About a month ago one of our locals and I had a conversation while patrolling about how I like milk and cheese, mostly because we use powder milk here and have weird squeaky cheese (named for the squeaky noise it makes when you eat it). Well, during the next week he brought me a jar of fresh milk from his work, he works on a ranch with cows, horses, and pigs. He also told me that next month, when he had to milk cows again, he was going to bring me with him so I would learn to milk cows.
Well fast forward to current time, and it was time for me to go learn to milk my own cow. After a night of patrolling and taking care of babies I was up and ready to go up to the ranch at 5 AM, I got way to little sleep that night. Santos came by and picked me up from the house and I jumped on the back of his motorcycle and headed up into town.
Upon our arrival, one of his friends/coworkers was already herding the cattle up to the barn that we were going to milk them at. There were 12 females and one male walking up the road to greet us, and when we got to the barn there were 12 calfs waiting to be fed. I'm curious as to what time Santos' friend got to the ranch because it seemed like so much had already been set up for us to go, we just needed to go grab the buckets. The calfs were kept in a separate pin and eagerly awaited to be let out to find their momma to be fed. Each calf was let out one at a time they would start to feed and then would be tied up away from the momma cow and the momma's back legs were tied together so she didn't kick us or the bucket of milk.
I was very shocked, milking a cow is not quiet as hard as I would have thought. Except, it takes a lot of hand and forearm strength, I'm surprised carpal tunnel is not a big problem for these guys. We collected two 5 gallon buckets of milk from the cows and each guy was able to take home a few liters of milk to their families. And I got to have cafe con leche with very fresh milk.
After we finished milking the cows I'm pretty sure Santos grabbed a huge shovel to go clean up the poop from the cows in the barn, but I was sent with his friend to go hang out with the pigs, so I will never know! After watching the pigs and seeing them be fed and cleaned, we made our way back to the main barn and there were two horses out! So I pet the horses for a little bit before we made our way back home.
It was 8 AM when I got home and I had already helped milk a dozen cows and fed pigs for the day! I cleaned up and crawled into bed for a little nap before getting up and getting the show running at our house. Where we had a couple visiting from San Jose and we wanted to make sure that they saw an exhumation before they headed back to the capitol. (They were extremely lucky and saw a turtle nest, babies, and the exhumation!).
Tomorrow Mom, Dad, and Miya arrive for a week in Costa Rica/Nicaragua for my visa run. I am so excited to see them! They will be in tomorrow afternoon and I think tomorrow morning will go very slowly with my anticipation of their arrival.
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