Jack of Few Trades

When we decided to travel around the world, we had a lot of ideas on how we wanted to travel. Though we were successful in certain areas like traveling ultra-light, avoiding big hotels, visiting local farmer markets, hiking where ever possible, effectively communicating with each other under life-threatening situations (well, almost!) , we weren’t very successful when it came to our desire to work and live on farms or pick up new skills (like learning new language). The desire to pick up new skills stemmed after reading 4 hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss and from the realization that apart from doing “office work”, we didn’t really have a lot of “life skills”. We wanted our lives to have diversity of experiences and connections with people from all walks of life. We figured no better way to start than on our world trip. We had signed up for a service called HelpX (similar to WOOFing) before we left on the trip. The service allows farms, B&Bs, ranch owners to invite volunteers to work in exchange of food and lodging. We emailed a few places but most of the time they didn’t have availability the week we planned to be in the area or they needed people to stay longer than we intended. We realized that in order to do HelpX, we definitely needed to stay in one place longer than a week and needed to have a better handle on where will be. If we had done a longer trip, didn’t plan to be in MANY places and weren’t deciding where to head next at the last minute, HelpX or WOOFing would definitely have been a cool experience.

After leaving my job and joining the ranks of the unemployed, I realized that more free time means more time to dabble around and learn new things…at least until your money runs out….but that’s where the hubby comes in 🙂 Over the last year in Colorado, I’ve thrown myself into a lot of things that I never really thought I’d EVER do, given my former days of sitting behind flickering computer monitors and drowning in spreadsheets. From learning to cook, to bartending, to doing food photography, to working in restaurant kitchens and at catering events, and even working on farms. Farm work required getting up ass early in the morning, which is an alien concept for me. The experience had me working all day weeding on hands and knees, harvesting bags and bags of vegetables, learning about mushroom cultivation and hydroponics and occasional killing/gutting chickens/ducks for the CSA baskets. I stayed away as far as I could from the actual killing part but I did partake in removing the organs from the recently deceased, warm chicken bodies and plucking the down feathers off of ducks. Yuck!

Getting my bartending certificate..

Dan is a happy camper since his wife can now make fancy drinks at home..

Working at a farm to table dinner event

 farm at 7.30am

Picking beans..I think I am delirious from heat and sun.

My back might hurt later but I feel happy and satisfied after a long day of harvesting veggies..

At an aquaponics facility

Gutting chickens. (I am not sure why I am wearing sunglasses while doing this..totally ridiculous)

                 Food Photography

                                                                                              Food Photography for a catering event

Watching the farmers do this back breaking labor day in and day out with a smile on their faces, made me realize how easy our desk jobs were and how ungrateful we are when we complain about the “difficulties” of our lives. I saw for the first time what working hard really meant! By the way, whenever we think about a farmer, the image that comes to mind is an older age man in his overalls with a country accent, but the farms I worked at were mostly managed and run by very young women and men who had previous careers and left them to pursue their passion of feeding healthy food to their families and local communities. I can go on and on about how amazing and badass these folks are..

Apart from getting a good workout at the farm everyday which I totally loved, I did get to do some other fun things like making and selling pizzas in a mobile pizza oven, bottling wines at a winery (okay, so maybe less bottling and more drinking..!). Now, I am clearly not an expert in any of these random things I have done lately (well, I did take a CPR class and I hope I’m closer to expert level if that skill is ever needed), but in the process I am gaining those “life skills” and getting to know what goes on behind the curtains…where our veggies comes from, where the meat comes from (not from grocery store, for sure!), how wine is produced, etc etc. I am glad that I have gained some knowledge beyond the world of Microsoft business apps and cell phone widgets 🙂

Making pizzas

There are times when it is hard to motivate yourself to do random things but I have started living my life with a motto, “if nothing else, it will be hell of a story” inspired by the words of the greatest – Mr. Clooney – from the movie Gravity. Totally cheesy stuff but hey, it works for me and pushes me to seek out interesting experiences and people.
In following the words of wisdom from my mentor, Mr. Clooney, my latest venture is working on a pink mexican food truck named Tina.  Honk, honk!

 Now all I am missing are some skull tattoos.

Yup, I get to drive it too!  I know what you are thinking, let me assure you…”I CAN REACH THE DAMN PEDALS”