caracolina

Today, John and I headed out to Tonopah, but he dropped me of with Celia and Jimmie before joining Rob and Jerry at the farm. I helped out with watering and feeding and a few other chores (including bottle feeding Jaanu, one of John’s goat kids) before we made curds from goat milk and tried out John’s new cheese press.

At some point we stepped outside and both heard a whistling noise. Walking towards the noise we realized that the tiny fish pond was almost empty! I ran over to the hose and got the water flowing. In this weather it takes a few minutes for the water to run cool and throwing the hose into the pond too soon would have resulted in fish stew. Luckily there was about a foot of water left in the bottom where the goldfish were huddled, holding their collective breaths, as it were. Apparently the cats had been playing around the fish pond’s “water fall” which is a hose that pumps water out of the pond and allows it to run down a few steps back into the pond. One of the cats tripped the rock that holds this hose in place and the water ended up outside the pond. The whistling noise was the pump sucking in air.

Once we got that squared away, Celia got to test drive my spinning wheel, not surprisingly quite the challenge. Unfortunately she didn’t have a whole lot of time on it because all of a sudden it was getting to be late afternoon and John called because he wanted to call it a day. Not surprisingly, since working outdoors in this heat and humidity is exhausting! Since Celia and Jimmie were planning to go to a party for 4th of July later that day, I helped her with the second round of watering and then John arrived and whisked me home.