Watch your feet

Adventuring rule #17: Touch the turkey. Touch it. 

     Farming is a cheerful pastime, right? All those hours in the sunshine, working with the earth and the animals. The clock is the sunshine and life is run by the weather. Oh, the charms. And the crazy hard work and long hours. I visited a kind of farm last weekend. There was definitely something in the air. But it might have been the smell of turkey poo. There was a lot on the ground, according to Keith. Those are his hands in the photo.

     When I dropped by with the tall friends at  a free range turkey ranch run by Keith's family, the season's load was just arriving. I was handed a chirping box and told to follow the line of helpers making their way into the long building.

     These are baby turkeys, called poults. At two weeks old, they made their way from their mamas or their hatching places into a number of plastic bins. From there the bins are stacked and loaded into trucks and shipped to farms, where they'll have time to grow into big Thanksgiving birds. Then we eat them.

An inconvenience

Adventuring rule #16: Let someone else be the grownup. It's cool. 

     "I just got my teeth back three days ago!"

     These are the things you hear when you wait outside a pharmacy counter at Raley's. I was waiting for the kind pharmacists to fill my prescription. Getting to this stage, however, was complicated.

     I'm one of those fortunate individuals who has always had medical insurance. Always. It was something I relied on, like having food and shoes. I was cut off from my parent's coverage, unfortunately, when I graduated from college. So the antibiotics I needed to battle a lingering sinus infection were on my own tab. My limited college-graduate-spending-the-summer-in-Europe budget is being stretched in these final days before takeoff.

Ending an Era

Adventuring rule #15:  Celebrate all achievements, even ones you knew would happen. 

     The final 24 hours of my life as a college student included the following:
Some are original, some are tradition. The timing, however, was all new.

Procrastinating, because packing sucks.

Wine. As always.

Watching youtube videos and reading blogs. That's a given.

Crying. I'm told this is a major life transition, but it involves a lot more tissues than I anticipated.