Still Lazy, After All These Years.

The Bible says Jesus cursed a fig tree. He wasn't the last.



One of the problems with spending the day with a three year-old, is that when he thinks something that he is doing is funny, he thinks it's as funny the one hundredth or one thousandth time, as he did the first time.

Suppose for instance, that you are covering you grandfather's face with all the pillows from the sofa. We had one solid hour of uproarious laughter. On his part, at least.

And of course also we played my favorite game, "Lookit, Grandpa, lookit!"

The little hyena was awake until 11:30 pm last night and woke up at 7:30 am, this morning. I have high hopes that he will be turning in early this evening

While Sneedlet and I were working outside pulling weeds today, I was remembering the crappiest job I ever had. I have had some beauts, generally all short-lived.

For two years, while I was in high school, we lived in the San Joaquin Valley of California. During the harvest time, the state of California would put out the call for people who wanted to make extra money, picking produce. The drill was that you would show up at the employment office at the crack of dawn and stand around waiting for someone to come and offer you a gig for the day picking stuff.

Every couple of weeks, my friend Bob and I would decide to give picking another try. We always hoped that it had improved as a money-making scheme since the last time we failed at it. We failed a lot and each experience taught us nothing. Things never improved. Being an agricultural laborer is hard, dirty and underpaid work.

One time we cut grapes for six hours and split eleven bucks. Another time it was almonds (no money), strawberries (backbreaking) and figs, the worst of the lot.

One of the problems with being a day-picker, is that the grower would pick you up at the employment office in a truck or a bus and then drop you off at the end of the day. Once at the fields, you were stuck there. For a couple of malingerers like us, this was always a problem.

The almond woman picked us up in her car and drove us to her almond grove, which doubled as her front yard. It was just Bob and me, because it turned out, the professional pickers knew to avoid almonds.

The harvesting process involves a machine that shakes the tree, causing the almonds to fall off. The pickers collects them up off the ground, being certain that only almonds made it into the collection boxes. Not too much fun. After a couple of hours we saw the futility in it and quit. The old broad refused to pay us or to drive us back to town. We hitched home, having wasted the day.

When we signed up to harvest the figs, we had on short-sleeve shirts, which turns out to be the single biggest mistake an aspiring fig picker can make. The farmer told us not to get on the bus, but we did anyway. Literally on the first fig we picked, it became clear why this was a poor idea. These figs oozed a fuzzy juicy stuff that itched like a son-of-a-gun. We had gloves, but our bare arms were a mess.

The way the pay worked was that we got a few cents per flat (box) and when we had filled ten flats, we took them to the supervisor, who recorded the total. At the end of the day, they settled up. I got about five or six boxes filled before I quit. I gave my flats to a young kid who was out picking me three or four to one anyway. Bob followed my lead a bit later. We wound up hitching home, broke and very dirty.

Back to the Sneedlet news. I gave him his dinner, gave him a bath, he got into bed and is asleep. It is only 7:40. This is good, really good.













Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky


Tag: Daily Life
Personal Finance
Humor