Farm 0621

June 21

On Friday we were out in the field early (@6AM), and we weeded all day. We weeded all the remaining chile crops in Cipriano, then moved on to weed the corn crops in the right side of Nemesio. I hoed the majority of the rows while J&T hand-weeded, and when I’d finished, helped J&T hand-weed what was left. It was a good morning of continuous work, perhaps until 10:30 or so. We conversed a fair bit about comics and video games as we weeded the chile crops, and Josh placed a powerful speaker between the corn crops as we weeded, so we listened to a podcast about the NSA and the privacy of citizens in the US and elsewhere for at least a good hour before we finished weeding. It was distracting, but I think I’d rather not have listened to it - I’d rather have been left to my own sounds and thoughts.

My lunch break was nice and long, and after I ate, Mario visited me in my cabin to ask me how to access some functionality about his emails, the particulars about which I don’t remember. After I helped him how I could, he left, and I managed to acquire car insurance for my new Geo. State Farm offered me the lowest price: less than $28 per month for PA insurance. Considering other companies charged me around $50 per month, I was happy to find this option. Soon after, I went out to work for the second half of the day.

I met J&T at the truck, and after gathering up some tools, we went to pick up some of the remaining branches from the horse fields. We managed to clean most of them up, and then we drove off, picked up a plastic wheelbarrow, and drove to the “zoo” to clean up the sheep pen. I inhaled much sheep manure dust that day, but we left it nice and clean, and after picking up the chicken eggs, we finished off the day and went back to our cabins. J&T told me they would be driving to SF at 6:30PM, and to be ready by that time. They were a bit dazed by me telling them about the laptop that I intended to purchase while in SF, but OK with it. Once in SF, they drove me up to Denny’s (the meeting place with the Craigslist guy). The guy turned up, he happened to be a 14-to-16-year-old-looking kid, and his computer happened to be an Asus EEE PC netbook with WXP on it. Everything seemed to work just fine, so I paid him the $50 and was on my way in about 10 minutes. Then J&T&I and drove to Trader Joe’s (where I bought 5 bananas and 1 carrot juice drink), then to Whole Foods (where I found a free little piece of protein bar sample), then we drove back to the farm. Movie night was about to start in front of Adan’s, but I texted Mario about the laptop, and I told him he could come get it now, as I’d be gone all day on Saturday. He seemed a bit coerced, but he agreed to come get it that night.

So instead of attending movie night with everyone in the farm, Mario and his wife came to my cabin, I introduced the new laptop to them, told them about the functionality they’d most probably deal with (basic trackpad/keyboard usage, internet, email, VLC player, and such), and after about 60-90 minutes of such, they went back to their house, and I headed over to movie night. The movie, “Born in East LA”, had just ended, but I stuck there for a little while, and Pilar logged into Netflix and put on a couple of Family Guy episodes - one with the Bird song and one where they go back in time to the beginning of WW2. After watching random funny jokes and eating cocoa-dusted crisp almonds and chips under the moonlight along with all the Trujillo friends and family, we said goodnight, and I came back to my cabin to sleep.