Ahh, now I´m sitting in my brother Marc´s apartment after having slept 9 hours on the most comfortable floor mattress, awaiting my greek yogurt breakfast and a day of my first experience downhill skiing. Leora, his girlfriend, is here this weekend too. Though it feels like -5 out and I'll likely come back very sore, this is just what I needed at the end of the week.
That resident I mentioned in my last blog, with whom I live and who is my biggest challenge, again blew up a few times this week. It's become a pattern on Mondays (euhh, dreaded Mondays) that he will not listen to me and/or threaten me and/or walk away from the farm. It's the day I carry the house alone. So this Monday he wanted to take a shower 20 minutes before workshop started. I asked him to take it later that day so that the whole house could use the bathroom. That was it. Those are the kinds of things that freak him out - someone asking him to change. So he started calling me names and threatening me. Five minutes later I was in the bathroom helping another resident brush her teeth and he comes in and continues to insult and threaten my life, and once the house parent came down because he heard the noise, the resident steps right up to my face and spat on me. SPAT ON MY FACE. I said, "THAT IS NOT OK" and slammed and locked the door. The other residents were either hiding in their rooms or crying.
The house is still an uncomfortable place for me to hang around. Every free time I have I usually go to another house - it's more fun and relaxed. Since Monday there have been some changes, like he force apologized to all of us (for that, walking out in a meeting, talking back to us, all in one forced "sorry"), he's getting back on his med's, the founders of the farm are taking him on Monday mornings and evenings, and he's gotten a lot of harsh or sly talks. I've decided that I am not going to go out of my way to walk on egg shells with him anymore. I will talk when I have to get things done, but I'm not going out of my way to be nice or his friend "to build trust" and hope he won't do that crap to me anymore. If he doesn't show me respect, there is no reason for me to shower him with it.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Saturday, January 29, 2011
what a week
I've had so many thoughts and feelings this week that I feel it must've been a month already. Time is so relative.
I've had fun. I went sledding with two cute little girls in Hancock last weekend, the first time I've been sledding in a few years. I had some good laughs at a few bars. I was reminded of how much I love Mulan. I ate delicious Indian buffet and got some feel-good clothes at the Salvation Army. I'm also getting closer to the other AmeriCorps volunteer, Erin, by taking winter hikes or talking about what seeds we want to order and what kind of gardens we want to grow. I'm especially excited about an herb garden - I've always wanted to grow and make my own tea and medicate myself with herbs.
I sat with a dead body. A lot of people who believe in Anthroposophy have a vigil for their dead family member, where for the entirety of three days, someone has to sit with the corpse to help release the spirit. You can sing, read, think positive thoughts, play music, just as long as you are with the person. Our Eurythmist's mom died and many co-workers and some volunteers volunteered to take 2-3 hour night shifts to help the family out (they are Russian immigrants and not many of them live here). Erin and I woke up at 3am to drive there and experience the small lit candles, the inscense, the Steiner books, and the real, lifeless body, covered in dyed silk veils, that lay in an open casket in front of us. It made me think of how I want to go - I had always assumed cremation, with my ashes scattered on some meaningful piece of land, but this vigil made a good impression on me. It was a good experience.
I cried from built-up frustration at the volunteer meeting we have every week with the boss. I've been having a rough time with one of the residents in my house who has severe emotional damage (from his poor upbringing) and a low IQ. He always makes public phone calls (on speaker phone, wandering around the house) cursing and saying (and hearing) awful things. When I tried to ask him to make phone calls in his room, he blew up on me, threatened me, etc. Very simple requests, if they're anything that would make him change his ways, are 98% of the time understood by him as attacks, and he will do anything to try to put himself above you. He targets the fact that I'm only a volunteer, only a female, and therefore I know nothing. A few days later him and another resident in the house had a real verbal (and nearly physical) fight. The man he was insulting was black, and you can imagine the direction he took his attacks. This resident is such a challenge for me to even tolerate, it's such a different type of resident who for me requires much more patience and will-power that I don't have in the moment. I'm not trying to hang out with him to establish a closer relationship with him because any time I'm off or don't have to see him, I don't want to. I can't feel very at home when I feel like I have to walk on egg shells to try to prevent another illogical blow-up, feeling like my body is trapping what I actually think so I can spit out what I am told to say. I could go on for so long...the point is, I'm struggling with that.
Oh, Spring, come a little sooner this year, ok?
I've had fun. I went sledding with two cute little girls in Hancock last weekend, the first time I've been sledding in a few years. I had some good laughs at a few bars. I was reminded of how much I love Mulan. I ate delicious Indian buffet and got some feel-good clothes at the Salvation Army. I'm also getting closer to the other AmeriCorps volunteer, Erin, by taking winter hikes or talking about what seeds we want to order and what kind of gardens we want to grow. I'm especially excited about an herb garden - I've always wanted to grow and make my own tea and medicate myself with herbs.
I sat with a dead body. A lot of people who believe in Anthroposophy have a vigil for their dead family member, where for the entirety of three days, someone has to sit with the corpse to help release the spirit. You can sing, read, think positive thoughts, play music, just as long as you are with the person. Our Eurythmist's mom died and many co-workers and some volunteers volunteered to take 2-3 hour night shifts to help the family out (they are Russian immigrants and not many of them live here). Erin and I woke up at 3am to drive there and experience the small lit candles, the inscense, the Steiner books, and the real, lifeless body, covered in dyed silk veils, that lay in an open casket in front of us. It made me think of how I want to go - I had always assumed cremation, with my ashes scattered on some meaningful piece of land, but this vigil made a good impression on me. It was a good experience.
I cried from built-up frustration at the volunteer meeting we have every week with the boss. I've been having a rough time with one of the residents in my house who has severe emotional damage (from his poor upbringing) and a low IQ. He always makes public phone calls (on speaker phone, wandering around the house) cursing and saying (and hearing) awful things. When I tried to ask him to make phone calls in his room, he blew up on me, threatened me, etc. Very simple requests, if they're anything that would make him change his ways, are 98% of the time understood by him as attacks, and he will do anything to try to put himself above you. He targets the fact that I'm only a volunteer, only a female, and therefore I know nothing. A few days later him and another resident in the house had a real verbal (and nearly physical) fight. The man he was insulting was black, and you can imagine the direction he took his attacks. This resident is such a challenge for me to even tolerate, it's such a different type of resident who for me requires much more patience and will-power that I don't have in the moment. I'm not trying to hang out with him to establish a closer relationship with him because any time I'm off or don't have to see him, I don't want to. I can't feel very at home when I feel like I have to walk on egg shells to try to prevent another illogical blow-up, feeling like my body is trapping what I actually think so I can spit out what I am told to say. I could go on for so long...the point is, I'm struggling with that.
Oh, Spring, come a little sooner this year, ok?
Friday, January 14, 2011
SNOW like WOAH
My house is pretty warm so I always sleep with the windows cracked. When I woke up in the middle of the night on Tuesday to snow flakes and a damp blanket over my body, I knew the blizzard had begun. It didn't stop snowing until Wednesday night! The whole day's worth of shoveling those nearly 2 ft of snow had to be essentially redone because of all the wind. I felt like I was in a sandstorm with the amount of dunes and ripples stacking outside our houses. Needless to say, there's been a lot of fun, cold falls, hot chocolate and cider since. I have yet to steal a kid's sleigh and zoom down one of our hills.
Other than that, not much new. Paul the volunteer has a friend from Holland staying for 3 weeks to help out and experience a little bit of America. (They're also going to New York and bigger places together - I'd be slightly dissapointed if my only impression of America was a small place in the woods). It's always fun to have people visit and mix things up. I also recently decided that every Friday I'm going to spend more time on the computer and look up possibilities for next year. As of now, I'm just looking at sustainable/agriculture-related jobs in and outside of the US. If any of you souls out there have a great organization or place to recommend to me, please do so at any time in the next 4 months!
Til next time...
Other than that, not much new. Paul the volunteer has a friend from Holland staying for 3 weeks to help out and experience a little bit of America. (They're also going to New York and bigger places together - I'd be slightly dissapointed if my only impression of America was a small place in the woods). It's always fun to have people visit and mix things up. I also recently decided that every Friday I'm going to spend more time on the computer and look up possibilities for next year. As of now, I'm just looking at sustainable/agriculture-related jobs in and outside of the US. If any of you souls out there have a great organization or place to recommend to me, please do so at any time in the next 4 months!
Til next time...
Friday, January 7, 2011
Needle in the balloon
I am baack! (Also using a German computer and constantly struggling with the keypad).
Vacation was great. I went home to Chapel Hill to see my parents and my sister Christine for 10 days. During that time I slept in (greatest feeling ever), ate, saw a few friends, and played in the lovely fluffy snow of North Carolina. I miss fat,slow flakes and it melting and still looking pretty. Not only has snow meant immense fun in my childhood, but even a few days off of school or early dismissals. And early dismissals meant one thing - getting to watch Garfield, which always annoyingly played the 30 minutes before I normally got back from school. During the vacation, we also looked for some bridesmaid dress potentials (my oldest sister is getting married in June in the Redwood forest of CA), went swimming in a pool, saw a musical version of the "Christmas Carol" (filled with "hahaha"s and "ho ho ho"s!) and went to a slightly awkward and half-entertaining German party (some of them my parents knew). Who knew you could gather so many Germans in one house in Chapel Hill.
Christmas Eve was nice. We went to a Moravian Lovefeast at our Church and caught up with some youth leaders and Christians I hadn't spoken to in years. We drank a warm German wine concoction (pronounced glue-vine), sang, and opened a few presents. Christine promised to either help me visit her in MN or come visit here, the best present she could've given me. If you're reading this Christine, now it's online so that means it's official.
For New Years I took a 9hour megabus ride down to DC to visit my college friend MaryBeth and see another college friend Sara. MaryBeth lives in a 7-person LVC (Lutheran Volunteer Corps) house and we bond over the pros and cons of communal living. New Years Eve we had plenty of wine before heading out to a dance club where we danced the whole night and met guys from Swaziland who had Macalester connections. The rest of the weekend was resting, watching the intense movie of "The Last King of Scotland" (very good), and walking around monuments and other DC neighborhoods. I had a really good time and I was a little scared of coming back to Plowshare.
But now I'm here and things are looking up. It was exciting to see everyone and catch up with the volunteers. I have officially moved into the Red House and though I'm still transitioning (new responsibilities, no longer involved with the Hill House which I miss, and very creepy and loud noises from my walls and the heater in my room) I think this will help me feel more involved in the communal living thing. My room is almost always a sunny golden (when it's light out, of course) because of the windows and direction it faces, which I love.
Last night we celebrated Epiphany. The whole community ate warm rice pudding, three people found an almond that made them one of the wise kings for the night. I and two others sang solos for the "we three kings" song and the Christmas tree was lit (REAL candles, ahh) for the last time. It's moments like these that fill me with peace and content - it all feels right.
I was talking to my volunteer friend, Natalie, about her vacation. She spent it on the farm and two of her friends visited her for a short time. She described the situation as these people from the outside popping her balloon, shocking her with the reality of the world that goes on outside of Plowshare. I feel this way when I visit my brother, Boston, or home, when I read the newspaper and remember that horrendous things, exciting political decisions, war, all of that is still going on. I use the internet only a few times a week, watch a TV show once a week, and when I have time and spot a newspaper on the farm, soak that up maybe once a week. In a way, it is nice. I can focus more on myself, on how to deal with people and social challenges, and on nature. And it's not like that this experience on the farm doesn't expose me to diversity - I have never worked with people with special needs before, nor known anything about anthroposophy, eurythmy, social therapy, certain crafts, etc., so my eyes are definitely being opened. Still, I sometimes crave a more consistent connection with the bigger world. It is hard to, in the time and energy that I have left in the day, choose running to a computer to look up news over hanging out with the volunteers. At Macalester, that type of thing was much easier to be exposed to. But then again, Macalester is also a bubble. So when will I not be in a bubble? Maybe I need to love my bubble just a little bit more.
P.S. My sister, Heide, is working on this project and needs to collect $1700 more to make it happen. Check out the website if you're interested or think you can help: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=522-244
Vacation was great. I went home to Chapel Hill to see my parents and my sister Christine for 10 days. During that time I slept in (greatest feeling ever), ate, saw a few friends, and played in the lovely fluffy snow of North Carolina. I miss fat,slow flakes and it melting and still looking pretty. Not only has snow meant immense fun in my childhood, but even a few days off of school or early dismissals. And early dismissals meant one thing - getting to watch Garfield, which always annoyingly played the 30 minutes before I normally got back from school. During the vacation, we also looked for some bridesmaid dress potentials (my oldest sister is getting married in June in the Redwood forest of CA), went swimming in a pool, saw a musical version of the "Christmas Carol" (filled with "hahaha"s and "ho ho ho"s!) and went to a slightly awkward and half-entertaining German party (some of them my parents knew). Who knew you could gather so many Germans in one house in Chapel Hill.
Christmas Eve was nice. We went to a Moravian Lovefeast at our Church and caught up with some youth leaders and Christians I hadn't spoken to in years. We drank a warm German wine concoction (pronounced glue-vine), sang, and opened a few presents. Christine promised to either help me visit her in MN or come visit here, the best present she could've given me. If you're reading this Christine, now it's online so that means it's official.
For New Years I took a 9hour megabus ride down to DC to visit my college friend MaryBeth and see another college friend Sara. MaryBeth lives in a 7-person LVC (Lutheran Volunteer Corps) house and we bond over the pros and cons of communal living. New Years Eve we had plenty of wine before heading out to a dance club where we danced the whole night and met guys from Swaziland who had Macalester connections. The rest of the weekend was resting, watching the intense movie of "The Last King of Scotland" (very good), and walking around monuments and other DC neighborhoods. I had a really good time and I was a little scared of coming back to Plowshare.
But now I'm here and things are looking up. It was exciting to see everyone and catch up with the volunteers. I have officially moved into the Red House and though I'm still transitioning (new responsibilities, no longer involved with the Hill House which I miss, and very creepy and loud noises from my walls and the heater in my room) I think this will help me feel more involved in the communal living thing. My room is almost always a sunny golden (when it's light out, of course) because of the windows and direction it faces, which I love.
Last night we celebrated Epiphany. The whole community ate warm rice pudding, three people found an almond that made them one of the wise kings for the night. I and two others sang solos for the "we three kings" song and the Christmas tree was lit (REAL candles, ahh) for the last time. It's moments like these that fill me with peace and content - it all feels right.
I was talking to my volunteer friend, Natalie, about her vacation. She spent it on the farm and two of her friends visited her for a short time. She described the situation as these people from the outside popping her balloon, shocking her with the reality of the world that goes on outside of Plowshare. I feel this way when I visit my brother, Boston, or home, when I read the newspaper and remember that horrendous things, exciting political decisions, war, all of that is still going on. I use the internet only a few times a week, watch a TV show once a week, and when I have time and spot a newspaper on the farm, soak that up maybe once a week. In a way, it is nice. I can focus more on myself, on how to deal with people and social challenges, and on nature. And it's not like that this experience on the farm doesn't expose me to diversity - I have never worked with people with special needs before, nor known anything about anthroposophy, eurythmy, social therapy, certain crafts, etc., so my eyes are definitely being opened. Still, I sometimes crave a more consistent connection with the bigger world. It is hard to, in the time and energy that I have left in the day, choose running to a computer to look up news over hanging out with the volunteers. At Macalester, that type of thing was much easier to be exposed to. But then again, Macalester is also a bubble. So when will I not be in a bubble? Maybe I need to love my bubble just a little bit more.
P.S. My sister, Heide, is working on this project and needs to collect $1700 more to make it happen. Check out the website if you're interested or think you can help: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=522-244
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
chestnuts roasting on an open flame
Partly the cold grey weather, partly the "pre-vacation" jitters, partly other things, things feel strange on the farm. People are ready for a vacation.
Helene, the volunteer who also lives in the garden room with me (two rooms in the "garden room") is leaving to go to school in Germany at the end of the month. She had a 6-month contract and unfortunately she is very cool, so we will all miss her.
Last week the whole farm had lice. Ahh, childhood memories. I can't wait to take my teddy bear out of its plastic bag in a week.
Things will also change come January after our break. The two farmers who were hired in April are now fired. I wonder about the responsibility shifts. I requested having even one of my farm workshops change to an indoor craft workshop where I could have time to be creative once a week, but the boss didn't sound super receptive to that. I would also like to stay in my current room and continue the "floater" position, but despite my request may be moved in January anyway. I will stick to expressing my opinion and continue to lay out the pros and cons I see, and we'll see if that works.
Sometimes I have doubts about this place. Blogs are not the best medium to express them, but a decent way to show my mood.
Helene, the volunteer who also lives in the garden room with me (two rooms in the "garden room") is leaving to go to school in Germany at the end of the month. She had a 6-month contract and unfortunately she is very cool, so we will all miss her.
Last week the whole farm had lice. Ahh, childhood memories. I can't wait to take my teddy bear out of its plastic bag in a week.
Things will also change come January after our break. The two farmers who were hired in April are now fired. I wonder about the responsibility shifts. I requested having even one of my farm workshops change to an indoor craft workshop where I could have time to be creative once a week, but the boss didn't sound super receptive to that. I would also like to stay in my current room and continue the "floater" position, but despite my request may be moved in January anyway. I will stick to expressing my opinion and continue to lay out the pros and cons I see, and we'll see if that works.
Sometimes I have doubts about this place. Blogs are not the best medium to express them, but a decent way to show my mood.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
(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/
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/
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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