Getting and Spending

We've been home from our mission for almost three weeks: 19 days in which we have spent a lot of money. On our mission we bought food. We spent our time doing things other than getting and spending. We've pretty much made up in three weeks for the eighteen months of abstinence. I think Wordsworth was right, "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; (Little we see in nature that is ours....)

Yes, the 23 year old carpeting had to go, and the tile countertops, too. Wallpaper has gone out of vogue and it's now back in, but I'm not trying to catch up with the latest. I'm over it. The Bagley house was due for an update, and is getting one in the next few weeks; but the time and energy involved in making these changes has been significant and I'll be glad to return to life without consumerism.

I realize since being home how materialistic our society is. We are bombarded by temptations to spend money almost at every turn, and we haven't turned on the TV but once in the time we've been home. We haven't subscribed to a newspaper. We throw away the junk mail without reading it. I think it's just the the presence of so many stores, and so many things in those stores that is overwhelming. Do I need this, might I need that? Objects that I didn't know existed before seem to clamor for my attention.

And then there's the internet. I've been up for an hour an a half this morning. I like to read my email and check in with FaceBook before hitting the scriptures and my journal. An hour and a half! With five minutes of real email and two minutes of catching up with friends and family online. That leaves eighty-three minutes of being a consumer. Eighty-three wasted minutes. I might as well have been watching TV. Despite 'unsubscribing' from every commercial email I receive, I still sift through many messages urging me to take advantage of this fabulous offer or that incredible bargain every day. If I click on a website hoping to select a good color for bedroom walls, suddenly I'm subscribed to every home decorating and furnishing store ready to meet my needs. And the angst of customers fearful of making the wrong color choice is there for me to read about. I now have several more to unsubscribe from just by that one click.

I should have been a pioneer. Nothing to buy.

BUT: two weeks later, here's what our house is starting to look like~~

Homeward Bound

First go to this link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaQYQnrPgSM

Did you listen to it?!! Do it now.

Nostalgia is my favorite minor key. I've always been a homesick girl down deep.

When I was young I'd try to spend the night at Grandma's--just our two yards and a dirt road between us, but I would look out her upstairs bedroom window at the lights of my own cozy home and want to be there so fiercely that I'd tiptoe down the stairs, out the back door and brave the dark to run home--being chased by bears.

I love being home. I'm a homebody. (In Chile, I'm a casera) Fortunately, I've been able to live all over the world and have kind of learned to "bloom where I'm planted," but I've always been eager at the end to go home. With less than three weeks until we get on that plane, I'm indulging my inner homesick child. Enjoy the music. (Maybe someone will help me make hot links so you don't have to cut and paste.) Suggest other songs to really get me bawling, as I did when singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" with the Officer Wives Skylarks in the Philippines in 90 degree heat.

Homeward Bound (Not Simon and Garfunkle but Tabernacle Choir's version) link above
Oh Home Beloved, LDS Hymn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay_b-r1WeGw
New World Symphony Dvorak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOX15agZ3-0
Bring Him Home:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-ypIhY42-o
The Road Home: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbwhSP3ZIq4
I'll Take you Home Again, Kathleen
Sappy song, but I can't resist Johnny Cash and Elvis crooning my demise
           Johnny Cash  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK1OZZ-TOuM
           Elvishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEHnzFC7M9A

From Olives to Olive Oil

After the truck dumps the olives, workers judge the ripeness of the particular load. The mix of green and purple indicates what the balance of flavors will be: bitter, fruity, grassy, etc. North Americans, who use relatively little olive oil prefer a blander taste than Spaniards and Italians who enjoy a more robust flavor. More green olives = more grassy, amargo (bitter) taste. I'm starting to really like flavor in my olive oil. The greener the better in my book! 

This batch of olives has a good blend of the ripe (purple) fruit with the less ripe (green) olives.

Conveyor belts move the fruit from the basement to a series of points where it is washed, leaves and non-olivey objects are separated out and into a series of machines that shake, rattle and roll (just kidding--I have no idea what happens, but it involves mashers and centrifuges and magic but NO HEAT). Don't let the three people who have explained it to me know that I suggested I didn't understand the process completely!

 This slurry gets refined and separated every step along the way---

.....until wah-lah! Olive oil!!

 The oil is stored for a time in the tanks with legs and a funnel-like base for any water or solids to sink to the bottom and be drained off and then in gigantic tanks (over a million gallons of storage capacity in these 40 tanks) in a climate-controlled room ready to be sold to wholesalers and exported.

This is the General Manager and Company Vice President and family that we love. Just having a tour with the commoners...... Austin prides himself on making funny faces, Dakota has redeemed that name for me, Madi is just eleven and knitting socks because I'm an awesome teacher and Dillon wanted a short list of things for his birthday--the last thing on the list was, "Bagleys." How could you not love him?

So once the oil has been extracted, some byproducts have to be dealt with. The pits become this material in my hand, piles of which are in the other two pictures. It is burned in the bio-masa red machine to provide energy for the plant~ very efficient and resourceful! I'm not sure what happens to the leaves and twigs, but it's an impressively small pile in comparison with the pit material.

The sloppy olive mash after the oil is extracted gets loaded on a truck and hauled to an area of the fundo where it's hilly and wild. There's quite a quantity of this residue, but a large area for it. It looks like a river of tar and smells woody and rich at this point. The wild horses seem to enjoy eating it. 

Watch for Chilean olive oil in your local grocery store. It's being sold to companies who will bottle it under their own label, but for the last two years, it was bottled and given as gifts under the label ARC (AgroReservas de Chile) with a picture of Noah's ark. The purpose of this farm is investment in the land, primarily, but also to produce food reserves in times of need. I'm happy we won't have to rely on Crisco for our fat allotment in a famine, aren't you?

Harvest! The culmination of a year's worth of work and anticipation

The harvest is going on night and day for about a month. Last year was the first mechanical harvest, with "try it out" equipment and very limited scope. I'm just remembering a day or two.

When all the trees are producing, it is estimated that these harvesters be operating for 70 days, 24 hours a day. 

This year, there are three behemoth harvesters that drive right over the trees, snarfing up the olives and leaving the leaves and branches pretty much intact. Olives go through the tall arm into a bin (metal with green framing) driven in the adjacent row. When this container is full, it dumps the fruit into larger trailers parked along the road.

A few of the small end trees suffered as drivers learned how to maneuver the harvesters.

  Overhead shot of a bin just beginning to fill up.

Truckloads of olives come first to the reception building where the load is weighed and data is collected. Then the olives are dumped into a chute to the basement where the fruit begins the process of becoming olive oil.

We have heard different reports about the harvest, but so far it looks wildly successful. Anywhere from 1/3 more than expected to four times the expectation. The workers are exhausted, the wives are weary (we've done guard-dog duty staying overnight at homes where hubby wasn't home) and the lights don't seem to go out in the fields or the mill; but after this week it should be done. It's 11:30 at night and I just heard another truck rumbling by. Thrilling!

Millions and Millions and Millions of Trees

 The baby trees are grown in a nursery and come to the farm in these boxes. Workers with various tractors and disks first prepare the soil, then others lay irrigation tubes. They place bamboo poles in mathematically perfect rows--by measuring and by "eyeballing," as Mom would say, so that the planters know just where to place each tree.

After the ground is watered for a day, one by one, all six million+ trees are planted by hand. Last year, we were told that the fastest workers could plant a thousand trees in a day. With improved soil preparation and having the protective bags already on the trees, now we hear that they are planting at twice that rate! Eventually, plastic-coated wires are strung to connect the "bamboos" and each tree is tied to the wire.

Here's what the vineyard looks like after a couple of years growth, some pruning and much work.

Besides growing trees, the farm has to move water, lots and lots of water, even though the trees only get it a drip at a time.You can see two of the big water storage lagunas. The farm has 34 wells with computerized pumps and irrigation systems and a number of these lagunas. (The building is the oil processing plant and office building being built. Our Learning Center is part of the itty bitty looking building to the left of the gigantic building.)

 The green in the photo below looks like grass--but it's thousands of trees that are 2-3 years old. 

If you look closely, you can see the new rows of trees in the foreground.

 A little tree doing its best....

Trees less than a year old with the "almasara" olive mill building in the background. With those hills and sky is it any wonder this feels like home to us?

Visitors: the Prequel

Yes, we did have visitors before the boys. JuliaAnne and Saundra were here for a whirlwind few days (Saundra) and slightly more than a week (Ju). It was wonderful! First, just seeing Julianne so healthy and fit and energetic after last years' scare was such a relief. It bathed the entire time for me in joy and gratitude. We took long walks, she took long runs, we visited everyone we know here, they saw our teaching and missionarying and we were able to take some interesting side trips as well.

 We started off by overwhelming them with a supersized completo from La Plancha--at least a foot long hot dog smeared with avocado and tomatoes. Then we overwhelmed them with seeing nearly seven million trees at different stages of growth. Predictably, Saundra contributed to the planting effort. Seven trees closer to seven million!

We ate pastel de choclo and empanadas in Pomaire, tried to get up to the Andes, succeeded in finding the ocean--they jumped right in!--and ate at a Chilean food all you can eat cafeteria before sending Saundra off at the airport.  We stayed up late enough and slept in long enough that I don't think jet lag was a factor. At least, I hope not, because she was the featured speaker at a big event in Logan the day she got home. We love her so much for coming!!!

 We took off for Valparaiso and Viña del Mar after teaching one evening. Jay made reservations sight unseen and held his breath. When we had a hard time finding it in the narrow 45 degree steep streets, Julianne went into a little corner tienda to ask directions. The shopkeeper had NO IDEA, but eventually, after backing up a one-way street for two blocks to make way for a truck, we eventually found the Art Deco Hotel......two doors down from the shopkeeper who hadn't heard of the place.

 It was charming and comfortable and it was fun to observe Jay's relief in the morning at the continental breakfast when he saw regular tourists and not a bunch of drug-dealers and hookers. He kept saying, "This hotel has people from Europe! Nice people!" Valparaiso is old and fabulous and run-down and eclectic: wonderful contrasts. We found the cemetery where there's a memorial for Parley P. Pratt's infant son, Omner, who died when PPP was there attempting to spread the Gospel without a grasp of Spanish and without anything written in Spanish for the locals to read. He left vowing to rectify the later before another attempt. The baby, not being Catholic, was considered a "disident." It's actually a nice cemetery, and happily, was a short walk from our hotel. As was the Holy Ghost Lift that I wrote about in another blog. I so love those ancient mechanical elevators!

Viña del Mar, is upscale, modern and fabulous in a different way. It has a museum of historical artifacts--including one of the moai from Isla de Pascua (Easter Island), lots of beautiful beaches, hotels and restaurants. JuliaAnne had to take another dip in the ocean at Viña just because it was there.

It's hard to get a bad picture of a beautiful person, but we managed to with this eyes-closed shot of our Hoolie, but here she is at the Santiago Temple before flying home. Thank you, Paul, for giving us the gift of time with our little redhead.