The first one. – Find Walden

1/3/2020

(Above: Jacobhouse on winter’s evening.)

Active Summary: Today, after the morningly routine of calisthenics, creative writing, and cow-surveillance, I ventured to the freezer room and performed a minor paint experiment. In this test, I mixed turquoise paint with ‘brushed orange’ in hopes of fabricating some form of purple. It was not successful*.

Following this, I neatened up the freezer room by: removing all renovation refuse, stacking supplies in a single area, and clearing all tools off the freezer tops. I also removed the original light/switch stand that used to reside behind the west freezers, collected all unused cords from throughout the entire freezer room, cut an unusable extension cord off at the place where it delved beneath the freezer room’s northwest doors, and stowed them all away. I even kept the snipped-off extension cord, because I’m fairly certain the pronged-end may be able to be used for wiring something**.

After freezer room activities, I ventured out to the garden where I weeded for a little while and the harvested some fresh spinach and arugula. I did not take any kale today, because the plants are still in their juvenile stages, and there is no need to stunt the younglings’ growth (especially when there are so many other greens available). Vegetable harvest was followed by my performing the weekly Jacobhouse cleaning and then by my finishing off the morning with a little bit more writing.

(6:27 PM Update:) Afternoon activities consisted of working a couple full-grown bovines through the treatment chute, tagging three calves, and helping Padre move a refrigerator into his studio. After that, Padre and I ventured to the freezer room and spent a few minutes cleaning dust off of the freezer tops.

TIL: Today Madre showed me what a countersink is, or rather, she showed me a drill attachment specifically designed to make the conical orifices that countersinking entails. This tool would have been especially helpful when laying the 2×4 planks on top of the grated floor within Jacobhouse. Back when I was installing those so-called floor-boards, I had to utilize a very large drill bit to create holes into which the self-tapping screw heads could be submerged. A countersink head would have enabled me to judge hole-depth much more easily.

A proper view of a countersink drill-attachment.
This is the original guide-hole for the screw.
This is that same guide-hole after a countersink drill-attachment has been utilized.
Due to countersinking, the top of the screw’s head is flush with the plywood’s surface.

Commentary: Cultivation is the seamless coalescence of effort and patience.

165,667 words.
1,325 photographs.
49 videos***.
389+ hours of writing/editing.

Happy first year, Find Walden. May there be many more.

The tidied-up freezer room.
A picture of Padre wiping the oldest freezer in our Master Blend beef room.
Mother and daughter have now been moved within sight of each other. They (#223 and her calf) already seem to be getting along a tad better.
Sunset over a semicentennial milking parlor.

Final Note: According to the weather forecast, tomorrow is going to contain prevalent moisture and gusts of over 25 miles per hour. My personal forecast is fortunately quite different – at least in regard to the morning hours – for tomorrow is likely to be a leisure-morning (if the farm permits).

*I realize turquoise and orange typically make brown when mixed on a color-wheel, but I also read that real-world paints often work quite differently than the simulations found on a computer. This was verified when I mixed the two together and got a green remarkably similar to that which was utilized to paint Jacobhouse and the freezer room’s trough-area.

**E.g. the plug-in outlet I recently made.

*** Make that 50. Here’s a video where I am happily helping a couple fungi reproduce.

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