Funny Farm

So the NAB has volunteer days, and today was one of those days! Our support team of 10 (plus or minus 2) headed off to the Collingwood Children's Farm! Yippee! Well not yippee really, I was quite dreading this day as I'd been ill for the previous week, and it didn't really seem fun spending your first day back at work actually doing manual work on a farm. But I'd have to state that it ended up being a very good experience!

I also woke up later which was a good thing :) I had to be there at 10, and I didn't expect that there'd actually be less traffic when I left the house at quarter to 9. It probably took me longer to get out of my suburb than to cross the city and get to Collingwood. Freakin' parents drive dangerous man... Don't underestimate the willpower of parents getting their kids to school to get rid of them.

Anyway I get to the farm. And for a Collingwood Children's Farm, it didn't look like they were farming many children. No children in their pens, no little kiddie houses, no fields with kids you pull out of the cabbage patch! *shakes head*

I mean there were produce, and animals and there are chicks everywhere! As in chickens hahaha, lots of hot, hot, plump chicks moving around and it's quite amazing that a place like that exists pretty close to the middle of the city. Not that there aren't plenty of hot chicks running around in the Melbourne CBD, but that fact that it's kind of situated a bit lower down in altitude kinda blocks out the whole city outside of the perimeter. So it's like you're out in the bush, but the air is still incredibly bad.

And the Chickens were HUUUUUGGEE!!!! Like they're on steroids! But they're not, and that's why they're so big! The geese were big too! I didn't know they actually go honk! I'd only ever heard it in movies, and in the Babe movie, they're actually talking geese, and I hear people like them every time I go on the train.

Honk honk!

There's always been one thing that's been kinda shying me away from farms though. It's all the crap. There is so much crap on a farm it is not funny. Well it is funny if someone steps on it, and they set it alight, but apart from that, I think that there are only a handful of scenarios where crap is funny. I must have spotted like 15 different types of crap there and only spotted like 8 animals. Little round ones, large round ones, small oblong ones, and some large and amorphous ones that you just can't avoid, unfortunately...

You also can't avoid sticks. How many sticks can a farm actually have?!?! The main activity for the day was to build a massive bonfire for a Winter Solstice festival that they're having. Solstices occur when the length of day is equivalent to the length of the night, so it means that the day time will lengthen again after that, woohooo! More daylight! So we took a bunch of hours moving a pile of sticks (varying from twigs to trunks) from one pile, to an even bigger pile 3 metres away. The strange thing is why didn't they just put it all on the spot just 3 metres away?! Hmm... *scratches head* But out support team did it quicker than they expected, and that's what it's all about at the NAB right? (Yes, do everything as quickly as possible so that we can have lunch sooner, hehehe)

And we got to set alight a bonfire of our own with the left over sticks. Boy, there were so many sticks left over that we could have built 2 more of the original pile.

So now I smell of sweat and smoke from doing manual labour for the day, warming by an open fire, walking around on a farm, exposed to fresher air, and spending the day with animals and people. I had a headache when I got home, but I'm glad that I'm home. I'm sitting in front of this monitor, using my hands to type as opposed to shovelling, raking or grabbing sticks and more sticks. The lovely fluorescent bulb lighting the room and typing messages to people as opposed to talking to them. I'll wake up tomorrow morning to go to an office to look at another monitor and be lit by this cold white light again.

Ahh... better than any farm. Or is it...?