Sunny Day :)

Today has been really beautiful, and I am very happy with the way it was laid out.

I think we're getting the hang of this.

When we woke up, it was really foggy everywhere, and the tent walls were still up from when we lifted them to let in the breeze yesterday... You could vaguely see my dad's spooky sculptures every now and then lurking in the grounded cloud cover. My friend Harris thought he was dreaming when he woke up.

Karen, Gaby and I milked the goats around 8 AM, which is when we decided we'd do it from now on (and then again 12 hours later at 8 PM). Goats are very routine-oriented, and get stressed about almost everything, so keeping a steady milking schedule is helpful. We're still not getting enough milk from them by ourselves, though... It takes us twice as long to milk the goats as it takes Karen's grandma, but she gets three times as much. By the time the goats are to antsy to hold still anymore, we've only gotten a few cups at MOST, and their udders are still full. We should be getting about a gallon of milk a day, but instead we're only getting several cups. It's making us crazy... We want to build some kind of milk stand that the goats can jump onto like in Karen's goat book.

After that, Gaby and I biked into Sag Harbor to go to a yoga class. This is one thing that I am thinking about critically... We didn't actively use any energy, but the money we paid for the class (albeit a student discount), will probably contribute to the grid in some fashion, which makes it a tricky transaction.

In any case, the trip to Sag Harbor was fruitful... or fishy... We met a friend of my sister's named Arthur who was fishing on the dock. Arthur goes to my school, and I've always known he was the outdoorsy type, and had a knack for (gently) catching bugs with a net when he was younger. He had had a lot of success in the past week, and at home he said he had about 8 Porgies and Snapper in the freezer, but the one fish he caught today he gave to us! It was a pretty big Porgie, bigger than either of the ones we caught when we went fishing earlier this week, and he taught us how to gut and fillet it before he stuck it in his cardboard bait box and we took it home.

The bait Arthur was using was bloodworms, which I have never seen before, and hope I never meet while swimming out in deep water. They're a local, prehistoric looking biting worm, kind of like a leech, but without the numbing chemical leeches produce when they bite your skin. Eeeeee....

When we got home, Karen had already biked to work in Southampton, so we washed the dishes (with hot water this time, I thought they might need a little heat to get rid of any stray chicken poo), and grilled up the Porgie and some eggs and quinoa. The eggs we actually cracked into half a bell pepper and then tossed on the grill. My sister did that at her birthday party, and it's amazingly delicious. We actually wrapped the fish in beet greens before we put it on the grill to prevent it from burning (that didn't work, but corn husks do). And we boiled the rest of the eggs so they keep well in our little fridge.

After that, Franco came over on his way home from the beach and helped us chop wood. Well, he did all the chopping, we just carried it to the porch. I've tried to use the chopper (which weighs a good 20 lbs itself), and it's really really difficult to even pick up. 

We were completely out of wood after Gaby and I built the fire today... We shouldn't let that happen again... If Franco hadn't been able to come over we probably wouldn't have been able to light a fire tomorrow even. None of us can lift that chipper.