Sunday 10/23 1145am Sora, Italy
I realize I've only been back in Sora for a few days, but it feels like a month and everything is completely back to normal and I'm pretty sure everyone has forgotten I left in the first place. I've started working in the mornings at the other farm sanding a wardrobe, so I work in the same room as Gavin and the mornings go pretty fast. I'm also positive that Antonello found this wardrobe on the side of the road and has decided to restore it... except I'm the one restoring it and it is pretty much un-fixable. The thing is missing a door and the entire bottom and it looks like the termites had a party in there before it was picked up. And I'm supposed to be cleaning and sanding it, but they put it in the same room as the jackhammering, so the cement that is filling the room is landing on the wardrobe... so no progress has been made in the past few days.
One of the last boys left the Moglie this morning so now it is Gavin and I and we are celebrating by making pancakes tonight. It is so hard to cook anything besides pasta when there are more than two people because we only have one burner, so we figured it would be super easy to make pancakes, especially for two people. I'm setting my tent up this afternoon as well because the weather has turned nicer than it was the past week and an 'insident' last night has me not wanting to sleep inside the ruin again. It pretty much has rained since I returned and created a giant mudslide from the Moglie to the farm which I had to slid down every morning. All my clothes are filled with mud and yesterday I looked completely ridiculous... and then all of a sudden, it cleared up. The other reason for wanting to sleep in my tent from now on is that last night, a friend visited the Moglie. Around 3am, we were awaken to someone or something throwing rocks at us from the ceiling. After scanning for about 10 minutes with our headlamps, we finally caught sight of our new friend... a squirrel. And he thought it was just the best thing to throw rocks at us. So for the next hour, he just threw rocks at us and dangled from the beams. So tonight, it'll be the tent for me.
Now that olive season is about to start, Gavin and I have started noticing that around the Moglie and the farm, there are thousands and thousands of olive trees that will need to be harvested. After talking to Anna (who runs the other farm they own, Via Piana) and to a few other people, we realized that a lot of people in this area will pay a bunch of money a day for people to come harvest their trees... mostly because there is no way one family can do it on their own. So Gain and I have decided that once the season starts, we are going to volunteer in the mornings at the farm like usual, but in the afternoons, we are going to go find work picking olives and being paid for it. We won't be working a full day, but Anna said that so many people need the hlp that they will take halfday workers as well. We are excited because it could mean 2 weeks of about 20 euros a day for picking olives. From what I heard, it will take two people about 2 hours to pick one tree, and with so many trees, we could definitely have work for two weeks. So, in theory, our plan is excellent, we just have to execute it now. With the help of Anna though, I think we should be able to at least get some work. It will give us something to do in the afternoons and it will give us some extra money.
