Immediately after our Abel Tasman Tramp, we spent a week in Upper Moutere wwoofing—volunteering on an organic farm for 5-6 hours a day in exchange for room and board.
A curious goat
Every morning around 8:30 and every evening at 6:30 we were responsible for milking 8 to 10 goats. To make things more efficient, Stephanie handled the mechanics of milking, while I was the self-appointed goat runner, bringing goats back to the paddock (pasture) when they were done. If you’d like to vicariously milk a goat with Stephanie, check out the video we made of the process on her post, How to milk a goat.
Testing the milk
After the morning milking and before breaking for lunch at 1, we’d help with various chores in the gardens, including staking peas, digging up thistle in the pastures, cleaning out animal stalls, pulling up kale roots, weeding carrots and parsnips, and harvesting fava beans and peas for the market. Then we’d take the afternoon off before the evening milking and dinner.
Long shadows on a dirt road
The food was hearty, filling, and largely homemade. Breakfast was toasted slices of dense whole wheat bread, butter, jam, and tea. Lunch was a combination of leftovers from dinner with bread and cheeses made from the goat milk (chevre and feta). Dinner ran the gamut: spinach quiche, roasted vegetables, lamb chops (hoggit raised on their farm), pasta with vegetables. Potatoes were a frequent side dish, often simply boiled, as were stir-fried leafy-greens. Most nights there was a dessert: fresh fruit crumble, “pudding” with ice cream, chocolate cake. The farm supplied the bulk of the food (fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese), and the rest was supplemented with things from the store (flour, pasta, sugar, butter, peanut butter, oil, tea) and things they got from other farmers/food-producers in trade.
Friday was my last day at Federated Media. How can I sum up four years of memories? I’m not sure I really have the words right now. So I decided to dig back into the photo archive, primarily Flickr, and post a few of my favs. If I’m leaving out any obvious winners, please post a link in the comments. Enjoy.
Two weekends ago, Stephanie and I drove up to visit Terrie who’s living in a yurt at the Bodega Goat Ranch.
A few words about me and Terrie. We first met in San Diego in 2005 at ETech. My friend Patrick saw a job posting about something to do with Blogging and RSS and thought of me. It turns out Terrie was looking for a new web producer at O’Reilly. I had a brief interview with her there, and then flew up to San Francisco to interview with the rest of the team. Not only did Terrie take me on a tour of Sebastopol, Petaluma, and Santa Rosa, but she also let me crash at her place. O’Reilly offered me the job, I moved to California, and the course of my life was forever altered.
A year later I left O’Reilly for Federated Media, and the story should have ended there. But for some reason it didn’t. Terrie started doing these interesting things. She got chickens. She left O’Reilly, but not for another job. She moved into a yurt. On a goat farm. Where they make cheese. So even though our professional paths diverged, our non-work interests only seemed to converge.
Which goes part of the way towards explaining how, two Sundays ago, we found ourselves visiting Terrie and holding baby goats.
One day I would like to write a post called “test-driven development for web applications”. So apologies to anyone who came here looking for that. Because I have no idea what that is. But maybe you do? Please feel free to leave a comment.
I would also like to write a tutorial called “how to write unit tests for web applications” because almost every example I’ve come across (and I admit, I have not looked hard) of how to write unit tests tends to involve obvious classes like BankAccount or abstract classes like ObjectFactory. Sheesh.
At work I help lead the development of a web application written in PHP on top of a MySQL database. More than a year ago we decided: “we need unit tests”. So we took the typical approach and used PHPUnit to generate a stub for each of our core “model” classes. Starting with the shortest and easiest classes I began writing tests. What a pain in the ass. The one good thing that came out of it is that I made it possible to do a single command install of our codebase.
