Time Racing By

I can't believe I'm already leaving Ytre Lygra tomorrow! Ack. I've gotten really comfortable here. In fact, it's going to be totally surreal being back in a city surrounded by unfamiliar faces. I'm heading to Bergen tomorrow for a couple of days. Erik and Annette were so sweet, they called their good friend who has a flat there and arranged for me to stay on his couch. AND we're baking fresh bread today, which they are insisting I take a loaf of to hold me over so I'm not just eating crap for the next week of traveling. I've been so spoiled, eating the most delicious meals every day, with only the freshest most organic ingredients, there's no way I can continue this while on my own in the city! I think I might go on a coffee and bread fast. I mentioned that to Erik and he shook his head in misery (serious body pollution, hah).

Well, shall I give a brief overview of the fun times I've had here? It was a rough start, because it was so different from the life I was leading before, but honestly I think I've been happier here than I've been for a really long time. Maybe years. Just to be living with two really positive and sincere and healthy happy people who have created their own beautiful life here... it's a nice influence, I think. I finally uploaded photos. Chantelle (the awesome Aussie wwoofer who left yesterday and I miss already) took many photos of me as well, which is sooooo nice, because I never have photos of myself since I'm always behind the camera.

Here is the lovely Dina.. all 550lbs of her. She is massive and has monsterous teeth, but she's sweet and gentle and just likes to be cuddled (Chantelle has nicknamed her Cuddlebunny).

And here is Chantelle on the swing in Johan's barn. We go there to feed Erik's sheep that are waiting for the slaughtery. Depressing maybe, but the swing is quite fun!

And now, speaking of which, I actually have to go feed those little sheepies. This has taken too long. Wish me luck in Bergen! I will be there for 2 days, then Oslo for 4 days, then a flight to Paris and on to the Loire Valley where I will be helping a woman named Joyce with her B&B farm. It looks really beautiful. Also extremely different from where I have been. Another period of adjusting! Maybe I will be used to it by now though.

TGIF

It was a rainy day today, so we took it easy. Cleaned the house, baked bread, made plum jam, spackled some windowsills... all in all, a decent rainy Friday.

Tonight Anders & Hilde & I drank Courvoisier and ate chocolate and watched Prime (a romantic comedy with Meryl Streep & Uma Thurman and some douchebag actor whose name I forget). Let me give you a little piece of advice. Don't watch that movie. Please. Oh my freakin gæd. Well Meryl Streep was awesome because she pretty much always is, but everything else was so vomit-inducing, I had to restrain myself from covering my eyes. Anyone whose watched a bad movie with me knows I have trouble keeping my observations to myself, so it was reaaaaaaally hard to shut up and be polite but I did a decent job of it (I think). Unconvincing love story.. he finds her number in the telephone directory, for christs sake. In Manhattan. After briefly meeting her once and only learning her first name. And then of course they fall in love immediately. That's to be expected though. But he's such a worthless piece of crap, you just don't understand. And then at one point he sells his first painting for $2000 and with that money somehow affords a big beautiful old 1 bedroom apartment downtown, and furniture and new paint, etc etc. Without a job. Oh and I'm sorry, he also drives a red convertible. Okay okay I know.. "suspension of disbelief". Regardless, it's a crap film and you should prob just avoid it. The cognac and the company were lovely, thankfully.

Sara left for Germany yesterday morning, and then Hilde & I went traipsing up the mountain to find some runaway ewes who broke a hole in their pasture fencing. I still pant like a dying dog on even the slightest incline, but it's just so stunningly beautiful up there, I've got to love it. The trip was a success. We found the ewes, and they followed Hilde back down the mountain. She had wisely given me the job of trailing after them, which I sort of managed, at a distance, flailing my arms and tripping over tree roots the whole time. Graceful I am not. But I feel like each hiking trip is a step in the right direction. Who knows, it may actually get easier eventually! Anders is like a mountain goat, he's been hiking up these mountains for so many years. He just hops straight up the mountain, whistling the whole way, with me desperately running and falling behind him. It's probably really hilarious to watch, in fact! :P

Here is a photo of me on the mountaintop with a massive rock, and Førde in the distance.

On Tuesday, Sara, Hilde, Anders and myself went to Hilde's farm on Grøneng to help Pete & Ginny weigh and mark all the lambs. It felt good to be working in a big group like that, as a team. We each had our own specific task, so by the end we did it really well. I was the marker specialist. Pete and Sara would catch the lambs from the pen, call out their number, and get them into the big old scale thingy. Ginny would read off the weight (a harder job than it sounds, with a chunky kicking lamb jostling the numbers) and record it. I would find their number in a big pile of numbers from 80001 to 80140, 1 yellow and 1 blue, and dip them in iodine and clip them onto the ear tagger (similar to an ear piercing gun), which I would then hand off to Hilde. Anders would wrangle the lamb out of the weighing machine, and hold it steady while Hilde marked their ear with the appropriate tag. The whole process probably took about 2 minutes per lamb, and with all those people it was extremely efficient. Most years, it's usually just Anders & Hilde doing the whole thing, so they were happy to have us all there helping. It was funny being in charge of the numbers too. The sheep are so noisy, Sara would shout their number over to me and I would shout it back, and after a while it sounded like a raucous game of Bingo.. "One hundred twelve! What's that, one one two? One one two, yes! Okay, one one two, got it."

Of course I don't have any good photos of the lamb weighing, because I was busy with my iodine and plastic numbers.
But here are some of Hilde's sweet little lambikins. They're an even older breed than Anders' sheep.. really really wild. She lets them roam free even more, so they're extremely independent, but because she doesn't bring them indoors over the winter, they're much much tinier. And so beautiful!!

I'm going back to Grøneng for the last time on Monday, and will be sure to take some better photos then. On Tuesday the 31st, I take the expressboat to my next farm, on the island of Lygra! That will be an entirely different experience, but hopefully equally as wonderful!!

seems like the appropriate time to start a blog

So in less than 2 weeks I'll be leaving the country. Traveling alone for the first time. Leaving the city for more than a week for the first time in like 5 years.

After 5 years living in Queens and Brooklyn, going to school and working retail and assistant jobs, I decided it was time to really WORK. Get my hands dirty. See some real outcome from hours of hard work, not just numbers or a shortened checklist.
So I found a few organic farms that needed workers on the Southwestern coast of Norway, had a yard-sale to get rid of alot of the crap I'd accumulated over the years, and in the next week I'll be packing my life into a big backpack and flying from the nest.

This seems like a good time to start a blog.

I'll be posting photos of sheep and fjords and updating you on all the exciting new things I'm learning. I'm sure some days I'll just be shoveling manure or looking for rotten potatoes in the root cellar. But I know you're dying to see photos of Norwegian root cellars.
You won't be disappointed.