It is a New Beginning

I arrived at Fallbrook Permaculture one week ago tomorrow.  Since Mondays and Tuesdays are off here, that means I’ve made it through my first week of work.  Huzzah!  I’m a permaculture expert now! Right? No? Not right? Ah well.

How was my first week?? What did I do?? Who did I meet?? What the flip is permaculture??

Settle down y’all, I’m getting to it.  But let’s begin at the beginning, yeah?

Day One: Arrival.  After six hours driving through rather unforgiving heat, I unstuck myself from the leather seat (lost water weight having served as effective butt-glue) and made my way up to the front door.  I was immediately greeted by a pair of dogs, two volunteers, and the owners of the house, who were all about to leave for a dinner at their friends’ house.  “Just drop your stuff off and get in the car!” Then, as everyone was leaving: "Grant, grab the pigeons from the fridge!" 

Introductions were made on the drive down.  Grant and Jackie (the two volunteers preceding me) were on their way out (they left the next day) but seemed like lovely people, if not a bit disconcerting in the intensity of their friendliness.  The intensity of their everything, actually.  Grant looked like your standard blonde haired blue eyed athletic all-American, while Jackie looked like she should be off modeling surfboards.  Their last day here they built a day bed from scratch.  In a day.  Because why not.  As they rattled off all the projects they had completed in their three weeks here, I gave up keeping track.  To this day I just assume Grant and Jackie built anything wooden I see outside.  Before we got in the car they gave me a granola bar they’d made from scratch that day after they’d finished building a bench.  They referred to each other as “G” for some reason and operated as a single functional highly enthusiastic unit.  Bloody terrifying.

The property we visited for dinner was amazing.  My new bosses' young, mildly eccentric engineer friend had converted his entire backyard.  He lived in the middle of the suburbs, but had terraced the hill behind his house and built himself a pool, a deck area, a chicken coop, a small house/shed thing, and was in the process of making an underground bunker.  

Homemade Pool

Seating area complete with bar and fireplace

Underground Bunker-in-progress

Plant and some wood and a solar panel and ?

Once we explored the property I mingled with the other guests trying to act social while actually just eating copious amounts of chips and guacamole.  Then we sat down to dinner on the lovely deck pictured above and ate a feast of barbecue ribs and pigeon.  The pigeon legitimately tasted like little baby steaks.  It was like eating tiny fingerfood steaks.  None of us could get over how good that pigeon tasted.  Someone needs to go make themselves pigeon steak wrapped in bacon NOW.  It would be the perfect steak-to-bacon ratio.  Seriously, I'm counting on someone to come through for me on this.  I need to know if it tastes as good as I think it would.

After pigeon steak, it was sadly time to go.  My fellow new volunteers were also showing up that night and we didn't want them arriving to an empty household.  And so, my first evening as a volunteer drew to a close.  My journey had begun.  The next day, our real work began.