Sunday, October 15, 2017

Halloween pumpkins

I volunteered yesterday to unload some pumpkins...




Last Sunday i attended the local Methodist church.  (they have coffee and donuts. ;-) It's close enough for me to walk or ride my bike.  Anyway, during the announcements they said, "Saturday at 9:30 we need volunteers to help unload the pumpkins." (they have a huge field of pumpkins in front, as a fundraiser.) So Saturday morning after my coffee i rode my bike over to help.  There were probably ~200ppl unloading a Semi Trailer.  This was done in the old time bucket brigade fashion where you hand it off the next in line.  In addition, they created two separate lines doing a conga dance off in two different directions.  I chose the spot directly against the tailgate to take advantage of my height.  i could reach up and take the pumpkins from the tailgate guy then hand them down the line.  this would keep the tailgate guy from having to bend down to hand them out of the truck.  Well, it was WORK.  Hard work! Some of these things were monsters.  The ones i could barely lift i put off to the side, so some small kid would not drop them or get hurt.  Lots were small cantaloupe sized and they ran the gambit.  They had lots of noisy rambunctious high-school kids working in the truck, handing them off and down to the ground conga line.  I unloaded ‘my half’ of a semi full of pumpkins in about 90 minutes.  (with two lines, I only had to lift half the truck) It wore me out.  I THOUGHT i was in shape from doing my exercise at the Ymca.  But i know and expect i'll be sore for a few days after this.  I had weight machine muscles, but this took Pumpkin Muscles!
You cant see it in this after-work photo, but i have dust and straw in my hair and eyes.  The truck had hay in it to keep the pumpkins from bruising.  Every 15-20 minutes we had to stop and push out the straw covered floor of the truck.  It got all over everything, but mostly on me.

I heard the announcement again today at church.  
''Another pumpkin truck next Saturday.''


Jupiter Fl. light house