Another day, another dollar

I can feel work slowing down. Day by day, there is less and less to to do and we spend more time at the end of the days looking, or avoiding looking, for work. I don't know if its a good or bad thing really. It can be kinda nice not to be crawling around the floor all day, but I hate just pacing around looking for sails that aren't there, especially when there are alot of other people in the loft working. I think that's the problem really, not working when others are. Even if there really aren't sails to be put together I see other people doing stuff and feel like I should be helping, or at least not standing around.

Oh well, so it was kinda a slow day today. Although, we got in some sails that were made in South Africa and all we had to do was put on the luff and measure them. Interesting side note about sails from Africa; they have to get sprayed with insecticide that smells like diesel and after about an hr they kinda make your head and stomach hurt. Also, they are a hundred times cleaner than the ones that come out of our loft, and less wrinkled, which makes me think we should be taking more steps to keep the loft clean so the sails don't come out looking used.

Anyway, enough of business. It's almost Friday!! Wahoo, I'm excited. Although, the big plans for the office football match seem to have fallen through because we didn't reserve the field or some nonsense. I guess I'll find out for sure tomorrow, but either way at least its the weekend. Not sure what all I'll end up doing...at least one day, maybe tomorrow, I'll head into Barcelona and see if my friend still works at this bar called McCarthy's bar and maybe I can reclaim some phone numbers. Also I think I'm gonna do a flashback and write about "buscando setes"...Here we go~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (bet you didn't know this is what a flashback looks like)~~~~~~~~

So this last weekend was defiantly an adventure. I had been giving James a hard time about it all Friday and neither one of us could think of any reason why anyone would wake up at 8 am on a Saturday, to drive 2 hrs into the mountains to look for mushrooms. But somehow by the end of hanging out Friday night, I was going too. So the next morning, Helena, James, Alexis (James' sister), and I piled in the car for a journey into the mountains. The car ride consisted of drifting in and out of sleep while bad techno remixes played on the radio. We stopped once at a roadside diner type place and ordered some food and coffee, but it was really crowded and they took so long we just left. Finally we finally got "there". There, was the side of the road on a curve like a hundred we had passed on the way but apparently, it was the good spot to be. So we hop out, and it is much colder than I would have liked in my T-shirt, but the view is very nice. Rolling hills and mountains that go on and on and nothing but one or too small random homes with a few goats and cows milling about. The thing that immediately surprised me was that there were no fences. We just walked off the side of the road off into the hills in sight of a small cabin but no fences surrounding property the way you see along the highways of Texas.

So looking for mushrooms is just that, you tromp around with your head down searching the ground for mushrooms, but not just any....oh no...there is a special kind and nothing that I find that fits the description is right. after a few minutes of that I get a little tired of looking at the ground so I just kinda explore. It was amazing, just running around the woods in the mountains, fallowing random little creeks, and climbing up inclines. At one point I heard Helena call my name and looked down and they were all about 60 feet below me fallowing a little stream so I ran back around and met up with them again. My camera was unfortunately out of battery for this whole thing, but James and his sis got some pictures, so when I get those from them I'll put a few up.

We did find a few mushrooms...and by we I mean Helena (the mushroom authority that turned all our finds down) and by "a few" I mean 2. I guess we were out there for about 3 hrs so I don't know if it was worth the 2 mushrooms but it was defiantly worth the views. And I think I found something better anyway....a whole cow skeleton. Just laying there in the woods. At first all I saw was a giant leg bone which kinda freaked me out and then I looked a little farther down and there was the whole back and a big skull, which was much more interesting than the mushrooms. It had been dead a long time and picked pretty clean but if you got really close it still smelled pretty funky, I tried to convince James to put the skull on the front of Helena's car but he wasn't touching it and Helena would have killed him. So after that whole excitement we decided to head back which was a quite a long way especially when you don't know exactly how to get back but we did fine. At one point we actually did hit a fence out in the middle of the woods, but not like a barbwire fence or anything, just a wire that we all thought was surely electric... all of us except Helena who, before any of us could stop her, touched it. Well, she got lucky and we found out a few feet down there was a break in the wire but it was a close call. That is till we came to another one at the road that we all stopped and stared at again. All except Helena who reached out and tapped it...Again nothing. So she put her hand on it and stepped over, but as soon as she had gotten her leg over to the other side she started jumping around waving her hand and screaming....we all laughed and jumped it without touching. Apparently it had given her a pretty big jolt and burned her hand and feet, but not too bad to cause any lasting damage or anything.

So we finally got back to the car and headed to a restaurant in a very small town on the way home. Unfortunately it was full, because it smelled amazing but we were able to find another place a little farther down the road. This place was interesting, it was quite literally someones home and looked and felt it. It was as if someone had just set up alot of tables around their house and had strangers come eat....which now that I think about it is exactly what it was. It was a nice meal too, or at least mine was good, the others had a few complaints about there and eyed mine jealously, but we had a nice Spanish/English chat and then headed home. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(Flash forward looks very similar to flash back)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So that was Buscando setes, or Bolets, if you're Catalan. It was one of several stories I'll be slipping in along the way with this new semi-daily routine. I say semi-daily because tomorrow is the weekend and every rigid, disciplined routine I've come up with here disappears on the weekends so it's very likely I wont be back on till Sunday or Monday. But have no fear all you eager readers, I shall return with more interesting stories to keep you entertained while you're at work at your desk jobs or sitting in class not listening to professors. Until then I wish you all the best and ask you to pray for the well being of me and my belonging over another dangerous weekend in Barcelona.

Abrazos,
Barrett