Work day

Naturally, I felt a sense of deep dread as I looked down at the lake park around 10 this morning. Once again, it was Community Work Day here in the neighborhood, when everyone gets together to shovel sand and do other crap around the park. As I have moved into ever more responsible roles on the Board -- culminating in my current chairpersonhood -- I have gotten ever less excited about going out for things like this, though I feel like I'm supposed to do them. This is compounded by the fact that I've gotten very accustomed to the rhythm of days spent alone under COVID. No more are my Saturdays consumed by taking Graham to martial arts and also perhaps soccer. I have more time to sit and read, get some basic exercise and perhaps nap and talk on the phone. Good livin.

But of course I remembered that I generally like seeing people when I do go out and that I like most of the people that I see, and even that, however much I dig my routines, I also tend to enjoy it when I break out of them. So I went down there. There was sand shoveling, but I was also able to martial troups for some of the projects that I had been thinking about, like recovering gravel which had washed off the side of the road and filling in trenches which rain running off the roof of the pavilion has pounded into the soil, creating a pretty serious tripping and/or ankle-breakage hazard.

But then I had the not too bright idea of alerting Mary to the huge pile of mulch cum soil from the pile of wood chips made from the tree we took down several years ago. Did she want it? I think you know the answer to that, fair reader. Of course she did. So my exercise for the day ended up being bringing many wheelbarrows of rich brown soil up the hill into our yard and dumping them in places where nothing grows from the barren red clay of the Piedmont. With considerable labor we (Mary did some earlier) were able to more than scratch the surface of the pile, but not much more.

And now I am hungry for my birthday dinner with my mom at Jujube.