A Day Off!

Luke finally writes on the blog…

A day off!! After what feels like many years of grading on the blueberry line, loading lug after lug (6 gallon plastic crate) of blueberries onto the “wet-line” belt we finally get our first day off in quite a while.  How did we spend it you might inquire?  Mostly sleeping would be the answer. By the time we rolled off the bed today it was after 2 o’clock in the afternoon! Mind you we didn’t go to sleep until almost 5am, getting off work at nearly 4am plus some time to clean up before walking back to our new home. 

Now you might have noticed that I said we rolled OFF the bed instead of out of it, or out of the van since that is where we had been sleeping… but recently we received some new accommodation! Greg and Allison (the amazing owners of Blueberry Country where we are currently employed) were gracious enough to ask us if we wanted to move inside somewhere.  Perhaps they were growing tired of seeing our silly little Honda Odyssey van sitting up on the hill outside their home?  So we are currently living in some old offices inside one of their big warehouse style blueberry processing facilities.  It is a beautiful…er…spacious living area.  Actually quite nice compared to the van.  About a 12 by 30 foot room split into 2 separate rooms, shelving on most walls (since it used to be a product development office and was chock full of parts and files), 3 windows (although one is boarded up and the other has no glass and just goes into another room) and a super cool bed we made out of 2 desks slid together and an assortment of pads, blankets, and camping mattresses.  I say we rolled “off” the bed because its over 3 feet off the ground, being desk height.

After a few mornings in a row of people basically kicking the door open looking for things in random places (the people that moved out come back to look for things to bring over to their new location quite frequently), we figured it was time for a lock of some sort.  The outside lock was easy, accomplished by a simple padlock.  This kept our things secure when we were away, but that doesn’t work from the inside, with the lock being on the outside of the door.  So on the inside I had to get a little more creative. It just so happened that we have attached shelving on either side of the door with some strangely placed cutouts already in them, using those cutouts I was able to cut a removable wooden plank with a few spacers so it slides into these cutouts and rests firmly against the inwardly opening door.  It looks like something out of a castle to crudely secure the entry but it works! It should keep out all but the burliest of intruders.

So our new accommodation is much larger than the van, and drier, but still provides no amenities really. We still have to walk a ways to the bathroom; no water or anything like that.  So it’s really just like the van but much bigger and much louder with the giant freezers not 4 feet away from our window.  But we are extremely grateful for this being offered to us. Who would have guessed that our quick “stop in” to see the blueberry farm we had heard about would include job offers, work extensions, and free lodging!

So for our day off, after we woke up, we took care of a few errands – like creating these locking mechanisms – and made some lunch before heading in to Hamilton to see Anchorman 2 at the movie theater.  I think Carolyn and I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes stupid comedies, as we both do!  Back to work tomorrow for another 12 or more hour shift of grabbing smushed blueberries off a slow moving conveyer belt!