Monday, April 17, 2006

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!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's close to a quarter of a million apples.
So if everyone in NZ ate just one of them, you could say you fed one in every eight people in the country!

Anonymous said...

Oops, I should have said one in every 16 people. (But who would have noticed anyway...)

Anonymous said...

Who would notice ummmm some smart parent, I would have believed him Rebekah as he is the math teacher.hehe.
I have counted the judder bars that the bus has to go over each day cause they seem to keep appearing every day in the same place, saying ha ha see if you can get around me. I couldn't so counted them 21 in the morning and the same[amazingly] in the afternoon. Then when the bus needed fuel there were another 6, laughing at the bus.Enough counting, glad you have had fun and met heaps more people, heaps of love,
Kiwi.