Mish Mash, Mish Mish Moshy

Sarah McGuire, that blog title is for you. :)
This blog post is going to be a mish mash of the last bits of our time here...we can't believe it went so quickly!

To the left is the long awaited photo of inside our little cabin. Those are handmade bunk beds just inside the door. Sorry for the mess everywhere, we don't spend much time in there and when we do it's freezing and all we want to do is change in and out of pyjamas without getting hypothermia. There is a little heater that you can see on the floor but it takes about four hours to heat the cabin and when we turn it on and go to sleep we wake up in deadly heat. It's a toss-up between roasting and freezing and we usually take the cold (inside the sleeping bags warms up pretty quickly). The lamp you can see by the bed is (wait for it) a unicorn patterned touch lamp. Unbelievably awesome. There was also an Aladdin themed lamp in there, with Aladdin, Jasmine and the Genie on it, but we had to give it to the goats.

That's a picture of the other side of the cabin, taken from the corner by the beds. The air mattress is blocking the view to the toilet in the corner (there is no wall or partition or anything, just a simple see-through shelf and as close as we are, it's a lot easier to go to the bathroom when you can't see anyone else). It's a simple toilet with no tank, flushed by pouring rain water from an outside barrel into the bowl. The water pump for the sink isn't functional yet either, so we carry water in a jug from the house up the hill every day. The entire cabin and most of the furniture in it was built by Betty and her family and a score of wwoofers.

Pet pictures! The dogs here are great. Always a source of entertainment. Here is Moragh playing with Zada and Bam Bam...they are both going after a little squeaky pig that Moragh has in her hand. Bam thinks she is the big dog. Zada could fling her to the road and back but she always plays tug of war on the little dog's level.

Zada also likes to drive the truck.

Smelly, smelly man-goat.

We've had a few goat adventures in the last couple of days. Betty has five female goats, two with names. Marney is the oldest and her daughter is Sammy. Sammy has a cyst on the side of her neck (a contagious condition called caseous lymphadentitis) that needs to be drained every so often so that it doesn't rupture on its own and spread to the other goats. So we lanced it and drained it for her.  She flailed and tried to kick and bite. Was one of the grossest things we've ever done. No more details.

We also gave de-worming meds to all the goats as a routine precautionary measure. Grab goat by the neck, restrain head, shove plastic syringe into corner of mouth, inject goop, step away and watch as they struggle with it. Sammy got her meds right after we drained her cyst and she was so mad at us that after she swallowed the goop she curled her upper lip up over her teeth and stared us down.

That same day, we took a trip to a neighbouring farm to pick up a billy goat for some quality time with the ladies ('tis the season). He reeks. So bad. So rank. Betty tried to warn us but we were not ready. There are no words to describe it, except perhaps to tell you how he gets so smelly - in Betty's words: "he sticks his pecker out and pees all over himself." Seriously, everywhere. Especially his face. Then he sticks his tongue out and snorts at the lady goats and thinks he is super studly. The smell is musky waxy thick, kind of like the after-taste of goat cheese in perfume form. We can smell him from across the farm.

It's like we shrunk dozens of orange socks.

Tuesday, we went to Betty's mother's house to pull her carrots for her (her name is June, she is 83 and lives alone in a beautiful house she built herself and she still plants and tends a huge garden - she has pictures of black bears on her front porch too). As it turns out, Moragh is a weeny carrot advocate and wouldn't let us throw out the tiny ones that June didn't want. So we took them back to Betty's and spent about two hours sorting them and taking the green tops off...and then we threw them in the WASHING MACHINE.

Yes. Yes we really did. Betty learned this trick from the Mennonites. Once you take the majority of the soil off your carrots, you can throw them in a wash cycle with some dishcloths and scrubbies and they will come out sparkling. And you'll never have to peel them, and they will stay fresh for longer. Who knew??

Since a lot of the carrots we took back with us were pitifully small, we decided we would juice them. Best. Decision. Ever. The juicer is the most fun kitchen implement we've ever used. We have a video on Emily's phone that we will hopefully upload soon.  You simply stuff a chute full of whatever you want juiced, turn the juicer on and use the "food pusher" to push the vegetables/fruit/roast beef/cake down into the blender part. A magical fan (we think) blows liquid out one side and fluff out the other.

Carrot-man! With an apple hat.

Carrot fluff comes out the consistency of wet, superfine sawdust. And it was very shape-able.

We made a batch of pure carrot juice, and also a batch of carrot-apple-lemon juice, which was gone in about two hours. So delicious.

Moragh was really into it.

By the way, we actually finished moving all the split firewood into sheds for the winter! 16 cords of it. For anyone who doesn't know, a cord is a unit of wood that measures 4 feet by 4 feet by 8 feet. In essence, we moved 2048 cubic feet of wood. What we had left over was about a cord of unsplit wood, which we finished splitting today. Not by hand, thankfully - the splitter ran on gasoline and slowly drove a huge wedge down a platform and by sheer force drove the wood apart.

This log is doomed.

Stage 1...

Stage 2...

Stage 3

Emily was pretty into it too.

We'll be very sad to leave here, we've become very attached to Betty and her human and animal family. We loved cooking for everyone and have learned many new recipes while we were here. All good things come to an end though, and we are looking forward to continuing our travels!

We'll leave you with pictures of us on our favourite toy here.

Emily trying to look dudely and failing so hard

That's the pile of wood we split in the background!