Work

The next month of work promises to be pretty difficult. We are short staffed, as perennially seems to be the case, and I'm going to have to take some extra supervisory work. I'm pleased that my boss thinks that I can handle it, but it means that May looms a bit in my mind.

When work is difficult, I try my very best to do completely distracting things during the weekends. Lately, many of them involve hard labor. Last week, I hauled loads of compost and mulch from the city mulch center, and spread them on the beds, which meant lots and lots of shoveling and a car that will harbor little piles of dirt in the cracks and crevices for the next few months.  I hope that each year, as I add compost, my garden soil will be a little bit nicer, but this is playing the long game. In the short term, I had to deal with my aching back, and arms that I couldn't lift above my shoulders for a day or two.

This week I was able to help my friends S&N with their roofing work. The roof that they need to replace is only one story high, thank goodness, but that still feels quite high when you are up there. I asked to be tied to the house with a rope harness, so that I couldn't fall all the way to the ground. This made me feel quite secure, and I walked around with relative ease. I spent most of the afternoon tethered on the roof outside in the sun, but it was a relatively pleasant day, and I could stop and hear the birds sing in between scraping shingles. Again, it was pretty hard physical labor, and I attacked the beer and pizza when dinner time arrived.

The big news at home is that the asparagus has arrived. I've been waiting three years to pick the first stalks, and they are every bit as delightful as I hoped. Asparagus is a funny looking plant. While most plants have the produce nestled in leafy bushes or under ground, asparagus looks like what would happen if you gave a bunch of stalks from the grocery store to a three-year-old and asked her to plant them in the dirt, i.e. this. I think I could have eaten it for a month straight, but because it's the first year I've only had enough for four or five meals. It is delightful, however, to think that I could be eating from these same plants for the next two decades.