So it's my fourth week on the farm. As I'll go into later, it was my goal to update regularly so as to have real-time-ish chronicles of my experience as it happens. But, like, life.
Yesterday was Sunday. It is for most people day two of the weekend but for people who work on farms, aka recently me, it's Monday. After a glorious 1.5 day respite during which time I hiked and picked apples and did all the quaint shit people do when they vacation here, it was back to the old grindstone.
For the first 2ish weeks of work, I had the advantage of being very expertly trained, not by Laini herself, but by a very lovely young lady named Glenn who was departing her post at the farm in order to travel and farm all around this lil old earth. Glenn was not only very articulate and helpful in easing a novice like me into the utterly foreign cheese room and barn tasks that I would be taking on after her departure, but she also provided a bit of a buffer between myself and Laini, so that at the end of our training period, I had what I now realize was a false confidence about my command of my myriad tasks. None of which is to say that Laini was at all mean to me about my failings, but having them pointed out to me by her had up to that point not been happening because Glenn either fixed my mistakes or alerted me to them or whatever, shit got done the way it was supposed to.
So Sunday. All was mostly fine in the morning, where I spent the hours of 8 to 2 moving cheese from a table to a rack to another rack to another rack, flippping some other cheese (though not, I found out today, all the ones that needed to be flipped), washing fucking everything four times over with different solutions, (this is one of the dirty -- ha! see what I did there? -- little secrets of cheesemaking: it's like 85% washing things), wrapping cheese, hanging out in the cave and having CAVE THOUGHTS**, and generally doing the things that Laini had laid out for me to do. The Sunday Tasks, you know?
I returned, as I do every Sunday, at 5 to do my evening milking. I had been tentative about my cheese room aptitude, mainly because since the tasks are slightly different every day, I haven't been repeating them over and over to the point that they've had a chance to sink in totally yet. But milking? Milking, while intensely fucking hard to wrap my mind around, let alone my wimpy city-girl muscles, was starting to make sense simply because by week three I'd already done it literally 12 times. So I was feeling fairly ok about my ability to not royally fuck shit up. LOL me.
Things began poorly when I accidentally shocked myself on the electric fence letting all the goats out of their penned-in portion of pasture. Ren and Stimpy advised not to wiz on it. I'd submit to not doing a goddamned thing on or around it unless that motherfucker is turned the hell OFF. Lesson 1. Somewhat undeterred but with presumably frizzier hair, I went about my business of marshalling the ladies into their pens, getting them in their stanchions, graining and haying them and getting them ready to milk. Mistake #2 happened when I misread the grain bucket and double-grained one pen. This is not in and of itself SUCH a big deal, but as I'll get into later, for as hardy as goats appear to be, any fluctuation in their diet can really fuck them up. I would doubt that a little extra grain one time would be enough to do it but I STILL DON'T FUCKING KNOW SHIT ABOUT GOATS OTHER THAN THAT I LOVE THEM AND THEY WANT TO EAT MY HAIR.
Things really began to take a turn when I accidentally skipped over one pair of goats in the milking sequence. It was early enough on that it wasn't a huge deal but a) everything at the farm is devised methodically for a reason*** and b) goats are particular, and so it threw off which milking stands I was putting the goats on. The ones I tried to put up on the east side were NOT having it, and I thought it was because they were disrespecting my authority. Turns out they were right. It was not their side! This was around the same time that I realized I hadn't gotten good enough at knowing the goats without their numbered tags to discern which goat was improperly identified. A series of events wherein I left one goat unattended while I tried to figure it out and said goat discovered a large yogurt container of grain ensued. It was, briefly, mayhem.
So what I'm telling you is I spent most of the evening unexpectedly flustered, trying to make up for the time I'd lost correcting my nube mistakes. Which is why when I went to put Rocky back in her stanchion and she was way more interested in eating the hay that had fallen underneath it, I yanked her collar while she was mid-chew, and she started to choke and convulse and I started to freak out and my life flashed before my eyes, and Rocky's life flashed before hers and Laini came running and ... Yeah. It was bad.
After a second Rocky righted herself of her own accord and almost immediately seemed totally unruffled by the affair. Laini explained (after unleashing a very understandable and concerned series of curses) that one must never pull up on a goat's collar. You can push 'em, kick 'em, nudge them with your knee and pull them sideways or down. But never, never, NEVER up. Goats can die this way. Lesson motherfucking learned.
And so ends the very traumatizing tale (tail!) of the time I nearly murdered (wreckless goat-slaughtered really) my friend Rocky. Fingers fucking crossed tonight goes (goats) better.
God bless.
*It has been my intention to keep up to date about the goings on both at the farm and in this bizarro little corner of the world, where the BIG NEWS is that Taco, the dog who lives at the General Store, got a hair cut. (So many goddamned parenthetical ideas here but yes, there are general stores here, they function sort of like rural version of bodegas.) But too much has happened that I haven't been able to formulate into cohesive posts as of yet, and though I'm sure some of you guys are into stream-of consciousness nonsense as an ART STATEMENT, I doubt my half-baked musings would be considered art by anyone. Suffice it to stay, I will at some point have to back-track or revisit the sequence of events that has led me here, as I enter my fourth week at the farm. Maybe?
**This may be covered elsewhere, but let it be known that any time you are doing serious affinage you spend a fuckton of time alone in a cave, doing little things to the cheese. All that quietude and repetitive activity gets a girl THINKING, you dig? And it's almost never pretty.
***Like for example when you are scooping curds out of the vat in concentric circles and into forms, also in concentric circles and you loose track of where you scooped so you just start doing it willy nilly and then it doesn't drain evenly and your Pyramids need to be monitored by the Boss Lady who literally has zero minutes in her day to fix your mistakes.
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