times he will stop what he is doing and stand there for 30 seconds just thinking.  We got all of the gear we needed, goggles, gloves, earplugs, gasoline, oil, and a marker for measuring the wood.  The wood pile is about 10 ft high and 20 ft long.  Cutting wood is kind of like Jenga.  You have to be very systematic and organized about which pieces to cut and where to cut it because you don't want the big pieces to come tumbling down.  On top of that you also have to be very careful when handling a chainsaw.  I never got to use one today, but I should be using it tomorrow, and it looks quite scary.   He was telling me about some injuries, and how to prevent them, but the chain saw is not down for tom foolery.  It is straight business.  The chainsaw was acting up, so Harold disassembled the whole device and it took him 45 minutes to put the howl thing back together while I stood there beside him.  Finally after realizing the chainsaw wasn't wiring we went back inside, and the day was over.  It went by super quickly.  I think between being in the greenhouse, and having someone to talk to, it sped things up a lot.  And of course cooking.  I love cooking, and I am not sure why but it kind of reminds me of home, and cooking with my family, and I miss that.  So today was fun, and didn't seem very long.  As far as off days go I am not sure how those will workout because as far as I know I don't have a car.  They are willing to let me take days off, I just don't know about the transportation aspect.  For dinner we had some of the bagels we cooked earlier, and some sausage.  I put the sausage in the bagel with mustard, and made a sandwich.  The family has some strange eating habits.  Harold, I saw, put butter on his bagel then proceeded to add ketchup...classic.  It was a nice day, and pretty relaxing, so I am excited for tomorrow.  Nighty.