Written sometime mid-October
The normal day at Ueda’s, described in short, interrogative statements:
6:40 wake up! Help with breakfast, watch the news and weather
7:30 do the goats! Alone, it takes until about 10:30, and consists of feeding, watering, and milking all the goats (8 at the moment, plus 3 kids and 1 adult male), along with cleaning out the pens, feeding the ducks who live next door to the goats (DUCKS=LOUD,SMELLY!), cleaning out the milking place, and making the goats’ dinner. The goats all have names and pretty distinct personalities, which makes milking them all the more fun and interesting! None of them kick except the biggest, named Ribbon-chan (the queerness factor rises by the second), but other than her they’re all nice and easy. I only hand-milk each about three times; after that, there’s a little motor in the wall of the milking pen, and it sucks up all the milk through an elaborate series of tubes. Like the internet! Harharhar; but seriously, it takes a few minutes depending on how old they are.
Now that it’s mating season the schedule is a bit different, since the big male goat we used to have (now replaced) was a little aggressive, and, along with the massive Beelzebub-esque horns, Mieko was too freaked out to let me do the cleaning alone. So it takes a little less time, with her help.
10:45 go to the restaurant! Along with owning the goats and running a guest house, Ueda-sensei and Mieko also run a Japanese-style noodle restaurant and a working patisserie in which they sell all the sweets they make at home. Working at the restaurant is just, basically, the coolest thing I could possibly be doing. I get to waitress and say “Omatase-itashimashita!” (“I”ve kept you waiting!”) when I bring customers their food, and when people come in I get to yell “IRASSHAIMASEEE!” (“WELCOME!”). Unfortunately, a new road was recently built which transferred almost all the old traffic away, and so we only have about 4 or 5 customers during the day, at most. Luckily, this means that working there is virtually stress-free, and around 1 Mieko and I take an hour break to just talk and enjoy sweets and soda from the bakery. Milking cool goats and studying animal behavior? Yelling festive phrases in Japanese? Eating delicious food every day? Getting to eat as much cake and drink as much melon soda as I could possibly hold in a sitting? Shouldn’t I be paying for this?!?!
3:00 close up shop! After we finish cleaning up the restaurant, Mieko rarely just takes us home; out of the roughly 12 days I’ve been here, probably 8 or 9 times we did something before finally returning home, such as: visiting Mieko’s rich aunt so she would buy Mieko meat (?); going to the neighboring prefecture to buy organic vegetables and ending up watching a lion-dog dance during the neighborhood’s annual festival for three hours; stopping to get two big bowls of udon noodles “because it’s only 120yen;” and, of course, driving up into the mountains to pick up a huge male goat for mating, whom we tied to the back of the truck and paraded through town.
4:30 do the goats, again! No milking in the evening; just feeding and watering and making breakfast.
6:00 eat!!!
7:00 take a bath and sleep!
Comments