Whew. What a day. My first full day in Alabama and I am whipped.

After getting up at 8:30 this morning and sitting around doing nothing, shooting the shit and getting a bit of work done while efforts at organization of the day’s tasks took place around me, I went out to help Mike and Tom Bosley do chores around the house. I started by trimming the Azelea bush at the front of the driveway before finding out that Tom already had done it (though not very well cause it did still look like it needed to be done). Then I went to trim the tree branches on either side of the driveway, so when people parked along the road they won’t be getting out right into branches. After collecting the detritus from those two projects and dumping it in the burn pit, I was sent to thin out the woods along the driveway for a bit. This meant walking around with a long pole saw and chopping away at “anything you don’t like,” that’s less than 3 inches in diameter, according to Mike. This was kind of odd cause, to me, it was all natural woods growth and who was I not to like it? But cut some out I did (using Dayna’s pruning theory of “tough love” as my guide).

Then came the two big group projects of the day: installing new transformers on the driveway lights and re-wiring the speakers so the wires weren’t running across the floor of the living room. The first involved me learning proper sledgehammer technique (“It’s not about pull, it’s about drop,” says Tom—and he’s right), and the second…well I was more in my element there so it was about watching Mike and Tom argue about the right way to do it and then coming up with the right way myself while sitting on the couch drinking beer and reading an article about parachutists who died skydiving at the South Pole.

Top all of that off with 100 degree heat that sapped even Mike and Tom and ice it with making a batch of bagels before and after dinner (by the end of which I was pretty drunk), and I had a full fucking day.