I am going to have to keep this brief because I am on dial-up. I can only update this on the weekends for the next two weeks because the connection is so slow that I canèt add pictures and also strange things keep happening when I try to use punctuation (francophone keyboard!).
Speak to you on the weekend, by which time I will be fluent in French – hah!
I arrived in Ottawa last night after a short trip by Greyhound from Perth. It was the first Greyhound that I’ve been on with Wifi and poweroutlets for your computer… however it was also the first greyhound that I had been on where the seats were stuck in this bizarre position somewhere between recline and upright.
I tried to make use of the wifi which did work well except that, with no table or tray to place my netbook on I had to sit with it on my lap and within 2 minutes I felt horribly nauseous.
So with my netbook stowed safely back in my bag I did what I normally do on bus trips. Connect. Not with the internet, but with where I am. I’ve always loved traveling by train and Greyhound makes a not too bad alternative. I can’t work, typically can’t read, I’m not responsible for driving or navigating so I’m able to just sit for a few hours and watch the world flow past the window. I have the kind of wild, crazy mind that when I try to focus on still objects I just get frustrated and bored, but with the scenery moving past me I am both present and able to maintain my concentration. By the end of the trip I’m tired but I’ve managed to gather my thoughts and feel ready to move on with the next stage of my journey.
Lynne picked me up at the bus station and took me to the WUSC office where I hung out until the end of the work day. She had mentioned that she was having a dinner party in the evening, but didn’t mention that it was also her birthday party. Lynne lives in a condo but has this incredible table that extends and extends to accommodate a ridiculous number of people. She was grumbling that she didn’t have enough chairs, but then I pointed out that most people who live in a two bedroom apartment don’t actually need 12 chairs.
A small gathering in Lynne's Condo
I spent the evening hanging out with a really interesting and diverse group of people, including one lady whose Mom I know because she lives in Grande-Digue!
Today we caught up on sleep, I did some more work on the final edits to the book, we both tried to summarized the last four years of our lives and then Lynne treated me to some Ethiopian food. Am I glad I came? Oh yes!
Tomorrow I leave for Sherbrooke where I will be spending 3 weeks staying with Lucie and her three sons at a poultry farm and homestead. Lynne has been very patiently insisting on speaking French to me to ease me into life in Quebec (she lives on the Quebec side of the river) and I did better than I expected though it is tiring and after an hour of speaking French my tongue aches!
Tomorrow I catch the Greyhound to Ottawa to stay with my former boss from WUSC. We worked together for the Student Refugee Program when I first got the right to work in Canada. She has invited me to stay for the weekend, which is a good thing as things are still up in the air regarding my next host.
So far I have been very polite about approaching potential hosts. I only ever contacted one farm at a time and waited for a response before contacting the next one. I tried this approach again this time again but was getting so many rejections that it was getting frustrating. Also I’d been struggling so hard to put my six potential farms into order of preference (overall they all received roughly equal votes by email, blog and facebook!) so I decided to just email them all and see who got back to me first.
Two have replied. One said she already had someone so sorry, but no. One said yes, but she seems to work all day so I’m concerned that I’ll be there all one my own for three weeks. Another is waiting to see if another pair of Wwoofers confirm. Silence from the other three.
It seems that my next host is still as much of a mystery to me as to the rest of you. But things have always worked out for the best so far, so I trust that they will continue to do so, no matter where I end up.
Ray helping with a spot of editing
I came here primarily to work on a book called called ‘Record Keeping for Organic Farmers’ that Kristine and I have been writing since last winter. We’re both farmers, so needless to say not a whole lot of writing gets done over the summer months, or the spring for that matter… or indeed the fall. There’s always something far more pressing going on in the garden.
So having stretched the deadline as far as it would go, I realized that I was not going to be able to get this thing done without Kristine being right there in the building with me. I am the kind of person who needs to verbalize things in order to be able to solve problems for myself. If I ever come to you and make a long and confusing speech, with much arm waving, perplexed expressions and apparent questioning tone, then turn and leave the room without even waiting for you to reply, that’s what’s going on. It’s as if only by setting the ideas free, am I able to get to grips with them.
That’s what much of this week has been about. There have been periods of me locking myself in my room and typing. There has been a fair amount of scrawling on flip chart paper in different colored inks, with arrows, scribblings out and question marks. There have been extended periods of piano playing as I’ve tried to think my way out of a particular metaphorical corner. There have been the crazed rantings of a tired, frustrated little organic farm inspector trying to decide if the manure section belonged under the subheading of inputs or processes “You use manure, but the animals also produce manure and what about making manure piles?”. Fascinating, right? But then there was today, which was a lot more fun.
Flip Chart Ville
I decided, quite rightly, that I couldn’t possibly edit on a tiny little screen for a minute longer and that this final stage needed to be bigger and much more social or I was going to go completely insane. So I asked Kristine if she wouldn’t mind reading out my part of the book to me and then I would read out her part of the book to her so that we could get a feel for how another reader would understand the phrasing of the sentences and, most importantly, pull out little gems like this one “Organic Process Records record organic processes”. No, really? (That was one of mine)
While we were doing this we documented on flip chart paper all the major themes plus examples used to avoid duplication or bias towards any kind of farm or region of the country.
The result was much better than I thought. By reading it through out-loud it made us slow down and not skip over sections, or the other person would complain. It helped us to spot repetition; “Didn’t we do this already?”. It drew attention to unnecessary use of lists (the tone of the readers voice would get progressively more bored as they slogged through them) and things that just didn’t make any sense (paragraphs that had to be re-read several times with accompanying head shaking).
It took several hours but I’ve gone from feeling really frustrated with the whole thing to feeling pretty darned good about it.
The high point? Kristine reading (or misreading) from a list of helpful hints for record keeping.
“If (when you are writing your records) your hands get wet or dirty, laminate them.”
I’ve been chuckling over that all evening. You know, Record Keeping for Organic Farmers can be fun, with good company, some cake and homemade wine.
Kristine; laptop in one hand, wine glass in the other.
At Blue Chicory they don’t just grow vegetables and produce honey. Kristine is also a herbalist so at this time of year she sells echinaceae tincture, in the summer she sells a herbal insect repellent and when the poison ivy is out in force she sells a jewelweed spray for any unlucky hikers.
Echinaceae Tincture and Beeswax lipbalm
Malcolm manages a sustainable forest, harvesting diverse kinds of woods for making hammocks, hammock chairs and Muscoka chairs, amongst other things. Today he was weaving the ‘hammocky’ bit of the hammock using a huge contraption in the middle of the living room.
High speed Hammock Weaving
He offers day workshops where you can make your own hammock, but will not sell you a hammock ‘jig’ so you can make your own. Partly because the jig would cost as much, if not more to make than a hammock and partly because your better half will likely divorce you if you decide to set one up in the middle of the living room and then spend weeks working on your hammock.
This jig is used for weaving hammock chairs. The full sized hammock jig is twice the size!
The benefit of Malcolm’s woodworking is that as well as providing an alternate income stream it is both complementary to what they do already, happens mostly during the winter and, most importantly, he enjoys it!
Kristine enjoys the benefits of selling hammock chairs at the market
So if you are looking for an ecologically sound Christmas present for a loved one that is hand crafted, fun and will last a lifetime, check out their website in the list of links. Who wouldn’t benefit from spending time hanging out in a hammock?!
Hanging out in the Ontario woods
When I awoke this morning I lay there, as I have done for the last five days, and thought about what I would do today if I could do anything. I have to admit to finding it a bit difficult because it really depends on where I am and who I am with and so I’m either overwhelmed with choice or, apparently, ‘limiting’ myself by what I can do here.
My ‘dream’ for today was to get up early, work on chapter 3 of the Record Keeping book that Kristine and I are writing, then take a walk in the woods, chat with Kristine and Malcolm and end the day with a board game. I tried to come up with something more exotic, but this was actually what I wanted to.
So I got up early and did all of the above, with the addition of playing the piano for an hour or so, plus it’s not evening yet so I don’t know if Malcolm and Kristine with want to play Chinese Chequers with me. But all in all I seem to be living my dream.
Gorgeous November Colours
Am I too easily pleased? Do I lack imagination? Should I be fantasizing about scuba diving or mountain climbing? If I was somewhere where you could scuba dive I would likely want to do it, but I’m not, so I’m perfectly happy to take a leisurely stroll through the woods with Kristine.
No matter where I am or what I am doing, I am usually more than content to be doing what I am doing, provided the following parameters are met.
This means that, while I might not decide randomly to try to break into an old police station to steal a tarp, hurl tree trunks around, learn to shoot, sing naked in a sauna, visit a Hutterite colony or go to a Catholic evangelizing, if someone invites me, I’ll likely say yes and in all probability I’ll enjoy myself. And I don’t think that’s a bad way to be.
Moss covered limestone boulders litter the woodland walk
So on that note, I’m having terrible trouble deciding where to go next. I have a list of 6 places that may accept Wwoofers at this time of year but I can’t decide who to call first.
Get your answers to me asap as I have to make a decision soon!
Today was supposed to be my last day here. I was going to ride in with Kristine to Ottawa tomorrow morning and head off to wherever was crazy enough to take me. However…
I spent about 2 hours this morning trying unsuccessfully to find myself a host. The people I contacted yesterday couldn’t take me because they already have 4 Wwoofers. They recommended that I contact their co-operative marketing group to ask them for suggestions for hosts. So this morning, after much psyching up, I called up the very nice administration lady at Fromage de Pays and attempted to explain to her, in French, that I was a Wwoofer, what a Wwoofer was and that, no, I didn’t want to buy cheese.
She gave me a list of organic fromageries, so I started calling them, one by one, until I just couldn’t do it any more. They were so nice and so patient, but Fromageries, unlike vegetable farms, tend to have enough staff and their staff are skilled, full-time employees so it is rare for them to take on random women who want to live in their house and eat their food, don’t know how to make cheese and can’t even speak French properly. Urgh.
One lady actually said that she would have taken me but all of her goats were pregnant at the moment so she wasn’t milking or making cheese. She invited me over to visit however and said she would love to give me a tour. I just can’t get over how nice people are. Most people really are lovely. It’s sad that we only ever notice the Jack-Asses.
So after that I went back to the Wwoof guide to try to find ANY farms that had livestock and were likely to be doing something over the winter months. I called 3. No luck. At least by this time I was getting more comfortable with speaking French on the phone. Calling people who are actually in the Wwoof guide is much less scary than calling people who aren’t! Everything’s relative.
I have found a few possible other hosts who sound very nice but they don’t necessarily sound like somewhere to spend 4 whole weeks… I’m not sure that there would be enough to do.
It’s like when Clare and I were trying to find a couch surfing host in Thunder Bay. We started off looking for a woman aged 40+ . Then searched for a 40+ man. Then finally resigned ourselves to anyone with a pulse. Brodie and Annie turned out to be an amazing find given how utterly desperate we were getting.
This time I started off wanting to find a Francophone Fromagerie. Now I’m looking for anywhere Francophone with livestock. By tomorrow I’ll probably have found myself an anglophone homesteader who just has Wwoofers over for the company and isn’t even organic. Watch this space.
This week Kristine and I have been trying to get a book completed. This has been quite the challenge for me and for the first time in 5 months I have been grinding my teeth at night. But there is another reason why I am getting stressed out. My next host will be my home for a full 4 weeks and, whereas my normal attitude is that I can cope with anything for a week, I want to be sure that I am choosing well this time. OK, that sounds unflattering to my hosts to date! Of course in each case it worked out very well, but before arriving I was less worried because it was always for a short period of time.
The reasons why I want to stay somewhere for a longer period of time this time are that
So I’ve just sent my first email to a Fromagerie south of Montreal in the most awful French, ever! While I was doing my best to figure out what tense I was trying to write in and conjugate the silent endings to the words, I was imagining them reading it at peeing their pants laughing.
Hello,
I Wwoofer from New Brunswick (original England). I want Wwoof your farm please. I like cheese and want love your goat, please and thank you.
If this not achievable please inform of alternative. I come Tuesday or Wednesday if you likes.
Goodbye,
Rowena
I’m going to try calling them later which is going to push me even further outside of my comfort zone because not only do I suck as speaking French but I hate telephones with a passion. So the thought of doing the two combined is giving me night sweats.
I have to keep reminding myself that what I am doing is both emotionally and physically exhausting and by adding French into the equation I am making this downright terrifying. But I am trying and this makes me brave and not, as I see myself, lame.
