Ramblings

To be perfectly honest, I'm not really having that great of a time. I feel guilty saying that, since my hosts are very kind and I am in a beautiful place learning very practical and sometimes interesting things. But I miss the variety of my former life in Brooklyn. I didn't realize what a varied life I lived in NY, perfect for the fickle Gemini who wants to see and do something new all the time. I honestly thought I was boringly doing the same thing every day, but being stuck on a farm in the mountains (albeit a gorgeous farm) has shown me what REALLY being in the same place every day feels like. It will be great for a few months, but I think I will be happy to go back home again.

Perhaps the thing I miss the most is my independence. I'm not really in the mood to go pick blueberries high up in the mountains today, especially since my boots are still wet from picking potatoes for 6 hours yesterday, but that is the activity chosen by the majority this morning at breakfast. I'm sure it will be really nice, but it's just a strange feeling to not know what your day will look like.. and it's not a normal workweek, it's every moment of every day, you know?
I suppose I am quite lucky to have nice and interesting and funny hosts, and I'm probably just having another cranky moment, because my legs are still killing me from hiking up a very steep mountain 2 days ago, and it rained last night, and so now I have to go get incredibly muddy again.

I am looking forward to having a real weekend again in the future, where I sleep in and go have brunch with friends and poke around the flea markets and take silly photobooth pictures. I actually am missing the hipsters at Union Pool. hah! Ok maybe that's going too far. But maybe not! Lauren told me it would happen and I didn't believe her. Lauren, if you're reading this, you are completely allowed to say I told you so.

It's been about 20 days. Maybe I haven't really let go yet, and this is part of the learning growing process or something. Yesterday I started to feel like I had no personality. Like I was a quiet boring shy person all of a sudden, with nothing to say. I realized that I shut down a lot around these new people because I feel like I don't have that much to offer them that they will be interested in. It made me panic a little bit, and I started thinking about what this experience of being a constant beginner and a constant outsider in this world of outdoorsy people is doing for me. And that's where this rambling is coming from. And maybe I should stop before I sound like a whiny depressive. I'm not, I'm just floundering.

I think I'll make a separate post about the things I've done recently, so as not to taint them with this paragraph of self pity. Ok!

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.