Friday May 27th, 2016

The exercise:

Write four lines of prose about something that is: infinite.

So many strawberries, you guys. Don't have an exact number, but we used up our remaining pints (around 137) and then switched to quarts (approximately 84 maybe?) because we've been unable to get more (quarts hold about 1.5 pints). Hopefully our order will come in before next Friday.

Anyway. I'll try to get an accurate count before they start selling tomorrow morning. I had help picking them from Adam, Becky, her friend Angela who arrived with her two boys for a visit yesterday, Kat's parents, and I think the kids might have done a bit of picking too at some point.

I got out there around 7:15 this morning, went until almost 1 (with a couple breaks), got back out after lunch around 1:30, and finished around 4. The truck is packed up, we just need to get the berries out of the cooler in the morning and we'll be on our way.

I'm going with Adam. Wanted to bring Max too but we're going to be busy and unable to give him the attention he needs. Need a slower market or an extra person for him to be there. Next week won't be slower, but we'll likely have more people to deal with strawberries and the first cherries.

But first... let's get through tomorrow morning. Here we come Penticton. I hope you're ready for some strawberries.

Mine:

Time stretches out beyond the horizon. Movements begin to loop, each motion repeating endlessly until it is impossible to tell when they begin and when they end. Every breath is a chore, as you wonder whether life is really worth living anymore.

"Sweetie, Mr. Garvey's math class is not that bad."

2 comments:

Greg said...

That is an impressive amount of strawberries, though pints still don't make any sense to me (a volume measurement for something that's not a liquid? Next you'll be measuring birthdays in metres). However, I'm guessing that with about seven hours of picking you must have picked something like 12kg of strawberries – and that really is impressive! I hope the market all goes well (I'll read the next post shortly and find out how it went).
Hmm, my maths classes were definitely better than Mr. Garvey's sound!

Infinity
I like telling people about infinity because of the properties it has that ordinary numbers don't have. For example, 1 + infinity is not the same thing (or even the same size) as infinity + 1, and 2 * infinity is smaller than infinity + 1 again too. It's actually really easy to show this on a whiteboard in a few minutes using every day language and concepts... and somehow that just seems to make it harder for people. It's as though infinity doesn't want to be understood by laypersons :)

Marc said...

Greg - haven't I told you that I'm 500 metres old? :P

I would like to see you try to explain this to me using a whiteboard. I would put money on it taking more than a few minutes. Maybe put more money on me still not getting it at the end :)