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Another time, his father had decided that the two of them would pick an entire bushel of crabs. All by themselves. They had never picked a crab, before. A bushel, he now knows, is a hell of a lot of crabs. But they sat there, in the living room, newspapers strewn all about the floor, and spent the day picking bluecrabs. They didn't know that there was a particular way that one picked bluecrabs economically so as to expend the least effort for the most meat. This was something they had to learn. And they learned it, more or less, over the span of hours. Not much meat comes from a crab, at least not if you have any idea of what you are doing. And if you do know what you are doing, it only seems as though you have picked a large amount if you compare it with the amount someone manages to get through having no idea what they are doing. The long and the short of it was that father and son persevered through an entire bushel of crabs. Suffice it to say that they never picked that many crabs, again. Ever.