the other barley drink

hmm. I can't believe it. I spent how many years working in an amazing coffee house? And now look at me. All I want is an instant barley beverage that looks like this:



I found it in my trailer. I wonder how long it's been here. Will someone please remind me to check the expiration date please?

hi & lo

I went to Hilo the other day, on my day off. I put my bicycle on the bus and headed to the big city. (Which bike rack rubbed the sides of my tires so bald I have since had a total tire blow-out and am mildly depressed). In town I bumbled, puttered, appreciated, and recoiled.

'Hmm?' you say.

From the abomination which I shall refer to as the "middle-aged-tourist-fat-man...shirt?"

Just because you are on vacation, it is Hawaii, it is hot, and you are a man, does not mean you are entitled to loll about, on the sidewalk, eating ice cream, with your shirt off. No. Not off - that would be somehow more acceptable. But rolled up over your ponderous paunch.

And it was not one man. Not two. But five. Apparently all deriving some sort of ill-advised strength in numbers.

And they were with their wives. And not a wife looked around at the rest of us pinned to our cafe chairs in abject horror and quietly motioned to her respective husband to 'roll down your shirt.' (um...note: I do not subscribe to traditional gender roles - no no nope - but, in defense of myself, they seemed to).

And they were sunburned. Which transformed the merely obscene, into the macabre.

Ready Eddie?

This is Eddie. He's my baby. I happened upon his mama birthing him in a field ten days before she was supposed to. He was such a wee little thing, all limp and blue. I stuck my fingers in his mouth and pulled out strings of mucous and whipped off my shirt (of all the times to be wearing an undershirt!) to clean him up and chafe some life into his little body. All the time I was babbling to myself. And his mama was yelling. And we were all covered in dirt and blood and goo. And I ran with him to the barn a'hollering "DickDickHeatherbabyBABY!!"

Poor boy couldn't see for the first three days and couldn't walk for six - but now look at him! Right as rain.

I love my Eddie.

heyday

Some things I find in my hairbrush at the end of the day:
-hay
-bugs (dead)
-bugs (alive)

Some things I find in my shirt at the end of the day:
-hay

Some things I find on my shirt at the end of the day:
-hay
-pooh

Some things I find on the shirt I change into halfway through the day at the end of the day:
-cheese
-whey

Some things I find on my face at the end of the day:
-toothpaste (because there are no mirrors anywhere. And apparently nobody likes me).

Gecko Raid

Look closely. You'll see his wee beady eyes from the get-go.

...what should we call him?

How I Picked an Avocado

a short "how to not."

What you will need:
-an almost idolatrous fondness for avocados
-little to no perception of actual distance
-help

Let's get started!

First, I had it presciently revealed to me that the article I had mistaken as the cast-off Halloween prop for a feral lacrosse* player was actually a fruit picker.

Then, I happened upon the avocado tree. Hallelujah!

mmm...Avocados. I knew they were not ready. I was told as much. 'But what's to stop me,' I plotted, 'from picking one and eating it anyway?'

I stalked my prey and found a likely candidate. An avocado, darker than the rest, dangling just above my head. I went for the picker. But I'm no fool. I recognized I wouldn't be able to reach the fruit just from the ground. So I grabbed a chair as well.

Hmm. Not quite.

So I grabbed a step ladder.

Hmm. Just a little further.

So I grabbed a ladder ladder.

shit.


Flash forward five minutes. The picker has malfunctioned. It has not picked anything, only dangled from it. Feebly. I had managed to (heaven knows how) lunge from the "this is not a step" step, javelin the picker over the fruit - and let go. And there it was. And there (short of my leaping off the ladder to grab hold of the picker and careen with it to the ground) it seemed likely to remain.

Until Charlie came and got it down for me - and the avocado as well.

Bless that Charlie.


*for which word I wikipediaed "sport" and perused a list of leagues. The google search for "sport with hand-net to catch ball" had yielded no fruit.

man cheese

Parental Advisory:
Explicit Content

soooooo. We have a cheese. It is a havarti cheese. It is a new cheese, developed by a guest Virigian cheese-maker. She, like myself, is new to the island and its nuances. Not to mention language. But wishing to add a local flavor to the cheese she called it "Omo Omo Kea Cheese."

Now, "omo omo kea," directly translated, means "white loaf"--or something to that effect. Appropriate enough for a big, white, rectilinear cheese. But there's this funny thing about languages. That is, sometimes they don't say what they mean. A concept which is known, in some circles, as an idiom. An idiom occurs when a commonly used group of words has an established signification not deducible from the sum of its parts; i.e. "see the light."

With the aid of an English-Hawaiian dictionary the signification of "omo omo kea" appears relatively straightforward. And yet, with the aid of the native Hawaiian woman at the veterinary office, the signification of "omo omo kea" is actually "man ejaculating openly."

Or something to that effect.

Gather round everyone please! Let us have some man cheese.

bunnies

I could feed them. All of them.

This is what happens on a slow day at the market. When everyone has a stronger force of will than me. "Take this." They say. Me: "Oh! Gee, thank you! but I already got..." as they shove bushels of radishes into my arms. And stash lettuce beside the cheese cooler. And hide papayas behind the van. I even got (and by "got" I mean "was forced to accept") spam musubi! SPAM! Spaaaaaaammmmmm. Spam-sushi. Like this:

...should I eat it?

Why I am a ninny.

Today I was in the cheese room, wearing a smock and a hair net (I like the smock. It is just long enough that if I wear it over my shorts, it looks like I'm not wearing any pants) and scooping curd into cheese cloth to drain for the next batch of chevre. Simple work. Solitary. One's mind tends to meander. This is where mine ended up:

While cleaning vat. Gee. I could fit inside this thing. Comfortably. I could make a nest. Then--and these are my actual thoughts, guys, with some dead space in between--If zombies came, I would hide here. Hmm. Fair enough. Next I wondered how effective a hidey-hole the cheese vat would prove if tested by those not undead, and I scrolled feebly through the catalogue of villains from which one hides. Like if the gazpacho came, I said to myself.

Keep in mind that this was all going on in my head. There was no one in the room. I wasn't talking. No pressure to impress.

Not 'gestapo', I said to myself but, 'gazpacho'.

Watch out for that chilled tomato-based soup, kids. If you need a place to hide...

How to not take a photo of a gecko

Like this:

Tara, HDYEUH girl

I kind of like being the "How Did You End Up Here?" (emphasis usually on the 'here' and occasionally the 'you') girl. Though my replies are not terribly inspired: "Umm. I dunno. The internet?" Or: "Umm. I like goats," the questioner never listens to them anyway. They either look hard at the breasts tattooed on my arm* and buy some cheese, or they look hard at the breasts tattooed on my arm** and do not buy some cheese.

A boy tried to hit on me the other day. He said he was "quite taken with me." OOOooooOOOooh. I told him I work on a goat farm. He replied: "I love goats!"

I was not impressed.

Reminiscence: When I Was Impressed, by tara louise.
When the gecko that lives in my trailer walked across the key pad of my laptop, and managed to spell: "pih." Apparently he was not impressed.


*for those of you who do not know me very well, the 'breasts' are not out of context. The tattoo is not just breasts on my arm. They are part of a larger tattoo. Yes, it is of a woman. Yes, she is naked. No, she is not me.

**these are the same breasts.

When to not ride 78.4 miles

When you think you're only going to ride 40. I tell you, the difference between 40 miles and 78.4 is truly astonishing. When you're on your bike. With your bikini on under your bike shorts. You have five bananas. And all of the beaches are closed due to swarms of tiger sharks.

Such circumstances as these--particularly when paired with a certain amount of heedless spontaneity--render a 40 mile ride a long one indeed.

Postscript Regarding Heedless Spontaneity in Hawaii:
Always. Always always always look at a map. LOOK, don't glance. Don't think "Oh, there's that road down there that eventually links up with this road that goes back my way, sort of." NEVER think that. Unless you have more than five bananas.

note: If ever you need know, the lady at the Subway in the middle of nowhere is really nice. She'll even encourage you to put ice in your water bottles when she lets you fill them up at the fountain drink station. Kudos, you, Subway lady!

mealking

Milking the goats is such a pleasure.
Let me walk you through it.

What I see:
goat butts.
(many many many of them)

Let's try that again, a little closer:







What they see:






Hey girls!
They eat and enjoy the view while I milk them and try desper- ately to catch their many poohs in a bucket so they don't scatter across the floor and get trampled into the concrete which I then have to scrub.





Eat up girls.
Make more milk.




cute, eh?
The one in the center, peering around the post is Truffles. She's not the brightest light in the barn, but she makes up for it with sheer mulishness. Hi Truffles!

Rodgers and Hammerstein

Song

In my own little corner

in my own little chair

I can be whatever I want to be

on the wings of my fancy

I can fly anywhere

and the world will open its arms to me

I'm a young Norwegian princess

...or a goatmaid

What girl needs anything else?

the end.

and a banana

Food Abhorrence Warning: This post contains extensive reference to bananas. May contain nuts.

I can already envision the day, sometime in the future, when I will look back fondly upon my Hawaii experience and be reminded of...bananas.

I am immersed in bananas. Bananas punctuate my existence. It's true. To illustrate, I have written a short interactive essay entitled "My Existence"--for which your only task is to insert a banana wherever you see punctuation. Any punctuation. (Apostrophes voluntary). When you reach the end, please put down your pencils and have a banana.

"My Existence"

Well it's another lovely day on the Hawaii Island Goat Dairy. The ladies have been milked; the babies fed. Although it has been a long morning, it is not yet time for that second cup of tea. First I must unload the hay from the truck, then I shall have my cuppa. And maybe a biscuit. After tea my chores for the day include: mucking the small pens, remulching the garden, planting some tomatoes, and messing with Otis. But what I'm really looking forward to is trying my first batch of goat yoghurt at noontime! (Maybe I'll make a smoothie). Either way, at 4:00 I get to "dip cheese" and thereafter the evening is mine! Maybe I'll pack dinner into my tainted Camelbak and go for a stroll... ..

cake or death?

Though the sun is shining a chill runs down the spine of Nancy. The birds have ceased their song and the air is still. Suddenly an horrible monstrosity blots out the sun. The sky darkens and a shadow creeps across the field.

They try to run.

They try to hide.

But they can't escape.

They're fenced in. And the fence is electric.

* * *

It is terrible to signify 'CAKE' to 130 animals. I can't go anywhere without getting chewed on. They chew on my shirt. My shorts. My hair. My skin. And yet they are afraid of my cowboy hat. "Chupacabra!" they scream and scatter, eyes rolling in panic, whenever the hat approaches.

Not so much about farming

So. I went for a longish bike ride the other day--as is my wont. I rode to the town Waimea, approximately 17 miles from the farm. Getting there is quite a climb, about 2,000 feet of vertical gain over a couple of miles. I was breathing hard. The sun was shining hard. I was drinking a lot of water. ...And I'd started the day off right. Coffee. Tea. Other water. So. I had to pee. Badly. But! luckily I knew where the public bathrooms are for the farmer's market. So I dashed over there (thinking about those triathletes who just wet themselves as they go--which wasn't making it any easier for me, let me tell you). I arrived, wheeled my bicycle right in, ran to a stall, and proceeded to relieve myself.

Ahem.

You know those "Camelbaks"? You know those long hoses they have? Those too long hoses they have? With the little nozzle at the end upon which you place your mouth to drink? You know those things?

I peed on that.

agggghhhhhhgggghhhhhhhhhhhh!

I know. I know. I mean, what do you DO after that?

I had no other vessel (having generously left my sister's water bottles in SLC.) It was Sunday. It was hot.

And it was seventeen miles back home.


...should i not have told this story?