Life is a Bowl of Cherries

Well, it's taken me a few days to recover from all the good deeds this weekend. It all started Thursday night, when I got a call from my dear, who was helping Ray take stuff to the dump before Ray had to fly off to Denver. Seems Ray's cherry trees were overloaded and needed relief. Soon. So I went over and picked about 20 pounds of cherries that I could reach with a stepstool. When they got back from the dump, my dear joined me (I had been about to leave) and we ended up with about 50 pounds. Fifty pounds of bing cherries the night before a fully booked weekend. Talk about stress! Ray lent us the cherry pitter, and I kept two coolers with ice to try and preserve some semblance of freshness until I could deal with them.

Friday morning I was at the volunteer station in BZ Corner at the assigned 6:45 am. The river boarding coordinator and volunteers also arrived then. But I was supposed to be with kayaking. That coordinator didn't arrive until around 8. I would have been more annoyed, but there was a guy who drove from PORTLAND to be there at 6:45 am, so he had my sympathy. I only live 15 minutes away. So the nice river board gal sent me off to direct traffic at the entrance to the launching area parking lot. I was prepared, having brought my hat, sunglasses, folding chair and ice water jug with me. All those years of volunteering at swim meets paid off. I have no idea what my assigned rafting job would have been, because I ended up in the parking lot until 2 pm. I made the best of having to tell people they had to go back to the Shell station to park and walk back, and there was no parking or stopping in the center area reserved for the commercial rafting companies. The kayakers could drop their gear, but had to park at the Shell station. The Forest Service supervisors, who were onsite watching, wanted all Gorge Games folk parking elsewhere so that 'the public' could use the area. Of course most people ignored my directions, and a second parking volunteer was needed to roam the lot and confront offenders. I preferred being the first line, so I was happy where I was.

I am disappointed that volunteers have no clue what it really means to be a volunteer. Everyone wanted to be the person in the tent handing out t-shirts and goodies to athletes, then to be the ones on the river, doing a job that allowed them to see the event. Which is why I was never relieved of my duty. At 1:50 pm, after directing carloads of volunteers to their parking sites and having not one return to take my spot, I went to the volunteer tent. My friend the river boarding coordinator tried in vain to get someone to take my job. She finally called two names at random and said go to the parking lot, and we'll rotate people through so you all get a chance to see the event. Nice. I do a double shift and no one wants to even do a part single shift. I finally got a guy to follow me back out so I could show him the overflow area for public kayakers, and who could go where. I found out later from the river board coordinator that the parking lot people abandoned their posts as soon as the event started.

I was pooped when I got home, took a nap, and worked on cherries. Froze some, bagged a bunch that Lloyd had pitted to do something with them 'tomorrow'. Did I tell you I rescued a river boarder from Seattle area? She was a 30 something competitor, and hadn't slept a wink at the athlete village (big parking lot in Hood River) because all the 20 somethings stayed up all night partying. So I gave her my number and said call if you want a bed. About 9 pm, the phone rang. "I can't take it any more. I'm on my way." So Rochelle became our weekend guest, and thought she'd died and gone to heaven with a real mattress and hot tub to soak her battered body. River boarders, in case you don't know, go head first down river, through rapids and over water falls with boogie boards? Insane.

Saturday was great. I made a batch of cherry jam. Then I worked at Wind River Cellars all afternoon. With the Gorge Games, the Trout Lake Arts Festival (which I didn't manage to fit in), and a beautiful sunny day in the Gorge, we had lots of customers. At six, I washed up all the glasses, cleaned up the tasting room, and headed down to Nights in White Salmon. There were about 500 people roaming the main street of town, listening to music, watching demos and tasting wine. We helped clean up at 9, then crashed.

Sunday morning, I was off to Husum at 8 for another parking lot job near Rattlesnake Rapids, where the day's River Board event was being held. Lucky me, same nice river board coordinator. She remembered my double shift in parking on Friday, and sent relief after a whopping 15 minutes, reassigning me to the river area for the duration. Bless you. Then it was home to make more jam. And Lloyd took two screens off our bedroom windows to fashion a drying screen. We have sun dried two batches. It takes a lot of cherries to make just one baggie full of dried cherries. We were cherried out, and took the last 10 pounds down to Pam to use for fruit smoothies in her shop.

The blackberries are ripening...another week or so and the new year's crop will start coming in. In anticipation, I took the last gallon bag of the 2007 crop from the freezer (to make room for cherries) and made more blackberry jam on Monday. Now I'm jammed out for a while.

So THAT is why I haven't blogged for week. Now that I'm rested, I can return to my literary ways.