Mine. As in, I didn't have any.
Therefore, what little was accomplished resulted from bribery.
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| There are goats up there. |
Yesterday I straightened up the wood shed so I could start moving all this new wood into it. I had to move around some wood that was already in there. Not much, but a bit. Then I unloaded the wood that had been stacked on my vacant lot, and which I'd moved over on a trailer earlier in the week.
I got a late start yesterday, so I quit early to make up for it. If that went by you too fast, it was supposed to be a joke.
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| And then there were five. Those oblong blobs are goats. Trust me. |
Today was no joke. Today was all about bribery. I had to bribe myself to keep going. I went to the first pile of newly-split wood and loaded the cart.
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| This wasn't the first load of the day, but more like the tenth. |
After ten or twelve cartloads, I wanted to quit. My hands ached. I didn't want to be out there. I wanted to be inside reading a trashy novel. Or something. Anything other than using my hands, outside on a chilly, windy day.
I persevered. Finish filling this side and you can go home and have a nice cup of cocoa chai, I promised myself. I finished it, and went inside as promised.
A half hour later, I was out there again. It was even windier.
I started filling the other side of this bay. My hands ached. I wanted to quit. I wasn't at all unhappy when the rain started. Only, some of this rain was mighty opaque and didn't fall straight down. There was substance to this rain.
I finished one row on the other side. There's a reason I stack the wood like this. It has to do with not exerting too much pressure on the sides of this three-sided woodshed. I built this thing thirty years ago when my husband was out of town on a construction job, and I didn't tell him until he got home.
Not only did we have a new woodshed, but it was filled with fifteen cords of split firewood. It measures ten feet wide by forty feet long. I worked late into the nights on this project. My hands would "go to sleep" on me at night, keeping me awake. I think it was from muscles swelling. Towards the end, I had to use both hands to swing a hammer.
That, I'm afraid, goes beyond determination. I felt traces of it today, out there working when I didn't want to be out there working. I wanted to be inside drinking cocoa chai.
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| The new, almost finished woodshed in early 1980s. |
By the time I finished putting away the wood in the front pile, which was slightly more than two cords, the rain was more earnest. I picked stuff up, put things away, and covered the last big pile of split wood with a blue tarp. That procedure would have made a good routine for Charlie Chaplin. Did I mention the wind was really blowing?
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| Front pile is all stowed away; only the rear pile remains to be moved. |
For those of you who know better than to get involved with nonsense like this, a cord of wood measures four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. Double that mass. That's how much wood I moved today.
Then I went home and had another cup of cocoa chai.