And so the vines are finished. No more aching right hand from squeezing secateurs for hours, no more use for the callouses and blisters on the index and middle fingers of that hand. No further call for my secateurs actually, I should hand them back. It was about midday when we got finished. We had the rest of the day off then naturally, and I spent most of the day working on the photo collection and slideshows and so forth myself and Freddy were putting together for the CD, because with Sophie and Caroline scheduled for the off not too far away time was running short. However there was still time for a game or two of soccer, Ossis (Ben, Mattze and me - well, I'm from east Ireland) versus Wessis (Freddy, Claudia and Michael). It transpires that all but Michael and myself have played soccer competitively and I'm not even sure that Michael hasn't. I did manage to play pretty well though, falling back on luck and a who-dares-wins attitude that manifested itself in loads of frightening sliding tackles, but the victories went to the Wessis because of Freddy, who also plays amateur-level ice hockey and is fast and fit and skillful.
That night was party night - because of the vines being finished, or the end of our group, or whatever, who knows. Tony produced a whole load of meat as usual, and of course wine, and a load of folks turned up - a few other farmers and their wives, Big Les and the other guy who works here whose name I keep forgetting and his missus who's half French and half Aborigine, and Nick and Ross appeared for a while. We gorged ourselves on sausages and lamb chops and burgers (and something called "salad") and wine, and beer, and then some old Spanish worker who's nearly eighty sang a song in Spanish... or maybe he's Italian... and then Mattze got his guitar out and I wrote out the lyrics for the first verse and chorus of Hotel California and we did a truly dreadful rendition of that (captured with sound on a digital camera, and it's really really bad). While working hundreds of metres from the nearest human being out on the vines I had sung to myself a little, and by accident realised that the reason I couldn't sing was because I was aiming too high, and my singing voice is an octave or two lower than where I was trying to hit (difficult to judge, because I never got close to the notes I was going for). So since then I have shed the chronic avoidance of ever singing where anybody at all might hear I've had since I was singled out to sing alone as punishment for being bad at singing in primary school (Anglican school, they like their hymns), much to the detriment of those in my vicinity. So apart from all that, I talked to the other worker guy and one farmer, who advised me to get up near Darwin because that's the best bit of Australia (technically I could, and we'll see what happens, but I doubt it), and the farmer claimed some kind of Irish heritage and kept calling me Paddy and made me try Vegemite to see if I'm really Irish or not - it was okay but not as good as Marmite was my verdict, and I'm not sure what that proved, especially seeing as Vegemite doesn't exist in Ireland. I chatted to the French-Aboriginal lady too about Australia and such, and talked to Sue a bit and I like her because she's smart but with that cynically patient attitude mothers have. People trickled away over time, and at last it was myself and Freddy and Mattze and Ben and Michael and Tony, and we drank beer until it was gone and then Tony brought out a couple of bottles of desert wine and we put them away and then he went to bed, and the rest of us stayed up talking crap and singing Ring of Fire and I made yo-momma-so-fat jokes at Mattze in German. It was maybe four o'clock when the last of us fell into bed looking forward to tomorrow's day of freedom and sleep and headaches.
Of course that wasn't going to happen, was it... the upstairs gets really, really hot when the sun shines, and shine it did. Right onto my bed. So everybody was forced, sweating, to arise long before they wanted to. After a while of sitting about feeling unwell and drinking water and doing some more photos stuff on my computer, I noticed that the breeze might be good enough to get my kite up. Experimentation revealed that it wasn't, so we borrowed one of the utes and took off for an empty field, where we were able to get it airborne by standing on the back and driving at a running pace. All attendees had a go - myself, Mattze, Freddy, Ben and finally Maria who managed to keep it aloft even while driving with the wind, doing most of a complete lap of the field. Before all that though when we arrived at the field, we spotted a herd of kangaroos, and Freddy drove at high speed after them, with myself and Ben trying to balance on the back and use our hands to record movies on our digital cameras. We got some pretty good footage, fortunately, because it was a mildly hair-raising trip.
Myself and Freddy spent the rest of the day finishing off the CD (officially called Das CD, because CD is a die word not a das word, but I always have problems with gender of nouns, so it's a joke you see) and we encountered some problems but I got around them creatively because I'm a freakin' computer GOD. At about ten o'clock all assembled on and around Kathleen's bed to witness the finished product - firstly a nearly-twenty-minute slideshow of all the best pictures, set to music, followed by the slideshow of my birthday and then a slideshow of each person or group of people, all set to appropriate music (Ben and Mattze cringed when they found their pictures set to the wonderfully bad Looking For Freedom by... David Fucking Hasselhoff! to which they'd introduced me, and although I'd allowed Michael choose his music and he went for some Dr. Dre rap stuff, after the previous night's antics I changed it to Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire - mine was the stupendously funky Moby remix of the Bond theme). Then we watched most of the mini-movies made by digital cameras, of ute-driving, an orange factory, people doing stuff and so on. Then it was bedtime, but some of people didn't go to bed because Sophie and Caroline were taking off at about two in the morning to catch a bus or something, but staying up wasn't very interesting so I went to bed after a while. So they're gone now. Caroline never was about much, and although Sophie was pretty good to look at and therefore nice to have about the place for that reason, I have this suspicion that if we spoke the same language I'd find her quite annoying.
Tony had said we can pick oranges for a week, and apparently even said that when there's no more work here he'll ask around amongst his friends and we can work there but continue living here, which is spectacularly decent. So Ben and Mattze are staying on for another while too. But... this morning we got news that the orange factory ain't taking no more oranges right now, so no work today unless Tony managed to contact the boss and sweet-talk or blackmail or threaten or whatever. So with the breeze a fair bit stiffer and the weather nice, myself and Ben and Mattze and Michael and Maria and Steffi and Kathleen walked up the road to yesterday's field with the kite, and it sure flew real good and real high and I got the knack back and was able to do some natty swoops and so forth, and then Mattze had a go and he was getting the knack too when Freddy arrived in his van and said that there are oranges to be picked, let's get to it. So we came back and Tony showed us the ropes of orange-picking. There's a tractor with a couple of trailers with big bins on them that hangs around where you're picking, and you wear this bag contraption on your front with an open bottom that's folded up and clipped, and you pick the oranges from thick bushy leafy trees by grasping them and twisting away from or toward you, and put the orange in the bag and repeat until it's full or you're sick of it being so freakin' heavy, because they are indeed heavy and hard on the shoulders and back. Then you head over to the bins and unclip the bottom and the oranges fall in, and when a bin is full you get twenty virtual bucks. Except we're all working like communists at the moment because there wasn't enough bins for everybody to have one to themselves, so we'll just split the proceeds. You have to try to get all the oranges on every bush, because with an extra year's growth they'll be overripe and only good for juicing, and we have to put the leftovers from last year that we find into a different bin for that reason. In order to get all the oranges, you have to reach far into the tree, and it scratches your arms up pretty good. We worked for maybe four hours and made a little over ten bucks each, I think. Which sucks, and the work is hard. But it is better than nothing and presumably it gets faster. I wonder if there'll be any more tomorrow...
Time for more soccer after that. This time the teams changed a bit - Ossis (Ben plus any two of Mattze - he had to take some time off after he got to the ball a fraction of a second before I did and got quite the kick in the ankle for his trouble - Michael and Steffi... actually maybe it wasn't an Ossi team at all, I'm not sure) versus Wessis (Freddy, Claudia and myself - I'm from the west of Europe). We won four to three, with three of our goals scored by myself, huzzah.
We're not going to the pub tonight, not sure why but maybe because everybody is probably wrecked. We've watched a few of my DVDs in the past, or some videos - Evil Dead II and Dog Soldiers went down well with Ben and Mattze - and I think this evening we might do Shaolin Soccer. Dinnertime now...