New Stuff

NEW!: pics from Italy and the days between Italy and Spain…as well as a sterling post by Molly on cow feces (see below).

Soon to come: pics from our abruptly terminated tenure at the Spain farm.

And then: hopefully a few reflective and calmly contemplative posts in which we really ”take stock” of how we have grown and learned in the past couple of months.  With any luck, we will avoid words like ”douchebag” and phrases like ”Molly needs to shower more often,” because we are reflective and contemplative like that.

 

A Very Special WWOOFing message.

Go here and learn all you will ever need to know about the WWOOFing lifestyle.

 

Doing the Hula in Italy

WWOOFing seems to bring out the sulky teenager in any otherwise self-possessed and rather charming 20-something.  We’ve seen it in our co-WWOOFers, and we saw it in each other as well during the last couple of weeks at Ca’ del Buco.  There is legitimate reason for this metamorphosis — a WWOOFer is essentially in the position of a 15-year-old.

Living under someone else’s roof
+ eating someone else’s food

+ someone else doing your laundry (our hosts have thus far insisted on doing it themselves…)

+ the fact that a WWOOFer is usually WWOOFing to travel on the cheap (and thus probably doesn’t have the funds to leave early and live at a hostel for a few weeks)

+ limited transportation options

= regression in maturity level

So the last few weeks could find us rolling our eyes when “Mom” and “Dad” yelled for us or gave us tasks.  We cussed even more than usual.  We consumed enough extra food and wine to sufficiently consider ourselves “inconveniences,” which is sort of how we were treated anyhow (for example, they forgot to feed us on several occasions) (and locked us out of the house at the same time) (thus cutting us off from all food aside from what we could scrounge from the garden) (and the rabbit pens…YUM!).

(I am not joking.  They really neglected to feed us.  A few times.  If you know me, this puts a person on my permanent shit list.)

Anyhow.  We are officially Italian 18-year-olds: out of the house and ready to do as we please.  I am happy as all get out.  Ecstatic, overjoyed, dancing happily down that highway, all the way to Torino, even while wearing my 200-pound backpack.

Yes, for the first few days ol’ whats-his-face was a charming facsimile of an Iowa farmer type, and the food was good and plentiful, we ate as a big happy family, and Allie was around, and I went to bed each night with a delightful “good kind of hurt” ache.

That was the first few days.  I now stand corrected.

Fortunately, one can always put on some rose-colored glasses.  And so I give you:

THE GOOD THINGS ABOUT OUR ITALIAN WWOOFING EXPERIENCE

1) Buffness that is only brought on by over 12 hours a day of manual labor.  Seriously, have you ever made lavender sachets for hours?  We have, and our hands are effing SEXY.  Major wrist definition.  Aw, yeah.

2) Varied work. One minute could find me putting labels on bottles of lavender oil (please, someone, tell me a purpose for this crap), the next picking 50 pounds of plums (and operating at a 1:3 eat-to-pick ratio), the next in my sports bra and jeans in the 95-degree heat, swinging a pickax into the dense Italian clay-packed soil as I attempted to make a nice deep grave to accommodate several bunny corpses.  Surprisingly enough (or maybe not), I enjoyed the grave-digging most.  To be perfectly, morbidly honest, I lately found myself secretly hoping that more bunnies would die, so I could be put on graveyard duty instead of whatever other tasks there were.

Speaking of varied labor, I also ended up hanging out with the children at Paola’s farmy day camp thing.  And if you know me and Molly, you know that she is generally the kind, personable, good-with-kids one in this operation.  I, on the other hand, am the big, sarcastic, cynical one with a potty-mouth that only a drunken sailor could love.  So one day I am in the middle of a three-hour raking-up-weed-whacker-droppings-for-goat-feeding-purposes session, singing dirty Tenacious D and rugby drinking songs to pass the time.  And of course, because she hears me singing, Paola comes up to me and says, “Ooh!  Next week is music week at our day camp!  You should help with the activities!”

In Paola-speak, this is not a suggestion.  It means, “Help me with the children or you are going to have to gnaw on weeds and goat haunches for the rest of this trip.”

If only she knew better English.  If only she knew that half my songs were about beer and rugby and the others were full of creative sexual euphemisms.

<sigh>

So I ended up playing duck-duck-goose — which I realize has nothing to do with music, but no one seemed to care — with the kids when Paola felt tired of hanging out with them.  Fortunately, though the kids knew little English, they did somehow know “GAME OVER!”  And when they finally screamed it, I said, “OK.  Do whatever!” and happily made a dismissive gesture.  Then I snuck off and downed some limoncello.  The day got much better from there, probably for both the kids and for me.

In short, it was hard to be bored.  Exploited, yes.  Bored, no.

3) The accomodations. Our room was in the agriturismo part of the compound, so it was clean, with a lovely shower and nice toilet and multiple pillows and towels and sheets we could change whenever we saw fit.  Granted, we were never granted express permission for this, but we were also never prohibited.  So there.

4) The “Camp English 10″ Factor. (This will only make sense to NIHS alums.)  Eventually we took to calling our farm “Camp Fascist,” and then the more-fitting “Camp English 10.”  Much like the North Iowa High School incarnation of English 10 when we were there, WWOOFing at Ca’ del Buco taught us that sometimes people have unreasonable, arbitrary rules and are just unpleasant for no particular reason.  It seems that at every meal we and the fam ate together, we would have some variation on the following conversation:

“Hey!  Don’t use that ________ (sugar/milk/butter/jam/cheese)!”

“Uh…OK…?”

“We only use THAT ________ on Thursdays/cloudy days/Arbor Day/etc.!”

“Uh…”

<then we would go replace it with ANOTHER milk/butter/etc.>

“NO!  That one is even WORSE!  We spit and pee in that one!  EVERYONE knows that!” <they shake their heads, unable to BELIEVE the idiots they have hooked themselves up with>

5) Advancing my stick-driving skills. Now I can go into second gear!  Ooooooh…

6) Pietro and Marta (Roberto’s parents). These two were friendly, kind, patient, generous, helpful, etc., and the best people we met in Italy — all without speaking a word of English.  Marta helped with work and patiently gestured at us when we didn’t understand her. Pietro wandered about, smoked clove cigarettes (though, given the smell of his car, he may or may not smoke other things…), and made up nicknames for us — Molly is forever “Princess Stephanie of Monaco,” and I am “Julie Andrews.”  This pleased us both greatly.

7) It strengthened our friendship. Or, depending on how you look at it, it introduced the strange new dynamic of making me fiercely protective of Molly.  This is because Paola decided early on, seemingly at random, that Molly would just be the one to pick on in the new batch of WWOOFers.  Like I said above — arbitrary and unpleasant for no particular reason.  So whenever Paola yelled at Molly, I knew it meant 15 more minutes of holding Molly that night while she gently sobbed.  I’m a friend.  Such duties are part of the package, I suppose.

8. The animals. I thought the goats were a riot.  Molly loved the rabbits.  Feeding the animals was a simple pleasure — you give them food, they immediately love you and happily munch.  By the end of our time there, the goats would come running if they saw me approach.

(Oh, and in response to Catherine’s question, the rabbits had been for eating, but all that stopped when they caught the plague.  I have no idea if Paola and Roberto and Co. will now eat the bunnies that are left…)

9) “The Hula Game.” Yet more evidence that we have LOST IT.  The Hula Game is a sort of “who’s-on-first” back-and-forth that we do for two major reasons: (a) we hate cleaning wool. HATE IT.  And yet we had to do it all the damn time…bags of the stuff…by hand.  Its purpose remains unclear.  (b) To make fun of Paola, who pronounced “wool” “hoo-la.”  A typical Hula Game session was a riff something like this, with one of us playing Paola and one as the hilarious American WWOOFers:

PAOLA: Girls!  Please start with the hoo-la!

US: …seriously?

P: Yes!

U: You have that here?

P: Yes!  Lots of it!

U: I mean…I thought that the hula was a Hawaiian thing.

P: Dammit!  It’s time to do the hoo-la!

U: OK!  <removing clothing> You got a coconut bra or grass skirt or something?

P: What are you doing?

U: The hips gotta show!  They tell a story!

P: DO THE HOO-LA!

U: Calm down, woman!  The hula is a dance of relaxation and beauty!  You’re just introducing tension.

P: DO IT NOW!

U: I am!  Watch my hands!  Every movement has a meaning, you know.

P: I really can’t wait around for this.

U: Listen, if you want artistry to happen, it takes time.  Sometimes I wonder if this is all a ploy to see us half-naked and wiggling…

P: I really want this hoo-la done before you leave!

U: …Paola…is the hula ever really done?

Ahahahaha.  Such moments of genius make this trip even more worth it.

Anyhow, tonight we are in Torino, as we were last night, and it is one of the best cities I have ever visited — gorgeous views (cathedrals and castles!  mountains!  rivers!), delicious food (I ate an entire pizza yesterday) (and two gelatos) (among other things) (no joke), outstanding public transportation, wonderful running trails, and things are a bit cheaper here than in Milan or Bologna.  Molly and I live for these 2- or 3-day vacations after farmwork, so I’m sure we’ll pull out all the stops in Barcelona.  Tomorrow we get to go on a train ride through the south of France, and in two days we will be at our Spain farm.  Cow-milking!  Yes!  I am excited already (that wasn’t sarcastic, either).

This was long but worth it.  I hope you agree.

 

No pictures…sad…

To any and all who are upset or concerned about the lack of new pics, we are having troubles getting our Bologna internet cafe compies to upload the little suckers.  Rest assured that we will get new ones up next week sometime.  If you really care and you have a facebook account, you can see a few new ones there.  K?  K!

 

Going slowly crazy in Italy

For some reason, when I first agreed to go with Danielle on a European organic farming adventure, I imagined we would spend most of our time dressed all in white crushing grapes with our feet in a giant wooden barrel. It would always be sunset and the leaves of the grapes would be the color of the green Crayola crayon, and there might be an old guy with some sort of indigenous type instrument (like an accordion or something!) sitting on an overturned wine crate nearby. The air would smell like lemons and chocolate cake and spaghetti sauce.

As you may have guessed, it is not really like that. The farm we are working really long hours (yesterday was around 13 I think) and the work is for the most part uninteresting (yesterday I tied lavender together for about five hours). Add to this the unsunny disposition of our host mom… long story short, I am looking forward to leaving on the 14th.

As Danielle pointed out in her last post, with Woofing, you get what you pay for. The woofing hosts might get a wobbly handicap accessible walkway, and the woofer might get a farm that has 10-14 hour days and hosts that at times of stress or fatigue, speak as if they were officers at boot camp. When we first arrived at the farm, the pace of work was frantic. I feel like when you are working in a place like this, being tired is dangerous. Our fellow woofer smashed her thumb with a hammer while making that walkway and while we were patching her up, she fell dead asleep. I feel like the hosts at this farm ask a lot of their woofers, probably too much, in fact. (The fellow woofer who just left a few days ago spent 3 weeks here and did not have even one day off.) To punish them I attempt every day to eat them out of house and home everyday. This is the only way I can really hurt them, besides secretly watering the weeds in the garden or telling the bunnies they can come to Spain with me. Or complaining about them on the internet.

During those first few five-alarm knock-down drag-out hair-pulling bone-crushing hair-pulling wow-these-hay-bales-have-lead-in-the-middle days, I was pegged as The Weenie. So now I am the “inside” wwoofer. I am apparently in training to be an Italian housewife: I am being taught how to make pasta, clean the house, do laundry, and groom a steadily intensifying temper.

I continue to give pep talks to the bunnies every day. The seven that are left look at me with their tiny little expectant eyes every day when I push weeds into their little cubbies. I tell them to cheer up and eat, and to look away while I take their dead friends away to bury them in the impossibly hard dirt next to the goats.

I do miss Greece some times. I remember random things throughout the days here like how Katerina used to talk to the dogs in Greek but the cats in German.

In other news, we have gone apeshit. There is no village near by and the only contact we have with anyone outside the farm is an occasional wave or nod from a friendly bike rider passing by. We have advanced so far in the Connect the Actors game that nothing is a challenge anymore. Even doozie combinations like Pauly Shore and Jeremey Irons take less than 2 minutes. If anyone knows of any type of international Connect the Actors championships or something, please let us know! Our new game is just making five-pointed lists, endlessly, back and forth. The best cancelled TV shows. People you admire. Things to do before you die. Things you hate about lavender. When this game is exhausted (probably tomorrow), we will just start punching each in the face other for entertainment.

We also spend a fare amount of time concocting elaborate fantasies in which some nice people in a spacious but stylish Italian car stop at the side of the road and interrupt our work with a “Bonjurno! Are you tired of weeding? Would you like to go to Bolonga with us? Also, we have Diet Coke with lemon wedges here in our heavily air conditioned car!” Every car that passes has the potential to hold THESE PEOPLE, so I watch the highway constantly. I fear my vigilance has affected the quality of my weeding.

My favorite part of the day is the hour in the evening right before dinner I spend watering the mammoth garden. It takes forever and Danielle is usually busy walking the hormonal dog or watering the animals, so its just me and my Ipod in the garden for a long time. When I start with the artichokes and the lettuce, its still hot, but by the time I get to the tomatoes, the sun is behind the house and the valley is suddenly lit with oranges and yellows and purples, and its sometimes so pretty I stop dancing around in the mud to stare. It is one of the few moments of the day when I remember I am actually in magical, intoxicating, disorientingly beautiful Italy. It reminds me of what I imagined this trip to be like and it’s awesome.

 

New tasks, gorgeous Italians, nympho dogs

We have settled in at our Italy farm, and things have become a bit more reasonable, workload-wise, since the last post. And by “a bit more reasonable,” I clearly mean “better, but then again Nike Singapore kindergartener sweatshop labor would have beat the first few days.” Our hosts are, as I mildly put it, “driven.” Or as Molly more aptly puts it, “frantic.” Any job worth doing, it seems, is worth doing at top speed and on meth.

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Anyhow. The days are still 11 to 12 hours long, give or take, but that (of course) beats 14 hours any day…as well as 5:30 a.m. (or earlier) mornings. Jeez Louise. We have found ourselves doing lots of “Greece vs. Italy” comparisons, and though I do miss a few things about Greece, I can confidently say that I at least like the Italy work much more than the work we did in Greece, for the simple reason that our work here tends to be far more gratifying. Greek work tended to involve three steps:

1. Perform task (putting up horse fences, cleaning fishing nets, etc.)

2. Find out that task was futile (horses have escaped, nets most likely couldn’t even catch a drunk AND suicidal fish)

3. Slap forehead, sigh, realize that you will have to do the task daily anyway for the rest of your WWOOFing tenure.

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Whereas here, even 4 a.m. lavender-cutting yields, two days later, a giant jug of lavender oil. Granted, we are not sure what exactly this oil does (Molly tried smearing some on her bug bites; Danielle fed it to the goats and got them all messed up), but hell. The work was productive. Score one for us!!!

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We do miss being within walking distance of a village, as in Greece. Our current location is right along a major local highway, which gives us lots of vehicle lust…not in the sense of “Ooh! Pretty BMW!” but more in the sense of “You see those people? They’re GOING somewhere! Probably somewhere with Diet Coke, movie theaters, and other people! OTHER PEOPLE!” Living on the highway has also given us some insight into what Italians drive…namely,

1. cute, compact little station-wagon-y things

2. big, loud (both in noise and decoration), ugly motorbikes of the type that we in the states call “crotch rockets”

3. bicycles

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It’s kind of fun to see all the cyclists that go by all day…and this isn’t granny and grandpa out for a spin on their Huffies. This is the full-on 40 mph set, awash in brightly colored spandex and chugging all gung-ho up the hills (and oh, do we have hills). And it is simply amazing on Sundays. For you Iowa folk, it’s a lot like a miniature, spread-out RAGBRAI all day, every day.

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Anyhow, back to the farm – we have some regular tasks, such as feeding the goats, sheep, ponies, chickens, dogs, and (still steadily dropping) bunnies; as well as watering the garden, which is also an important and time-consuming task here, as it was in Greece. This week has added three major items to the WWOOFer plate: the wheelchair walkway, weed-whacking-slash-mowing and dog chaperoning.

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There is a pile of scrap wood behind the hay bales. It is large and consists of boards of varying widths, thicknesses, lengths, and degrees of rottenness. And we all remember that old saying: “When life hands you rotten boards and a WWOOFer with no construction experience…make a handicap-accessible walkway!” So Allie* and I set to work on constructing a walkway that starts by the animal cages, travels past the flower beds, and ends its glorious, scenic journey right in the middle of a large patch of……..dirt.

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Hey. We just follow instructions.

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One of my personal mottos for this trip, however, is “WWOOFers: you get what you pay for.” Just as I consider not nailing my hand to the walkway an accomplishment, I wouldn’t expect Bob Vila to crank out a particularly coherent essay on Pre-Raphaelite literature, especially on a volunteer basis. So I’m not feeling too bad about any crooked or death-inducing boards. Meh. I tried. (Seriously, though: to any future physically disabled guests of Ca’ del Buco: I am so sorry.)

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The weed-whacking-slash-mowing is really exactly how it sounds….namely, they had me mow half of a really quite spacious lawn in the last two days WITH NOTHING BUT AN EIGHT-GAZILLION-POUND WEED-WHACKER. This at least gave me a wonderful photo op with my scary apron-and-face-mask get-up, but also led to a “SWEET MERCIFUL CRAP!” moment when I discovered a LAWNMOWER in the shed. Whaaaaa…? <slaps forehead>

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As for the dog chaperoning – as a backstory, we have four dogs: Tex, a smallish yappy mutt who is quite simply Earth’s stupidest living entity; and three larger dogs: Sinbad, Coach, and Mila. Anyhow, we’re sitting at breakfast with Paola**, when suddenly she jumps up and runs to Mila’s little house, screaming, “No, no, no, NO, NO, NONONONONO!” She then yells for me to get a pitcher of cold water, and I oblige, shooting confused looks at Molly as I walk towards Mila’s abode, where Sinbad is…

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Oh.

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As Molly put it after I <cough> defused the situation, “Poor Sinbad! He’s just so full of emotion! It’s OK, buddy!”

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Long story short, we are the teachers at the middle school dance to the dogs’ hormone-crazed seventh-graders. And because we have reached our “apeshit” point (and also because we are immature and AWESOME), this has given us endless material as we sit, cold-water jugs at the ready:

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“Listen, Sinbad. I know it was great, it was fun, but you gotta call her. You can’t just do something like that and not call. I mean, are you a man, or are you a mouse? Huh? I bet she even let you have some of her breakfast this morning, am I right? Ugh. You all are just the same, aren’t you?”

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Of course, the situation is further complicated by the fact that Coach is Sinbad’s mother and Mila is Coach’s sister. Sinbad is having some conflict, needless to say:

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<in what we imagine to be Sinbad’s inner monologue voice> “I just don’t know what to do! I have these strange new FEELINGS, I’m having these DREAMS at night, I’m getting hair all over, and I just can’t help but think that my aunt is HOT! Come to think of it, Mom is lookin’ kind of smokin’ lately, too…”

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On a completely different but nevertheless remarkable note, we have named this particular trip the “some stereotypes are true tour.” Greek men are forward; Italians do indeed say “EAT! EAT!” to you every few minutes at every meal, no matter how far unbuttoned you already have your pants; armpit-shaving doesn’t seem to be that important to European women (not that there’s anything wrong with that…); Italians all ALWAYS look really, really good and just classily-put-together (making me feel perma-frumpy, but that’s beside the point); and so on. What shocked me, however, was to sit in a café the other day and suddenly hear the haunting strains of a familiar and, given the circumstances, perhaps offensive melody…yes, the Godfather theme, set as a cell phone ringtone. I thought, “Oh, man. Some clueless American tourist is about to get his ass BEATEN!” But lo and behold, it was an Italian man. This goes right up there in the “Really? You’re OK with that?” column, alongside Greeks wearing 300 t-shirts. Who knew?

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Of course, this all may sound way Debbie Downer – heavy and unnecessary workload, nympho dogs, etc. – and we are indeed superpumped to check out other parts of Italy and Spain. But (and I am certain this will sound very Taster’s Choice) it is lots of fun to do this trip with Molly. We have found that we divide the work well – I take the heavy outdoor tasks that require no thought and no subtlety of movement or decision-making (weed-whacking, rabbit burial), and Molly takes the tasks that actually require motor skills and complexity (the mind-numbing little lavender-stem sachets, spitting in the freshly made jam when Paola isn’t looking). Plus, I can imagine no one else with whom I would rather play 8-hour sessions of “connect the celebrities” and “top five _______.” On July 4^th, in a truly patriotic mood, we did the top five things we do not miss about the US. Pondering the failing economy, the number of times one hears the word “quagmire” on the evening news, the decidedly lesser quantity of prosciutto in comparison to Italy, a flooded Midwest, and the fact that Hillary’s run is over…it all made this trip to foreign lands seem just all-around BETTER, something I hadn’t thought possible.

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In addition, I have had several disoriented middle-of-the-night panic moments in which I wake up and think, ”Holy crap! I haven’t checked in at work in…like…a MONTH! My ass is getting fired! Why am I in EUROPE? I must surely have responsibilities to someone!” Then I think about it. Nope. I am home free. I can come home whenever I want. Or whenever funds run out.

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In other words, bee-stings and lavender-bundling aside, life is sweet.

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Well, that’s about it. I leave it to Molly to fill in the gaps and make more inappropriate Sinbad jokes.

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*Allie left on Friday, and we are sad. But way to go for us, getting two quality co-WWOOFers in a row. Allie! Come back! Translate their Italian for us!

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** Paola is a woman who, just to give you a picture of her particular personality, JAMS OUR BREAD FOR US. Not in a “here, let me help you with that” sort of way, but rather in a “Jesus, let me do it since you clearly will not do it quickly or efficiently” sort of way. I’m just saying, is all…

 

Conigli morti

We have arrived in Italy, and the trip was magnificent…

• First, Ioannina, Greece. A beautiful little city on a lake, where we saw our first precipitation on the whole trip and stayed in a beautiful hotel room. And where we each did indeed take obscenely long showers and watch some TV. Though one of the only English offerings on said TV was ”How to lose a guy in 10 days.” –slams head against wall– Maybe the big hippie-WWOOFer gods are punishing us for wanting a little TV. I dunno. Anyhow, we went from Ioannina to…
• Igoumenitsa, where we discovered the joys of ferries. This is officially my new favorite way to travel, and I believe Molly would agree with me. Our Eurail passes got us deck passage aboard a ferry bound for Italy. What is cool about deck passage is that you take your sleeping bag and pack, stake out some property, and camp out somewhere on deck (or, as some intelligent passengers did, on a couch in the corner of the bar/casino). And yes, there is a bar/casino, as well as a hot tub, a (laughably small) swimming pool, several restaurants, showers, and BRITISH TOURISTS! YES! THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE! THE SWEET MUSIC OF THE GODS! But we had to bid farewell upon arrival in…
• Ancona. As Lonely Planet puts it, ”Ancona’s biggest tourest draw is leaving Ancona.” Enough said.
• Then we took the train to Bologna (the simply GORGEOUS city where I am as I type this), where we hopped on a bus to…
• OUR FARM. Our farm is an agriturismo, which is like a B & B where the guests get to see farm life and help out if they want. The place is run by a couple, Paola and Roberto, who have a son who is not here for the entire time we are…and, though children are a blessing and all lovely and innocent, blah blah, I believe I speak for both of us when I say that we are welcoming the reprieve.

Anyhow. Roberto reminds me a lot of Iowa farmers. He’s very nice, works really hard, helps with the cooking, and is encouraging and totally forgiving if we make any mistakes (snapping a string on a hay bale, etc.).

Paola, on the other hand, is a hard-ass, to put it lightly. We’ll keep it at that.

Speaking of hard-assness, they run a tighter ship here than in Greece…a ship where, apparently, there is a stash of speed somewhere on-board, because we still haven’t figured out how Roberto and Paola maintain their energy for the work they do. Roberto is a sanitation worker for the city of Bologna, and Paola is a judo teacher. IN ADDITION to the farming, which is, as I said, hard-assed. For example, our first day consisted of waking up at 5:30 a.m., loading and unloading hay bales with Roberto, bundling lavender (dear God, the effing lavender), cutting lavender (unnnnnnngh) (also, bee stings galore), and then much more hay, and then lavender-cutting (I hate lavender so much at this point that, if I ever set foot in a Bath and Body Works store again, I just might snap). At around 9 p.m., I ran up to the house to nurse a bee sting, and Roberto made me sit down with him and eat supper, as Paola was insisting on cutting lavender until dark. ”But, Roberto, Molly and Allie (co-WWOOFer) are still working…” ”I will go get them. Paola is crazy. You eat.”

So since we didn’t finish the lavender, we got up the next morning at FOUR A.M. YES, FOUR A.M. I gathered a bundle of lavender and promptly got stung.

”Impossible!” said Paola dismissively. ”The bees aren’t out yet!”

As if on cue, a truly monstrous bee flew out and landed on the back of her shirt, and she begged us to brush it off.

Heh heh heh. Suckah.

Anyway. The food, once again, is OUTSTANDING…even better than Greece, though prosciutto and other meats factor heavily into the meals. Which is fine (and by ”fine” I clearly mean ”heavenly”) with me, but inconsequential to Ms. Molly Vegetarian Angstman.

The only other real news from the farm is the rabbit plague, due to which we have learned a new Italian phrase — ”conigli morti,” or ”dead rabbits.” Every day, for unknown reasons, three rabbits have died, and we are down to about 15 rabbits now. This is sad (and gross, as we have to carry the stiff, dead corpses to our rapidly growing rabbit cemetery), but it did mean that yesterday Allie and I had the laughable task of catching the remaining little suckers from the large pen and putting them in separate cages so they could be sort of primitively quarantined. According to Molly, we looked hilarious, all hunched over and concentrating fiercely. But concentration is necessary, as even the chubby rabbits are surprisingly quick and good at putting up a fight. Futhermore — to my horror — rabbits can SCREAM. Seriously. Grab one when it doesn’t want to be grabbed, and it just HOWLS, which scared the living bejeezus out of me the first time it happened. However, rabbits being infinitely stupid, you can make them calm down by holding down their ears, which is one of the stupider evolutionary tricks ever…right up there with fainting goats. God gave rabbits a giant, obvious off-switch right on top of their heads. Genius.

Well, our bodacious, farmers-tanned deltoids are sore from all of that hay-baling (but not the lavender…let us never speak of lavender again) (ever) and we should go nurse them. By burying our faces in a trough of tortelloni. –dies of happiness–