July Sweeps - Day 539

Wow, it was quite a day today.  If manual labor is the price I pay to have a family cabin, then I put in a good payment today.

We woke up early and drove down to the cabin (my mom, sister, brother-in-law, me, and his three kids, all jammed into the same vehicle), so we could work on this big project my brother had dreamed up: because there has been a lot of drainage and some visible settling of the ground behind and right next to the cabin, he was going to dig a two or three foot trench there, fill it with gravel, and then cover it with dirt again.  This would be a multi-person, possibly multi-day job, but we were going to give it our all.

One of two gravel hills.

Sit-ups Today: 60
Sit-ups In July: 2549

Oh, I meant to tell you about the weasel.  I had left it in the trap on Thursday, covered it to protect it from the sun and rain (with the tarp you can see there), and gave it a little food).

Sadly, the weasel had figured out a way out of the trap in was in since Thursday, because I had shown everyone the video, and the kids were excited about feeding it.  Even my brother said, "Well, there's no reason to kill it; I suppose we could let it go."  Of course, ground squirrels are cute too, but not cute enough, apparently.

My brother had seen two weasels frolicking in his security video, so it's possible the free weasel busted out the incarcerated one, they went over the wall and they're holed up in a dive until the heat dies down.

Push-ups Today: 66
Push-ups In July: 2514

The work was considerable, and I probably did more manual labor today (July 24th) than I ever have before, even digging a ditch for five dollars an hour when I was fifteen.  My brother had brought his miniature backhoe from work (they use it to dig trenches for powerlines, I suppose), and he was as adept with that thing as Leonardo the Turtle is with nunchucks.*  Seriously, he could make it go up and down, back and forth, scoop and release like one of those Henson Workshop guys making Yoda come to life.

While he did that, the rest of us would shovel gravel into one of two wheelbarrows, and the men (and my sister) would push the wheelbarrows up the hill to the back of the house, dump the gravel in the trench, and take it down again.  Rinse and repeat.

I wore gloves pretty much the whole day, not taking them off unless I absolutely had to (and I feel that was smarter than usual for me), though I still ended up with a blister on my thumb from all the shoveling.

After not too long, my Uncle John showed up with his family, and he and his wife also shoveled gravel.  After he got started, John started into that macho competitiveness he's so known for, and began to insist on the wheelbarrows be filled higher and higher when he was carrying them to the back.

The fruits of our labors

And then my brother got an idea: why not use the backhoe to fill up the wheelbarrows, so we didn't have to shovel?  He's so good with it that it took him less time than it did for all of us and our shovels to fill them up.  And the work went faster after that.

And then my brother got an idea: why not use the backhoe to fill in the trench he had been digging?  This was toward the end of the job, in the afternoon, when he had dug the trench all the way down the driveway and into the woods.  And then the work went so fast, I sat down and typed a few words on my story.

So, the work got done, and even though my brother did the lion's share, his was with a machine--a sort of John Henry versus the Steamshovel kind of thing.  I admire my brother a great deal: he works really hard, he seldom complains, he will never get fat, and he seems perfectly content without a wife and children.  

The new gravel trail

I have never had much of a work ethic--or maybe that's just my father talking--but all of us did what we could today, and I was particularly impressed with my sister, who was just as sweaty and dirty as the rest of us.**  I was very tired and sore when the day was done, and when my mom asked me to help her move a mattress, and couldn't quite get my fingers to grip it tightly enough to lift it over the railing to drop it onto my sister below (okay, that's a joke--we deliberately tried NOT to hit my sister).

Then, all of a sudden, it was time to go.  I had survived and the job was done.  Of course, there's still half a ton of gravel left from one of the piles, but at least we got rid of the pile that was blocking the driveway.

Words Today: 610
Words In July: 22,188

*Alright, goddammit, I looked it up, and it was Michelangelo that used that weapon.  And they're called nunchaku, apparently.

**She did pay for it, however, having to wake up to take a Tylenol or something in the middle of the night.  Same as me.