Coming up for air
So, here's what I've been up to, in order:
1) School
2) Garden
3) Job
Details will follow shortly, but let's start by saying, I. Am. Exhausted. My whole body hurts. It hurts to move, it hurts to breathe, it hurts to think. Even my nipples hurt, and god knows they're not doing any heavy lifting! But, let's start at the beginning:
Last week was apparently Panic Week at school. I had a written assignment due every damn day! And of course, me being the unorganized mess that I am, this came as a complete and utter surprise to me. Lots of fretting, very little sleep. Anyway, papers done, some of them even turned out not half-bad.
My new garden. About 12 years ago the previous and, what I gather, rather disgusting, owner finally passed away well into his 90's and passed on his... interesting garden to Evelyn, one of my favorite neighbors because she's the local gossip fountain. And the things she's told me! But I'm getting ahead of myself. She's since passed the garden on again and a few steps down the list it's now mine.
See, this guy was a collecter. And he liked to build things out of the things he collected to hold the things he collected. Now, if he'd collected art of some kind that could've actually been pretty awesome, but he just collected junk. The last vestige of this was a fence and a small shack at the far end of my garden which finally toppled over. It had to go.
It took my parents and me THREE DAYS to tear it down and get rid of everything that construction consisted of!
It had layers of wood, poles, sheets of plastic, metal pipes, steel wire, sheets of glass!, metal netting, plastic roofing, and, in the case of the shack - insulation (why??), more glass, old rugs (for the roof, of course!), a piece of lineoleum (again, roof) and finally, way down under the wooden floor, tiles. That guy built that thing thinking, 'this will last for EVER!' It very nearly did.
That part was interesting, but apparently not nearly as interesting as what else he had going on down there. He apparently had quite a thriving vegetable garden happening. But a garden needs fertilizer, I hear you say. Yes, that's true, and of that he had plenty. See, he had a grand total of three toilets down there, in spite of there being no running water. He would use these toilets for what they were intended, add a little water and have a niiiice mixture to spread over his potatoes and strawberries. Yummy, huh? To his credit, the soil down there is fantastic now, but *eugh*. I try not to picture how it came to be.
And now, the Coup de Grace. This sentence still haunts me: "His wife would make him sleep in the shack when he wouldn't shower." - This is a man who was literally elbows deep in SHIT and he would refuse to shower? Did it somehow surprise me after this to hear that he also chewed tobacco, dumped chicken fertilizer under Evelyn's bedroom window and had mirrors everywhere in the yard so he could spy on the ladies laying out? Not so much, no. What a character. Everywhere I put my shovel I'm digging up something weird. Today alone I've found a glove, half an insole, a baby sock and about a million zillion shards of glass. To my credit, I managed to sound surprised every time a new piece of glass made an appearance. "Hey look, glass!"
Anyway, it's hard work, but it's also kind of fun. Now I just have to move about 8 tons of dirt and pull about as many weeds and it'll be pretty ok down there. But for a while, it looked like Beirut.
It's been fun starting work again. It's ironic, but being a waitress doesn't feel like work to me. It's hard physically; lots of running and carrying heavy things, and sometimes people can be a pain in the ass (colleagues too), but for me I guess it feels more like solving a crossword puzzle. The challenge of it. The timing of things, charming people, getting a smile and making sure they're having a good time. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't have to be. I'm glad to do it.
It IS hard work, though. Between this and the garden, I've been waking up with heavy bones every morning. I've been sitting on my lily-white for more than six months doing nothing and this past week I've been pounding my body back into shape with back breaking labor from morning till nighttime. It seems I can never get enough sleep. I wake up exhausted. On the upside, I feel more limber than I have in a long while. Which is also ironic, because I'm sore everywhere.
I now have two of those waitress jobs. Yeah, my leg is gonna take it whether it likes it or not! And right now, it's not liking it too much...
On top of everything, exams are coming up. So I'll probably be back sometime after June 1st...