ONE

"My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now."

Robert Frost: After Apple-Picking (1914)

TWO

a maths problem for someone mathematical to solve:

each day i wear a bag that i put apples into. once when i was bored i counted how many apples it took to fill that bag. 100. once my bag is full i put it into a big bin. it takes about 20 bags to fill that bin. eric and i fill the bin together. over a day we would average about 9 bins. our record was 11. weve been doing this for 5 or 6 days a week for nearly two months now. thats a lot of apples eh?

how many?

heh.

THREE

so my orchard days are drawing to a close. its been a good experience - weve met lots of fun people from all sorts of walks of life who are all picking apples for very different reasons. weve worked in the hot sun, the rain and nearly in a frost (apparantly it was nothing like a frost but there was snow in the mountains behind us, i could see my breath on the air and the apples felt like ice cubes - or ice spheres i suppose). its been fun - ive learnt all about apples (how they sunburn and bruise and get punctured from stems and grow 1mm a day) and will never see them in the same light again! i will also never buy an apple from a supermarket again - they are in bad condition there! for casual work the pay is decent too - wed average $15 an hour easily, if not more like $18 an hour which isnt bad at all for my first experience on an orchard.

two days left! then eric and i head down the west coast to experience some real west coast wilderness and rain!