Today I was still suffering post-traumatic stress from my border ordeal. Even though I had a good nights sleep, my alarm this morning made me want to shoot someone. And the closest living thing was Donald. Who has once again taken to sleeping on my bed. Right next to my head. Thanks Donald.
The day though started as well as it could have. Nothing to wild and crazy to work on. Just the regular old feed pigs, water, breakfast, harvest, plant the new hibiscus seeds and the stakes of Okinawa spinach. I had a brief conversation with Pablo when he told me of his concern over my absence yesterday, which I will take with a grain of salt. Pablo likes to joke, usually at my expense.
The only slightly “funny” thing that happened to me is that I finally experience a very potent touched-my-eye-after-cutting-chilies moment. For our natural pesticide we cut up onions, garlic and chilies to accompany the neem. Today I was the one responsible for chopping up the first three ingredients mentioned. The last one, was the obvious cause for concern. While I was cutting k’tuc for the restaurant I managed to scratch something away from my eye and all hell broke loose!
I felt the immediate burn of the chile residue on my hands and went running (and yelling) to the kitchen to flush it out with water. I grabbed a cup and started pouring water into my eye. Pablo came running to check if I was okay, but I definitely needed more water in my eye immediately. I poured water on it (and mostly down my work shirt) until the most harsh of the pain had subsided.
However due to the residue still on my fingers I still had a red face from where my hand touched my face to forcibly open my eye. The long and gist of it is that it bloody hurt. Pablo seemed relieved when I regained the ability to open my eye. My repetitions of “esta bien” or “it’s okay” didn’t seem to assuage his worry. Just as I had finished my work for the day, Martijn came by and I once again touched my eye. This time however, it was not the sort of hell-fire response that I originally had. I also had to rub some aloe on the sensitive skin in between my fingers due to the chilies. Apparently my left hand is just not able to deal with the heat.
Perhaps the funniest part of this whole thing is that you know how ridiculous you look to other people. For example, I distinctly remember a time when my Dad once took me up to Edmonton for a dance competition. We were eating at a sandwich shop and my Dad had asked for jalapenos on his, however the person making his sandwich was a little jalapeno happy, and my Dad had to remove some. In a similar fate, my Dad put his fingers to his eyes and my Dad got a little teary eyed. Perhaps all of this was karma for this incident, because I distinctly remember laughing quite loudly at the whole thing. Sorry Dad for laughing. I understand now how much of a jerk I was!
To avoid the drop-in visit of a very forward guide, Sara and I opted to head into town. I have been trying to offload the dress I bought since I got here. I wore it once in San Francisco, but here I have not found it my liking to wear dresses. And I certainly am not the dress wearing type of girl before I came here either. Balgue has one second hand shop and is the closest thing to vintage I’ll get here. I headed there with the dress hoping for an exchange, one dress for two shirts (the dress is very nice). And I was in luck! I walked in with a purple dress and I left with two shirts. The first is a boring quick drying golf shirt, the other is a dorky turquoise shirt reading “friendship rocks”, accompanied by a picture of a ship. It was essentially the best thing in there and my size.
Like most of our Balgue adventures, we had some minor successes in finding what we were looking for and also some failures. I still haven’t found shampoo that isn’t a chemical explosion or a large enough notebook for me to take notes on the permaculture book here. However we were able to find some snacks and invariably ended up back at Cafe Compestre for a late lunch. I finally tried the vegetarian fettuccine dish (the noodles are made in house), which was delicious with a spicy tomato-basil sauce.
In the spirit of the title of this entry and my newly acquired shirt, I want to have a shout out to my friend Amanda. For reasons she will understand. I’ve also been listening to a lot of Zeppelin lately...
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