Goats are gonna get you!

Every night I look outside to see if I can see San Francisco. I use binoculars to weasel my way through the fog. There is a beautiful porch that overlooks Napa Valley and on a clear day you can see across the land to the Golden Gate Bridge. I find myself checking a few times a day to make sure that I am not missing anything.

The first real day on the job was rough... There is a routine that I still don’t quite get but it entails 16 hay stacks of alfalfa that I have to throw of a 15 ft fence at 7 in the morning. After the goats are let free to graze and all the chickens are happy we go back inside and make ourselves breakfast. Now, if you know my morning eating habits, a breakfast sandwich is the cat’s meow in my book. Imagine this, I enter the kitchen to find fresh baked bread waiting on the table, eggs that have just been collected from the chicken coup and goat cheese made the night before...awaiting my anxious touch. This is the freshest most wonderful breakfast sandwich ever! Yummm...

I am going to highlight some of my most interesting jobs. Yes my watering of the apple orchard for 3 hours a day is interesting, but there is more than that in a day’s work. I have officially worked a real “shit job”. Literally. There is a huge manure compost pile that is inside of a barricade of 30 cinderblocks. My job is to flip the poop, while taking these 20lb. blocks and rebuilding it so the freshly flipped pile o’ poo will be barraced nicely. This took me two hours and was the most intense job...Flippin poo ain’t easy ladies and gentleman. You gotta stick a pitchfork into it hoist it over and then make sure that the new cinderblock walls that you are building do not fall over.

My most thrilling job I have is to collect huge rocks all over the land, put them in a wheel barrel and push to wherever they need to go and build what is called a carrine. A carrine is this 4ft tall wire basket thing that is filled with rocks and used to hold the fences together...blah blah blah, long story short, about a ton (seriously a ton) of rocks fits in one of these wire basket things, which meeeeans, I collected a ton of bricks and hoisted the whole ton into this thing....This is some hard work.

One thing I have learned this week is that I have a slight fear of goats and it has everything to do with a psychic. So when I was 19 or 20 I saw a psychic and she said that I was going to be kicked by a horse...well what if she meant goat!! Seriously, what if I get kicked or rammed by one of these goats?? This is something that I need to get over.

Aside from feeding the goats and chickens, I also help milk the goats. This is pretty cool because this is where that goood goat cheese comes from! My job is to distract the goats while they are being milked. I throw in handful after handful of goat junk food, which is just corn. The first time I did this I was really nervous because if the goat gets bored while being milked it will start bucking...Again back to the psychic, I do not want to get kicked!! So I was shoveling corn into these goats’ mouths.

Twice a week I cook for everyone. My first meal was rigatoni with basil, yellow and green squash, tomatoes, black olives, garlic and olive oil...All but olives came from the garden! It was delicious!! Friday night was not so great...I attempted to make this zucchini pizza...We have plethora of zucchini that is growing in the garden so this seemed like a great idea at the time...wrong. I must have done something wrong, I don’t know, but it was more like a quiche goop. Yuck gross... no me gusto.

I am trying to get used to farm life. We have no TV, rare opportunities of internet, horrible phone service, the town is a 20 min drive away...and I have no car. But I have to say, I am ok with that. Lately I have been finding myself too dependent on all these things. It kind of becomes creepy when I am checking email, face book, celebrity gossip 40 times a day on my iphone. I just need a good ol’ detox from all that. Here I am.