Musings of a wanderer

I've left my job at the strawberry farm. A few reasons for it - (1) We are looking to do a roadtrip all the way to Melbourne next week and we have to prepare for it, (2) my knees and legs and hands, fingers are killing me. We thought planning for this roadtrip was going to be quite simple. We can plan and stop as we go along. However, reading about it more over the past few days have been quite a shocker. There seems to be quite a lot to prepare especially since we will be traversing the famed Nullarbor Plains. I've been doing some research and this (https://clairesfootsteps.com/driving-across-nullarbor-plain/) has got to be one of the better sites to get some info; I'm hoping to do something similar once I've actually completed the trip (fingers-crossed). Frankly, there seems to be a lot to be done and prepped. At the start of this whole adventure, we had thoughts and ideas on what we were going to do with our vehicle - having a roof top tent for camping, or having a r...

One realisation that I came to is that we don't end when we are tired, we end when we are done. I seems such an Army thing, but it isn't. In the context of strawberry picking, this means we have packed and processed all the strawberries we have picked. Here's the schedule for a typical work day. 6.00am: wake up, shower 6.15am: light stretching for legs and back (massively important!) 6.30am: breakfast and prep lunch for the day 7.00am: leave house 7.25am: arrive at work, put on work attire/ gear 7.30am: start picking/ pulling curtains 11.00am: lunch under the blueberry tree 11.30am: resume picking/ pulling curtains 2.00pm: stop picking (by then, by my estimates, we would have picked about 2000 - 4000kg of strawberries depending on the number of pickers that day, weather conditions) We usually throw out 5-15% of the strawberries we pick because a part of it has rotted. Due to the erratic weather and the high winds recently which destroyed many of the curtains and pickets, we...

 With berries coming into season, I'm working a bit more. Coupled with the erratic weather (high winds) in Perth recently, which meant we had to spend our rest days doing maintenance and rebuilding the strucutres in the farm that has been damaged by the winds, off days are becoming a rare privilege. And since in my last post I bitched about not spending enough on the 'Attractions' tab in my Finance spreadsheet document, on my last off day, we decided to make an impromptu day trip to Rottnest Island. Sidenote: this day-trip hit our budget with an almost A$200 price in the August attractions tab - a good 13 times more than July. Rottnest Island is a 30 min ferry ride from Freemantle (with a A$70 round trip price, urgh). We had slept in a little and woke up pretty late, slightly before 9 am, since I don't get much rest on work days. With the sun blazing into our eyes by then, we quickly realised it was a rare good-weathered day. Made the snap decision to not waste the good...

One of the perks of having some time to myself just as we enter the peak season for strawberry picking is that I have some time to sit down and look through our finances.  When we made the decision to come over here on a Working Holiday Visa for a year putting our career and life on hold for a year (for me at least - I'd like to think I was doing decently well at work), there were many who lauded the courage and free-spirit we had. However, I think one of the main reasons why we were able to embark on this potentially life-changing endeavour was having clear financial goals over the past few years and working towards those targets. And so just before we came over here to Australia, I created a spreadsheet to detail how we were spending our money and our budgets. I think this is mainly for ourselves to keep our finances in check - to not spend too irresponsibly but yet at the same time not being complete paupers about it like when we were students on exchange or 18 year old backpack...

Over the past couple of days, Perth has been experiencing severe rain and winds. The sidewalks around our suburban apartment has been littered with thick tree branches that have been snapped off by the winds. Garbage and recycling bins that used to line the small streets have been blown over the rubbish strewn across the floor.  One of the consequence of this extreme weather is the tarps that are used to cover the strawberry plants have been blown over. Some of the iron pickets locking them in place as well as the metal rods holding them in place along the lanes have also been blown out of the ground. Actually when I last went to work on Monday (longest work shift of 11.5h ever, omfg), there was already a short inkling of the damage the weather could cause. On that day, the rain was pouring down, visibility was low and everytime the winds roared we all crouch down in between the lanes with the plastic tarps slapping into us. The noise of the tarps palpitating from the wind together...