Sweet, sweet FridayFollow

Six, actually. The rest are just tourists.

Lots and lots of tourists.

On Saturday, I'm helping some friends move their house. Ok, not the house, but all the stuff in the house. Saturday night, I will be drinking and eating payment-pizza.

Sunday, I will be recovering from Saturday. That may even extend into Monday.

20 years ago, I used to love helping people move (moving, not packing!). I'd volunteer to help, even pick up the truck, drive, operate the dolly, everything. A friend and I even did some moving semi-professionally (seemed like fun and easy money and it kinda was). Now? Not so much. For some strange reason, I now prefer to sit on furniture rather than carry it.

Not sure what happened there.

Oh, you.

You start to view your time as more valuable than a Dominio's pizza and a six-pack of Milwaukee's Best.

Pretty much exactly this. I helped a friend build a picket fence across his backyard a couple years ago. While there was some satisfaction from building something with your own hands, on the second day of work, there was literally a point where I was more than willing to flag any random truckload of Mexican laborers driving down the road on the other side of the fence we were building and hand them several hundred bucks to finish the work. And it wasn't even my fence.

Funny story to that. After a day digging with post hole diggers (mistake!), and then finishing the rest with a two man gas powered digger thingie (still slow going when you hit the ubiquitous clay 6-8" down, but better than doing it by hand), then actually putting up the fence sections (I'll never use fence sections again btw!), my hands were so cramped that there were some unusual effects. I went out to my car that evening to drive home and had to use both hands to turn the key to unlock the door. Then I sit down, put the key in the ignition and start it. No problem. Then I put my right hand on the shifter to put it in drive. That shifter has one of those little grip handle things you have to squeeze to get the car out of park. No dice. I sat there scowling at my hand but no matter how much effort I put into thinking about squeezing the damn thing, my hand just wouldn't do it! I had to put both hands on it just to put the car in gear.


So maybe some parts are me getting older. But a whole hell of a lot of it is me thinking the whole time "Why the hell am I doing this instead of just paying someone the equivalent of a half a day of me sitting in an air conditioned office to do it for me?". Unfortunately, I usually think of this after I'm already doing the work anyway.

Edited, Aug 5th 2011 4:38pm by gbaji

There are more People in NYC than there are in Finland, Denmark and Norway combined. I thought that was interesting.



Most of my jobs have been laboring outside. The one I did the longest at was similar to fence installation, only with telephone poles and nets. I've done a bit of volunteer work at churches and restaurants which mostly entailed office work.

I'd have to say I'm generally more fond of manual labor. I've found both sorts to be mindless and repetitive, but manual labor helps with your health, you can smoke or get high while you do it pending the equipment used, and it's always nice to look in the mirror and see that you have a six pack.

Today was my day off from other job, and I ended up using most of it to destroy a large pile of brush and the enourmous blackberry bush of doom (LPOBATEBBOD would be an epic band name incidentally) at my parents house that needed destroying. Tomorrow, I will aquire new fish to replace a few that ceased existing over at the neato aquarium store in portland, then go see a movie or something.

Dunno what i am doing on sunday yet.

The one time I was part of an outdoor construction project, it was basically me watching other people work.

GDI, you figured me out! You must be one of those damn gay black liberalists that the other ignorant **** keeps spouting off about.