Friday June 12th, 2015

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about being: pushed around.

That's how I felt while picking strawberries and raspberries this afternoon in very, very strong winds. The raspberries were especially fun, what with the canes blowing all over the place, keeping berries out of reach and thorny bits dancing around my face.

Totals for the day: 20 pints of strawberries, 27 pints of raspberries. My feeling at the moment is that was the final major strawberry pick of the year, which I'm more than ready for. Kat also harvested five bags worth of snow peas and her parents got the... what was it again?

Ah, right. Cherries. Eighteen crates of them. And they're planning on getting us two or three more before I pack up the truck tomorrow morning.

It's going to be a busy market. Good thing Kat's brother and Rebecca will be chipping in to help get us through it. Wish us luck!

Mine:

After far too many years, he had finally grown tired of his treatment. Forced to go this way and that at the whim of others, never consulted as to which direction he wished to go in. No more, at last.

It was time for the grocery cart to lose a wheel and be left to his own devices.

2 comments:

Greg said...

How many kilos of cherries are there to a crate then? I tend to think of crates as being tea-chest sized, but I suspect that that might be rather too large for a market stall :) But still, that's an impressive haul for the market, and I hope they sell out just as fast as last week!
Picking the raspberries doesn't sound like fun in the high winds. I guess there's nothing to tie the canes to while you try and pick from them?
I did like the punchline to your tale this week. Very fitting :)

Pushed around
"I've never liked being pushed around," said the presenter, "and I know what you're all thinking: he's in a wheelchair! He hasn't got a choice! Well, that's all about to change, as I've invented an engine that runs off the ambient heat at room-temperature. It can take a wheelchair carrying a two-hundred pound man from 0-85mph in thirteen seconds, generate enough thrust to get up three flights of stairs, and power a trucker's klaxon to give fair warning to the vic – I mean, pedestrians in the way."

Marc said...

Greg - about twenty pounds per crate (I'll let you do the rest of the math). And we were bound to sell out closer to the end of the market since there isn't really a limit on how much we could bring, unlike the berries. I learned last year that 20 was close to the right number and we decided to bump it up another one this year. I'm thinking next year we might go for 25 on the first cherry market... as long as we have enough bodies at the stall to do it!

I always end up wishing I had three or four hands when I pick raspberries. But yeah, I usually put the pint on the ground, hold the cane I'm picking from with one hand, and pick with the other. Sometimes I get my shoulders and forearms in there to hold off other canes when I'm picking from the middle.

Hah, I quite like this presenter. His little slip up at the end there... well, I hope it doesn't prevent him from going forward with his design!