Did you know, that in both MS Word and the word processor in MS Works, that if you have a lot of text that you save and then add to and save and then add to, you can work in say 12 point, but all the text before now you can reduce down to 1 point (you can’t see it much but it’s all still there) and this saves an enormous amount of space? All of my blog is originally written in 12 point (so I can read it) and I add today’s blog onto the bottom of yesterdays. I started the file on the 5th October and to date it was over nine pages long. I have just reduced all the text before today down to 1 point by highlighting it all (Press Ctrl and A keys together) and then left clicking the down arrow, where you can change text size (it will show up as 12 point or something similar).Then just press the number 1 key and all of the highlighted text will become 1 point. My nine pages of text are now reduced down to just one page.
I’m not sure if you will find this to be useful# but I just wanted to share it with you if you hadn’t thought of it before.
We decided to put the car through the auto car wash at Albox today (lazy ‘bs, but it’s rather windy and quite cold with the wind chill factor, probably down from 11 to about 5 or 6 degrees’). Next to the auto car wash on many occasions we have seen an olive collection point. Until today it has always been deserted. Today it was a hive of activity with cars with their boots full of bags of olives and cars with trailers full of crates with the whole family, young and old, helping out. The process seems to be that you arrive with your load of black ripe (and also green unripe) olives. When you reach the front of the queue you register in the little ticket office and when you are told to, you empty your harvest of olives into a huge hopper with grids across it. Your olives then go up a conveyor a few at a time and any branches or leaves that are still on the olives are removed mechanically. The whole crop is then weighed and the recorded weight is entered onto a computer and you are given your receipt ticket showing your name and this weight. While the olives then go through different stages of crushing to remove the olive oil you take your ticket round to the side door and get either money or olive oil in exchange for your ticket. We stood talking to a Dutchman and his Spanish wife and M in L (he spoke super English with a slight American twang, from watching American TV he told us) who live down near Antas (down near Mojacar). They had been harvesting their three trees (we have fifteen) and had a whole boot full of crates of olives to exchange for olive oil. He told us that they get one sixth of the weight of the whole crop weight, in olive oil. This exchanged olive oil is then more than enough to last them and their family for the whole year and also lets them give some away to friends. We didn’t find out how much money they would have got instead of the oil.
I’m really chuffed to have seen all of this at last. We have puzzled over how the system works for ages. We are considerably higher up in the mountains than Antas so I would suspect that we will be harvesting nearer to Christmas or even in January. Watch this space for more olive news as and when it occurs. You may remember Chris Stewarts funny story about taking his first crop of olives to the crusher in his book Driving over Lemons, or was it Parrot in the Pepper Tree?