It could have been worse, apparently mangos spray acid

Rachel's RTT post yesterday included a bit about how lovely the orange blossoms are smelling in her corner of Florida right now. Which I'm a little jealous about, because there is NOTHING growing here at the moment, never mind blooming. But I'm really not that jealous, because up until very recently the smell of orange anything made me want to puke up a lung.

You see, once, my friend Fashionista and I went on a little tour of the South Pacific. And somewhere around Sydney, we ran out of money. We probably could have held out longer if we weren't treating it like one big extended lunch-and-shopping date, but hey, it was OUR vacation, if we wanted to spend money on sushi and Golf Punk shirts and the quest for a decent cup of coffee, we were going to do that. So shut up.

Anyway, we spent about a month in the armpit of Australia picking oranges to make some cash. Approximately 4 or 5 bins of them a day. The bins were 8 feet by 8 feet by 2 feet deep. Which is like...(counts on fingers)...a fuckload of oranges. And oranges, when you pick them? They zest. They spray the lovely scent of themselves all over you.

Also, orange trees have thorns. Did you know that? I sure as hell didn't. Fashionista and I had deep gouges on our forearms that no amount of Polysporin could allay. We spent a whole month aching, bleeding, with crabbed hands, reeking like fucking oranges.

You could see how there might be some negative connotations there.

Oh, and there were spiders.

Not as many as there would be during other seasons, but enough of those big hairy bastards for me to worry that one might crawl on me while I was picking the oranges at the top of the tree. Because my first instinct when a spider touches me is to leap four feet straight backwards, and that is EXACTLY what you want to do while at the top of a ladder.

I was pretty sure I was going to die there on that Australian orange farm.*

But at least I got to drive a forklift. I can always be distracted by letting me play with machinery that can potentially cause a lot of damage.




After a month we took our money and ran. We managed to run for at least one week before we were broke again, because clearly our experience had taught us NOTHING. So we landed back in Sydney and found employment making candles, which on the whole was preferable to the orange-picking, but that's a story for another day.


*It wasn't the worst place to die, because the Australian orange farm was populated with Australians. And Aussies, as we all know, are some of the nicest, kindest, most generous and welcoming-est people there are. I'm pretty sure they would have honored my wishes and buried me somewhere other than the orange grove. In a ceremony possibly involving wallabies, because they're cute.