May 6th

Hanna, Jorge and I live in this house--it was here when Anders' parents lived here, over 50 years ago!

The sun sets around 10, rises around 4

Aaaand here begins my tale

Hanna and I are sitting at the kitchen table now. She is flipping through Jorge’s Spanish dictionary, I am writing on my laptop. Jorge is cooking, and we were just talking to Jorge about his first dumpstering experience. Jorge is so great—he is the most humble, nicest, hardest working guy ever. My nose is going crazy with all the dirt and dust around here but I’m all whatever, ya digg? Larson is a useless lump of hair, but slightly endearing. Today he played dj with my ipod while Hanna and I cleaned the kitchen.

“Do you have Pink Martini?”

“Yes…but you have my ipod…why don’t you check?”

“I don’t want to scroll down to the p’s..”

“Yes, I have Pink Martini.”
“They are super Spanish.”

“…(in this moment I contemplated throwing the mold-covered cheese plate I was washing at Larson’s face)”

Larson begins playing Elohai N’Tzor, a song in Hebrew

“Super Spanish.”

It was hard not to laugh.

Today I sorted through vegetables, peeling off dirty/moldy bits and composting rancid cabbages/carrots/celery roots. It doesn’t sound glamorous now that I wrote it out, but it was fantastic. Sitting in the sun with a bag of produce and a dull knife. Part of the time I sorted through vegetables with Dan. He talked more about working in Greece and we discussed veganism a little. Dan said 1/3 of what is produced is thrown away. Next year I’m going to try dumpstering, at least a little. I also plan on subscribing to CSA baskets, and Hanna and I talked about finding a place in the house to store cabbage and potatoes. Even if my dumpstering/sustainable habits don’t stick, I may be able to write a story about my adventures for the Beacon in the Fall:
 “I went in the dumpster at New Seasons!” Hard-hitting journalism, folks.

I helped spread horse shit in the new greenhouse today. Hanan and Jorge loaded up wheelbarrows of horse shit and I spread the horse shit along the rows of raised earth. The horse shit didn’t smell bad at all. We will finish spreading the horse shit in the second half of the greenhouse tomorrow.

HORSE SHIT.

Hanna and I tried to make ice cream out of some of the expired milk here. It was DELICIOUS, except it never thickened into actual ice cream, so it was more like sweet chocolate milk with a pungent aftertaste. Will make more tomorrow. Such a treat!...seriously.

In the late morning I went to deliver some orders to a preschool with Anders. Anders is awesome. I will have to put up a picture so you can see what I am trying to describe. He’s old enough that any hard personality traits that he may once have had have softened and sagged along with his face skin. We dropped off the potatoes and beets at the Waldorf school and then drove to the store. Anders has diabetes and today was my fourth day on the farm.