We had a few rainy days on the weekend and Monday. We got on rain clothes (knocked the dirt and spiders out of old rubber boots) and crossed the valley to pick apples. Delia picked more higo chumbo (which Bijoyini says is prickly pear) and Siri (from Sweden) and her made mermelada out of it.

The boys are gone. It was us three girls until Wednesday and then Siri went too. There was a cold day, where I wore tights under my work pants and a skirt on top, lots of layers. But yesterday and today have been back to long sleeve shirt while working. We've picked more olives, picked madroñas (red fruit that sometimes ferments on the tree), sewed cushions covered in old Afghan woven cloth. Today we spent the first half of the morning hauling what looked like runny pig feed down to the mill where we put it into an alambique (still). A beautiful, huge old clay pot, inside the cauldron holder, fire underneath. Put a copper thingy on top with two spouts. We had to connect it up to some copper tubes going through a wall into an arched pool area. Connections were sealed with bread dough and an old rubber tired was put around the top for insulation. Hours later distilled alcohol is running out the tube that goes through the pool, into a pail below.

Pretty much every kind of fruit or jam that went bad has been put into two blue 45 gallon drums in his crazy scientist room behind the kitchen at the back of the courtyard. That's where we sacar-ed the mushy fermented stuff, into mas o menos clean pails and hauled them down here. Everything in this place is like something out of an ancient story. Homayoun himself, his way of doing things, the stuff he does, and the equipment he uses. He mentions sterilising things, but then on the outside of his bottle that's bubbling away with fermenting madronas by the fire, it is so covered with dust and grime that he can't see what level the ferment is at inside. Our jam that we made goes bad because we didn't put enough sugar in it and left it out on the table in bowls covered with plates. He tells us we are irresponsible, but pretty much everything around here is done in a kind of half-assed way, as far as cleanliness is concerned. People eat right out of the serving dish if it's something that is like a bowl of pomegranate seeds being passed around. Probably lick the jam spoon. Everybody talks about natural dirt not being dirty but then things go bad... hmm...

We still eat lunch outside. It's really quite warm here. Not warm enough to wash your hands under cold tap water in the morning and evening. I have chilblains. I am leaving tomorrow. Going to stay in a hostel in Ronda, and just put it on my credit card. Not sure where to go next. Am a bit exhausted from everything. I think of home lately, but am not sure whether that is the right decision for me.

Yesterday Diego was here with his mules. He brought us a mo-ca de caballo (horse fly - but not the same kind of horse flies we have), to prove what he'd told us: that they can take out slivers. You grab the horse fly by the body and put it over the sliver. It grabs out the sliver with its legs. I didn't have any slivers (amazingly) at that point, so the fly actually pulled out some hairs on my hand! He told us he once use a fly to get a sliver out from the inside of his lip. The slivers you get here are not nice ones like from wood or something. They are tiny, nearly invisible, break easily and cannot be dug out easily with a needle - I dug twice and ended up with only infection for a week. It is not nice working heavily with that. You end up getting slivers from all over the place.