I a bit rushed, so just ignore any typo.es It's been a long day.

We've had some interesting adventures in the last three weeks, starting with picking potatoes, and ending with killing sheep. Perhaps I shall begin with the beginning.

No, on second thought, I'll begin with some characters that follow me along my tale.

Vegard: Our sailing teacher. Thin, tall, and pretty quiet. One of the most hard core men I have met. Ever. Some of the stories I've heard include - sailing a wooden square sail boat from Maine down to the Norwegian exhibit in Epcot center (I think). During a hurricane. They hit speeds of 25 knots. Sailing a viking boat from the great lakes out to Norway. That took 3 months. Remember the night sailing that so impressed me? Yea, I think he referred to it as the boring part. He also slaughtered and cleaned the sheep, during which he would wipe his hands on his clothes. And you'd think his wife would kill him for that. Nope.

Vegard's wife: Short, thin, and the most hard core women I have ever met. She was stirring the blood of the lamb as it drained into the bucket. I don't think she cares about some guts on her husbands clothes.

Østain: Another student in the sailing class. He's almost as funny as I am.

Sara: Shaved head, 10 ear rings, nose and lip piercing. She's done this sailing thing before, and is no end of help to us on the boat. And a very nice, smart, friendly type, Karin and I may join her for out vacation when she's goes back to Denmark. As she put it, 'Vegard's so fucking hard core'.

Farm Week.

To keep it short, we worked on a farm for a week. The first two days were chopping wood, building a log cabin, building a cow fence, and other assorted stuff the farm needed. I ended up chopping wood for most of it, which is always a good stress reliever. The 3rd day was pretty much us playing around, I think we finished off most of the work that was to be done, and the rest of it needed it not to rain. Yes, that means it was raining for the fist 2 days. Showers off and on. Not so much fun and not so warm.. This playing was centered around teaching us how to do things 'right', you know, how to lift, how to carry heavy loads, yea I thought I had seen most of this in Work and Safety videos at various places of employment. I was not ready for how much fun we were going to have. First, we had to lift 80 gallons of water from a pulley in the ceiling, and tie it off to a cleat in the floor. It weights more then I do. I managed. Then Vegard's Wife comes over and does is faster then I did. She's maybe 130 pounds. Next we carried 40 kilo bags of grain around. No video here, just a demo and then we go to it. Then we lifted 40 gallon jugs onto a truck bed. I think they weighed about 40 pounds and that was pretty easy. The tossing hay bales up one floor was fun, and not to challenging. The next station was pretty cool. We had to lift a backpack and put it on. Vegard was straining a bit. That worried me. Then he demonstrated how to get to something that is too high off the ground. You get somebody else to stand on. He climbed up on the shoulders of this other guy and showed that you can reach pretty high. So we tried. We had the chicks climb on us, and then we tried the backpack. At least 60 pounds. I couldn't lift it with less then 2 arms and a good grunt. Good times. All these things had 'tricks' to them, and they made everything from easy to possible. I was quite surprised at how much I didn't know, which I'm sure will not surprise you.

Potatoes. We picked potatoes for 2 days. Cool for the first 2 hours. The horses pulled the plow around and dug up the potatoes. This part of the farm is run on grass power, it's all horse done. That was need. But, man, after 2 hours it was no fun. I'm glad I'm not working the fields for a living. I think we found 6000 kilos of spuds in that field. Most will be eaten by the school. I was glad to be done with potatoes.

Tune in for more adventures next week, same bat channel, same bat time!
-Byron Posted by byron at October 08, 2002 06:13 AM