Neck deep in the green stuff

Chores in Germany have not been very much of a big deal for me. I clean my room every week and wash the tupperware every night, which is a fairly light load. Today is a special day, though. Today I experienced for a mercifully brief period the deeper circles of Apple Hell.

Yard work always sucks, and today was no exception. Most of it was raking leaves in our very large yard, no big deal except for the time it takes, but there's a special complication here. Before you can even rake some areas of the yard, you have to get rid of all the apples that have fallen from the two immense apple trees we have here. We literally do not know what to do with all the apples. There are two piles sitting outside of just the usable apples, and we have no idea what should be done with them - there's at least two hundred. Forget selling them - we can't give the stupid things away.

Which is not to say those are all the apples we had to collect. This is the full year's worth laying there, some of them since summer. For every edible apple I collected, there had to have been five that not even the most desperate starving rat would touch. Black apples, open brown apples with moldy, digested looking insides showing, apples with seemingly impossible cracks going through them as if they split at the seams, the odd half apple with any one of a thousand possibilities of things wrong with it, and us sitting there picking the things up off the ground. We ran out of room in the garbage for the rejects and ended up throwing the rest of them into a wheelbarrow. When the first bucketful went in you could see the juices dribble down the incline. I have never seen nor imagined in my wildest dreams such an amazing variety of rotten apples, dripping their putrid runoff in one place, together, like some sort of chorus of putrefaction, thousands of voices of the damned singing their reeking doom to those tasked with carrying them out of their resting places.

Other than that, my day was pretty good. Apple suggestions appreciated!