By the end of my last entry I was about to intrepidly go hunting for work; AG had some for me on a farm that grows strawberries and raspberries. It's the end of the season, but there's still work to be done, and the pressure is on as things must get done before the first snow arrives.

I have done a little commercial raspberry picking, and thus have eaten my weight in raspberries (the really ripe ones are delicious but not suitable for selling as I guess they'll go off or get squashed or something), which considering the speed at which I pick them is quite a feat. The pros pick raspberries at an amazing speed, at least twice as fast as I've managed to do it judging by the number of filled containers. Maybe it's because they don't eat any of them. They also wear fingerless gloves, which I now understand the reason for by looking at the back of my hands. Raspberry plants are not the friendly sort.

What I have mostly been doing is helping with some of the research they are working on (I am destined to do research in some form, it seems, or is it doomed?) by picking raspberries of specific plants, weighing them, measuring the growth of the plants then cutting them down, separating the leaves and the stems and then weighing those. On the plus side, having previously only driven a limited selection of small cars, I have now driven a 4x4, a yellow school bus and a golf buggy.

I'm staying in a lovely little cottage next to AG's house on the side of the fleuve St-Laurent, just down the road from the farm. When I arrived the weather was glorious and I couldn't believe my luck. Even in stormy weather it's great, nothing but the sound of the wind, the rain and well, intermittently, the fridge. Add to that no TV, radio or internet (I pop over to the house and bother my host once a day to check my emails and today post this pre-written blog thing). So I've been sleeping a lot. What with being knackered from work, not through lack of imagination or boredom, honestly. But also reading. Writing. Editing a video (this one's for OW, it's getting done!). Sorting out photos, which hopefully you've already enjoyed. And playing my newly bought guitalele.