What unusual weather lately - this morning I took a long walk in a t-shirt to dim sunlight and 4 days earlier it was snowing tiny little balls (you could hardly call 'em snowflakes at how round and compact they were!) on a crisp and very windy day. That crisp and windy day I was helping to build a garden coop (like a greenhouse), standing on the very top edge of the tractor scooper, holding on to the plastic cover for dear life while the workers down below wired the plastic on. I would say staple gunning the coop for a few hours was the highlight of that day...felt like a real farmer woman.
So it's been a while since my last entry, guess I have been choosing sleep and socializing over publicity. But I'll try to remember what's happened since...
-had a really fun weekend with volunteer Natalie and Macalester friends (Jen Agans, Emily Heckel, Sara Gottlieb, Kate Ganong) dancing in Boston. It was a little strange having a Mac crew in such a different part of the country, but just as good as the old times :) We even ran into Emily the next day at a Lush store and I got to talk with my sister Heide from Honduras for her 15 min free phone call! We stayed late enough to see white christmas lights brighten up the night streets. This made me crave a Christmas tree lighting service, like in Chapel Hill where people would sing, eat free cookies and hot cider and see an enormous tree get lit. I'm excited to go home for winter break and maybe see the Nutcracker with my small family crew of 4 this year.
-Marc visited me at the farm and stayed over Sunday night. He got to eat a delicious home-cooked meal, meet some of the characters here (including the volunteers), go for a walk in the woods/get a tour of the place, and eat at the Peterborough diner. He also gifted me a "sudoku for dummies" book which has already commenced to drive me crazy, but nonetheless keep me busier :)
-i'm learning how to knit, learning being the key word
-i've started singing Christmas carols with three other people (a couple and another volunteer, Helene) Monday nights. The idea is that we'll walk around from house to house with a recorder/pitch pipe and sing them for people before vacation starts Dec 18. We're practicing "In the Bleak Midwinter," "Lo, How a Rose 'Er Blooming" (in German), "Noel Nouvelet," and "Gloria" (or is it called hark how the angels sing? I mostly recognize it as Gloooooooo-ooooooooooooooo-oooooooooooooo-ooooooooooooooooooriia!).
-a while ago I saw this cool movie, I think it's just called Temple Grandin, about Temple Grandin, a woman who has her phD in Animal Behavior and was the first Autistic person to really explain what it meant to be Autistic. Because of her, the majority of American slaughterhouses have been redesigned to fit her more calming and logical model of how to move and kill cows. I highly recommend seeing the movie.
This week is Thanksgiving week so we have 7 new residents taking holiday here, but it's not overwhelming because about that many of our residents are spending Thanksgiving with their former caretakers or friends. We have no workshops that day (just helping to cook) and we each eat in a house instead of in the main building as they did last year (which WAS overwhelming, trying to arrange for 70+ people). We hope to play a couple rounds of (tag?) football to bring in a taste of America. And I hope to jump on into the giant hot tub right outside of the farm's founder's house to finish the day off. At the end of the week, I get to go to Trish and Owen's (Owen went to the peace corps with my mom, and they've been family friends since) in Hartford, Connecticut. No specific plans on my end - the refreshment of just being somewhere new, even if I'm just relaxing at their house, is plenty satisfying for me :)
Reading a blog entry like this makes it sound like I'm always busy and always doing something. It is true that I'm lucky to have access to a car (though it's dying by the day, with every new fix it needs) and live only a state or two apart from my brother and friends. That said, there is a lot of down time, time to be by yourself, time to try to come up with a motivational activity, time to think, time to feel lazy. At school, at least half of that time was taken up by homework and studying, or planning the social moments when you weren't doing that. I would feel like I needed more time to myself, more time to reflect. Now I feel like I could go crazy with my thoughts and being by myself. I think about rituals that I can do by myself to keep me focused, like reading or sudoku. I never thought I would say this, but I miss having to do some homework to keep my mind a little straight.
The nice thing is that a lot of the volunteers feel that way and we talk about it. They're a good group of people. Between them and the woods, I remain more sane.
***If you'd like to check out some photos of the farm and us, go to this site: http://www.fredgoldsmithphotography.com/gallery/PlowshareFarmAutumn2010/
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
hee hee ee ee eee...
That's the closest impersonation I can do of one of the resident's witch cackles. She has short grey hair and is nearing her 50s, is a witch every year for Halloween, and does the cutest witch cackle. She'll be mid- "blahblah" (repeating sentences), I'll start to do Halloween noises and for 5 seconds she'll break out into them with me. I also love chasing her with these small felted ghosts around the house, particularly the night before Halloween when our power went out :)
Halloween was fun - on Friday the whole community went to a Halloween party at Lucas community (similar to ours, but with less capable residents). It was great to see everyone in the outfits - Elvis, the costumes where it looks like you're piggy back riding on an ostrich or person, cleopatra, Groucho Marx's (I was one of them), etc. I was a little creeped out by two residents who were completely covered in masks and robes and would stand very close and still to you. heh. There were first a couple games (tie a balloon around your leg and pop everyone else's before yours gets popped, musical chairs), then good dance music, and lastly desert and a play of the children's book about "the little old lady" who wasn't scared of anything.
On Saturday the volunteers went to a house party in Peterborough that was like a small college party. We had considered driving to Keene to crash frat parties afterwards (putting the Germans in the front line so their accents and foreign appeal would get us in), but decided we would do that another weekend.
This week seemed pretty busy since on Thursday night the whole community also went to a professional Eurythmy performance in Keene. At first I had to mentally calm down to try to take it seriously - all the women were completely straight-faced, but their bodies were SOO expreSSIVE and Rudolf STEIner, mOOOVing to the poems that were being read, that it was hard for me to access it. But as the performance went on, there was a little more music and a few humorous pieces that I ended up really enjoying it. I remembered how much I miss being a part of and seeing musical/dance performance and how easy school has made it for me to access that. I occasionally drum in one of the houses when people aren't around to make it a private performance, and I often dance in my room, but I could always use more music.
In other news, my brother Niels' family is expecting a baby boy in March!! I'm so excited for a new cute nephew :)
That's all for now, I don't have Thanksgiving off but I might see Marc a few days later. Time is going by pretty fast here, and before I know it I'll be back home for Christmas (which I am already looking forward to). Stay healthy as the weather turns cold and VOTE tomorrow!
Halloween was fun - on Friday the whole community went to a Halloween party at Lucas community (similar to ours, but with less capable residents). It was great to see everyone in the outfits - Elvis, the costumes where it looks like you're piggy back riding on an ostrich or person, cleopatra, Groucho Marx's (I was one of them), etc. I was a little creeped out by two residents who were completely covered in masks and robes and would stand very close and still to you. heh. There were first a couple games (tie a balloon around your leg and pop everyone else's before yours gets popped, musical chairs), then good dance music, and lastly desert and a play of the children's book about "the little old lady" who wasn't scared of anything.
On Saturday the volunteers went to a house party in Peterborough that was like a small college party. We had considered driving to Keene to crash frat parties afterwards (putting the Germans in the front line so their accents and foreign appeal would get us in), but decided we would do that another weekend.
This week seemed pretty busy since on Thursday night the whole community also went to a professional Eurythmy performance in Keene. At first I had to mentally calm down to try to take it seriously - all the women were completely straight-faced, but their bodies were SOO expreSSIVE and Rudolf STEIner, mOOOVing to the poems that were being read, that it was hard for me to access it. But as the performance went on, there was a little more music and a few humorous pieces that I ended up really enjoying it. I remembered how much I miss being a part of and seeing musical/dance performance and how easy school has made it for me to access that. I occasionally drum in one of the houses when people aren't around to make it a private performance, and I often dance in my room, but I could always use more music.
In other news, my brother Niels' family is expecting a baby boy in March!! I'm so excited for a new cute nephew :)
That's all for now, I don't have Thanksgiving off but I might see Marc a few days later. Time is going by pretty fast here, and before I know it I'll be back home for Christmas (which I am already looking forward to). Stay healthy as the weather turns cold and VOTE tomorrow!
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