Mark, Coming and Going: Day 39: And the poles go up.

Yeah, that is definitely double entendre; the fourteen year old boy in me is still laughing! I do miss Val, though.

But really, the supports for the new greenhouse did go up. And we got the reinforcements on and some wire to hold it a bit more stable. And it looks great. If we ever start a farm I will have the construction of the farm pretty much in hand. Growing stuff, well I suck at that.

Then I had to dig a trench. It will go all of the way around the greenhouse. It is so that the screen covering can be held down. So the idea is to dig a trench about forty centimeters down, wrap the cover so that there is dirt inside of it, and then bury the whole thing. They know how to do this because Avi said they did it only twenty centimeters before, and then he just shook his head while looking sheepishly at the ground. He didn't grow up a farmer; he is becoming one.

Here is the whole thing without the cover. As we were constructing it I was thinking that I was in the belly of a whale. What a story that would be. So, how'd you pass the time? Well, I ate a lot of sushi.

And more rock reaping. I have to clear the field kind of quickly because the tractor is configured for plowing. But I'm not so sure how quickly it will happen. Reapin' rocks is just hard.

Then we had lunch. Mmm, sweet lunch. Which, did I tell you, they call breakfast. I just don't understand why. The food is typical Israeli breakfast food, so I can allow for that, no problem. But if it is called ארוחת צהריים (arochot tsoriyim)--this literally means lunch or dinner--then you should really call it that, right? But not breakfast. Sheesh.

I'm really struggling with speaking Hebrew. My reading and writing has improved vastly over these weeks, but the speaking part, I still struggle with this. Since I have such a good foot-hold on Hebrew and am not likely to pick up any other language I'm going to work diligently to keep improving so that I can communicate easily in Hebrew. A second language just makes a person more worldly, I think, and we can all use a bit of broadening.

My rock harvesting went well. I finished half of the field. The second half doesn't seem to be too bad, but it is hard to say without hoeing it up (There has been a bit of this in this post; I do miss Val!).

Here are the fruits of the harvest. We put the rocks around the supports for the grape vines. It is kind of pretty. I moved a bunch of rocks today.

It was marked day again today, so I was responsible for feeding Blues and the goats. I really like that what I do shows up on the kitchen table in just a bit of time.

The kids' water bucket was filled with crap, so I dumped it out and started to fill it back up. My favorite and the cutest kid came over and poured on the extra cuteness so that I would continue to feed her apple cores and remnants of other fruits. She was treating the spigot just like a water fountain. Too cute.