What I'll Do to Avoid Going to Work

As a morning person, my mind is sharper at 7:30 am than it is at 7:30 pm.  In the morning I'm curious, interested, engaged, alive, awake, etc.  All the wonderful things.  In the evening, I'm done, mush, not there, blank, etc.

So there I was this morning, wondering again, what kind of apple trees do I have?  I went to four apple trees around the house and picked one apple from each.  The top right, dark red apple is an excellent cooker, but sometimes a little too tart to eat. This is the apple I cooked with on Sunday. The top left are excellent eating apples, but turn mushy and bland when cooked, from an experiment I ran last year.  The lower right tastes like Golden Delicious and the lower left is totally unknown.

Websites on apple varieties note the overcolor of the apple, the undercolor (greenish or yellowish), the streakiness and splotchiness, spots and their color, color of the flesh, crunchiness, smell and a few other things to identify apples.  The top right apple is definitely different from the top left.  The top right apple is darker and more solid in color than the top left, which is streaky, blotchy red on top of greenish yellow.

The two left apples look like McIntosh but act like something else.  The upper right looks like something else, but acts like McIntosh.  I think the lower right is Golden Delicious. One of the differentiators that I read about yesterday is that some apples darken faster than others when cut.  I can't help it!  I'm an engineer.  I HAD to cut those apples open and see what happened.

So there I was this morning, sitting in front of four cut apples, waiting for them to darken.  Kinda like watching paint dry!  How's that for avoiding work?

The Golden Delicious began to darken immediately.  The dark red one began to darken after a few minutes.  But the other two apples did not darken much in ten minutes.  I wanted to extend the experiment, but since I get paid to do other things, I had to regretfully leave the apples behind.  Now I have more data to add to the, "what kind of apples do I have," question.  And as you may have guessed, I'm all about data!

One thing I know about cut apples though, is how fragrant they get when left out - so these went in a plastic bag and into the trash on my way out the door.

Did I resolve anything about my apples?  Not really.  I'll continue calling them the cooking apple tree and the eating apple tree.

I didn't pick any apples from the tree I've been calling the Grandpa tree.  It's a huge, gnarled old tree that didn't bear last year.  The trunk is 18 inches in diameter at chest height.  Huge for an apple tree. This year it bore ONE apple.  From the looks of the apple,  I'm guessing it's golden.  Plus, the Golden Delicious tree is about 50 feet away from this tree, the Grandpa tree might be the daddy of the Golden Delicious tree.  Isn't detective work cool?