Today, I took the day off from all three jobs, and it was delightful. M made his fancy tangelo-challah french toast, and I made serious knitting progress on my next sweater. I also busted into the garage and unpacked 3 boxes of books and a box of miscellany. Then, I put on my tall rubber boots and braved the brambles in the back yard to pull out several dozens of feet of piecemeal fencing that my uncle used in an attempt to keep rabbits out of his garden. There were short white looped border fencing, there was two and three feet tall hog fence, and a long roll of chicken wire (which tree had grown up through, so it will have to be extricated the rest of the way tomorrow). Much of the fencing is salvageable, but it had to come out of the brambles, as it is hazardous to the kinds of equipment we want to get back in there to make way for my shed. There is still a bunch of trash strewn through what used to be the bramble wall between the yard and his former garden. When I was a child, it was known as his “secret garden” because he grew marijuana plants in it. Apparently more recently it had vegetables… though you wouldn’t know it by the brambles. So, tomorrow, I hope to pick out some of the trash. Old gatorade bottles and the metal spade of an shovel–the wooden handle long since disintegrated, plastic bags, plastic bottle caps, styrofoam plates, red cups… They were all very fond of just leaving things where they left them…. forever.
I also did my nutty ab workout for the second time, and it was slightly less graceless, though I am still not efficient at it. I never heard back from the woman who created it, but I eventually found clips of the moves buried in longer clips on her instagram account. The magazine has also posted the workout, so here it is for posterity. Things I’m particularly bad at include the Crab and Frog Kicks and anything Bear related. While looking for clear examples of them, I fell down an IG wormhole of “animal flow.” All I could think was: we are so innovative when it comes to compensating for technology. We don’t have to move much anymore to survive, so we make up these choreographies to compensate. Before my “workout” I was hauling around boxes of books, and after it I was yanking old fencing out of the tangle of blackberries, old grasses, and weeds.
I was so glad to have those book back out in the open. There are still about six boxes in the garage and about 3 totes in the house with no current home. Mostly the stuff that is shelf-less is fiction and nonfiction. I have a ton of the latter and a bit of the former. Even my mom has a box of my nonfiction at her house that I somehow left behind.
Anyway, it was nice to take a day off from the computer. I have some writing work to do tomorrow, but no schoolwork, so I will still count it as a day off. It doesn’t look the like the hike will work out, but I’m not ruling it out completely.