Rice Planting; or, Occupations I'm Not Cut Out For

Last fall sometime some friends and I had decided to help out a friend of ours who owns and runs an organic rice farm. The rice was ready to be harvested, so we joined him and some of his other friends to spend the day cutting, hanging, and drying rice.

So cut to several months later and it's time for us to come full circle and help with planting rice! Nicole had mentioned that it would mostly be us squishing mud through our toes and putting rice plants into some water. I had seen some Japanese Grammas and Grandpas doing some rice planting around town for the past several weeks, so I decided it couldn't possibly be that difficult.

Especially if we had the right hat. As far as I'm concerned, you can't rice farm without a rice farming hat, so we ran to the local hardware store to pick one up.

Cut to the rice patty and there we are and... well... did you know there's a lot of wild life that likes to hang out in shallow, still water? Like, a LOT of wild life. A lot of wild life that I don't like to have near me. And it wasn't until we were already there that the ever present threat of leeches made itself apparent.

"Look, Tetsuya," I told our friend, "I've got a really low leech threshold. A one leech tolerance, if you will." He just laughed. Somehow I imagine he wasn't taking me seriously.

There were also tad poles and weird beetle looking things that carry their eggs on their back (gross) and I distinctly remember stepping barefoot into a patch of grass and then having a sudden horde of spiders attack my foot.

Needless to say there was plenty of squealing from the foreigners. I admit it. I squealed. I was terrified I was going to die and painful death and quite frankly that's not how I want to go.

About 20 minutes later I've finally gotten into the swing of things. I'm up to my knees in mud, have essentially become one with the earth, and I even stopped shooing spiders away since I convinced myself that they keep mosquitoes away, and my hate for mosquitoes > my hate for spiders.

I had been doing pretty well and we'd gotten about half of the field done, when suddenly as I'm returning to grab more baby rice to put in the field, a wild leech had appeared and began attacking my foot. Much screaming and complaining later, I made it evident that that was on my one leech limit and I was done for the day.

...sure there was also a 2 year old baby playing naked and fearless in the rice field, and sure she was clearly more courageous than yours truly, but I like to believe I have more sense.

In either case we topped of the day with some lunch and a trip to the mall, having decided that we're not exactly cut out to be farmers.

No thanks, I'll take my semi-quiet office job. :)