I know I’m supposed to be working for money, but I still like it when I get to go home early. It’s like being flooded out of school and all of a sudden having a day to yourself. At Camp Nasties (my previous farm), it was my job to hand out raincoats and what have you in the event of heavenly leakage. Everyone would continue picking in the rain until it got really heavy or rising rivers threatened to flood us out. But these days, once we get soaked through after a couple of minutes, we’re usually good to go home for the day. Today, I started at 6 and knocked off at 9.
It’s a smaller farm (smaller picking troupe), but there are a couple of characters starting to make themselves apparent. Firstly there’s Michael, foreman/Executive Picker. He’s probably only in his fourties, but he looks older, skinnier and greyer from the cigarettes he smokes (and whatever else he’s done). Dislikes police, government, slackers and lots of other things. From what I gather, he’s been in prison, got teenage kids, a wife and perhaps another woman who’s sucking his money away. That’s not so uncommon on the farms. Yesterday, on inspecting one of my first full crates of mangoes, “It’s not bad. You could prolly make a brothel out of it.” A brothel? From a crate of mangoes? “Yeah, just put a red light over it and she be right”. I didn’t really get that. Today, every clap of thunder was a bus rolling over and killing a dozen pretty ladies inside. “That’s alright though coz they’re prolly young virgins. No good to me – I like ‘em a little older meself”
Then there’s Ben. He’s my age, thinking about going to uni sometime soon to do agriculture science. He claims he can see it being big business soon; I have a hunch that he thinks so because his religous beliefs predict an imminent apocolypse followed by times of happines, sunshine and smiling families with full stomachs everywhere. Ben’s pretty good – having work ethic and half a mind go quite a way.
Anyway, what did I do for the rest of the day?
Loaded up the communal computer with the latest Ubuntu release, works like a charm as far as I’m concerned. The household idiots are still clueless though. De-clucked some chickens. It’s a problem when there are delusional chickens who act like they’re sitting on eggs when really they’re not. The lucky ladies were sent to the Cairns Regional Declucking Facility, conveniently located in our backyard. How does it work? It’s a bare cage in which the birds stay for a couple of days until they gain a sense of reality. It’s like a mental institution for birds.
This specimen wasn't pleased to be moved on
The new puppy went off to the vet and the rest of him came back to spend the evening limping around instead of jumping, licking and running. “Oh Rocco, there’s nothing there!” Erin (sister) and I reviewed videos of last night’s efforts to stop our father from being grumpy by introducing triangles into his meal. We chopped and arranged everything in a triangular fashion, based on the notion that triangles make people happy. We think it worked, but we had to wait 12 hours for the desired result. Then we got down to some improvisational old time dance. Here are some video stills:
Symptoms of grumpiness include abrupt departures
Let's try some triangles
...like this one?
Triangulated mango, salad, cucumber and rice for father
Dancing the night away
We broke a sweat dancing after a couple of minutes because it was so hot and sticky. Not because we were unfit.
I should go to bed. I might be getting called in for mango duty tomorrow morning if the weather’s good.
