(in)sane in the membrane

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/