On the 25th, we got up and after eating breakfast (Ran out of gherkins...), I went and worked on the metal reclamation some more. I got to it a bit better that day, and organized a system so that when I folded up the metal sheets I didn't drop flakes on the ground - instead they fell on a non-rusted piece of corrugated roofing, from which I swept them into a bag. On the pieces that hadn't completely rusted apparent, I scrapped off a lot of the rusted bits from them, so they wouldn't drop rusted chunks everywhere. I also started sweeping the rust/pine-needle mix from in between the panes into a bag, since I had no idea how to separate the two (Perhaps I could use a pan like the gold prospectors of old?). This got me quite far. Since my gloves were not dextrous enough to pick up shards from the ground, I used my chain-mail pliers to pick up pieces, which I collected and threw in the bags. Meanwhile, Edelweiss kept at the gardening, as far as I know. Eventually, I asked Eileen to come up and let me know which panels she wanted to keep, and which ones she wanted to throw out. She indicated such, and showed me how to put them up in a way in which they would largely avoid rusting further. After getting the panels into the right positions and the rest of the metal squared away for the day, I called it a day (the WWOOFing standards were roughly 5 hours each day).
After a bit of a break, I let folks know that I was going on a walk, and went up out of the farm and took a right and walked down the road. Edelweiss indicated she didn't want me to be gone a worrisome amount of times, what with me being alone and not knowing the area, so I limited myself to an hour or so. Walking down the road, I past some pretty fields and wilderness, and then an abandoned house, and eventually came to a fork in the road. Lots of walking, looking, and thinking. I came up with quite a few ideas for DnD and other things, some of which I wrote down when I got back to the bender. Eileen took off again while I was writing, and later came back. Edelweiss went down to read in the house, and I sought out Eileen to see what she was doing.
Eileen was putting up plastic fencing posts to measure out a new electric fence for the donkeys. I helped her with the electric cord. Apparently she is using the donkeys to eat the reeds that are infesting that (and a few other) fields. Looking at the field the donkeys were currently on, it looked rather effective (apparently the reeds come in big enough clumps that they can't be cut by hand or machine, so most people use weedkillers, which she doesn't want to use). After measuring the fence, we retrieved the actual posts, and carried them out to the appropriate locations. Eileen put them in, as she was wearing steel-toed boots, and the device to put them in was bad for softer boots in the case of it falling on them. We also nailed in insulating materials to hold the string.
I went back to Edelweiss and let her know that Eileen had said that dinner was going to be late, and that we might want to fend for ourselves. Edelweiss wasn't immediately hungry, so this was no problem for her. I had some toast and cheese, but decided to wait with Edelweiss so she wouldn't be eating dinner just with Eileen or by herself. (Edelweiss had mentioned earlier that she doesn't relish time with Eileen.)
Eventually Eileen came in and told us that she felt that the WWOOFing arraignment wasn't going to work out, because she wasn't feeling the right sort of WWOOFing atmosphere, but rather tension and hostility. She then went out to fix up a few other things, and Edelweiss and I talked about various options and other things.
Eileen eventually returned, and pointed us to the WWOOFer noticeboard, where a variety of WWOOFing hosts were posting up relatively urgent WWOOFing requests. We looked through and eventually found about four options we decided to try. We sent an email to one of the WWOOFers who did not have a phone, and resolved to call the others the next morning. We ate while doing this, though I felt awkward about it (and everything else, really).
Eventually we finished up and went to bed rather late.
(I mis-ordered the posts, so the 27th comes before the 26th. Just look for the May 26th post, and read that before the short May 27th post.)
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