Barbed wire and Scottish marble

This morning after breakfast, Diana and I went up to meet and have tea with yet another member of the lovely community living here at the farm. Magda is a polish lady that moved to Scotland about 6 years ago. She and her family live in this cool little house next to Adam's jewelry workshop. She showed me a picture of when they first moved in; the building was about half the size. Since then, she and her husband have expanded in several ways. By now, the back of the building is built into the rocks behind it. It is honestly one of the coolest things I have ever seen. I know I said that about the tree house, but this is also just as awesome.  She is working on restoring this boat:

Anyway, after a nice cup of tea in the sunny sitting room and pleasant conversation, I went to help Richard in the field with the fencing project. We went along the length of the field snipping away at the old rusty barbed wire. Excuse my french, but that shit is nasty. Although not as bad as the new stuff. At least the rusty stuff could be twisted into submission. After clearing away all the old stuff, we unrolled a spool of new barbed wire (yay!) and stapled it to the new fence posts. As careful as I tried to be, I still manged to cut myself on it. 

Then after we had lunch, I went over to the jewelry workshop to work on a few things there. I filled a bunch of tiny glass bottles with little bits of Scottish marble, then capped them with corks. I have no idea what purpose they will serve, but the Scottish marble is really cool stuff.

 Then I was tasked with helping pour vegetable oil into various different bins and through different filtration systems. Why? Because both Adam and his business partner run their vehicles on it. How cool is that? They just collect the used vegetable oil from restaurants. The whole time I was pouring the bins out into other bins, I kept thinking of how much it smelled like a McDonald's. And french fries. And how I was super hungry and totally would have eaten some crappy French fries...

Regardless, I learned a lot about the process of turning vegetable oil into something you can use to run your car.

I spent the rest of the afternoon gathering rocks and building debris from behind the jewelry shop and bringing it around to the top of a small hill. They have plans to use the stuff to build some kind of a stone wall, so I was just getting the materials from point A to point B. It was a good work out.  Eventually I got lazy and started chucking the rocks up over the wall and right on the hill top. It worked out much better than walking to wheel barrel, puting rocks in, gathering more, then going around, dropping them off at the top, then going back. Instead it was throw, gather, throw, climb up and sort. Yay for being lazy! (Innovative??)

Then I had to clear out all the leaves from the little area behind the work shop. By this point, it had begun to rain quite hard, so all the leaves were all soggy and disgusting. And I was clearing them by hand. For that hour and a half that it took me to clear them away, I lived in constant fear of coming upon a spiders nest/ some other nasty bug. So I squatted down, sifting through the gravel to gather the slimy black leaves, then put them all in the wheel barrel. Can I just say, this was really difficult. Mostly because the leaves had been there since fall and were completely padded down. The rain made it even more difficult. And my fear of spiders made it more stressful than it should have been.

I ended my day covered in dirt, pretty tired, but overall pretty satisfied with my work. That's the thing about farm work, you really can see your works progression. It is a lot more rewarding than completing something on the computer. I still like my computer, but there is something more satisfying about mucking around in soggy leaves than clicking on icons on a screen.  

Okay enough of that hippie rant, see you tomorrow! Thanks for reading!