As I wrap up the Saturday of the 2010 Labor Day weekend, I came to the conclusion that this is the first regular Saturday I have had since early June. Regular in the sense that I could spend the day doing what guys, who work a regular day job of five eight-hour days each week, do on summer weekends. Three of the last four weekends were spent working a side-job. The fourth was helping out at a friend's customer appreciation day. Before that there was double duty on household chores with my wife recovering from surgery.
Today was spent doing regular weekend guy stuff. First thing there was a trip to the transfer station with garbage and recyclables. (We don't have curbside garbage pickup. Most of the town does not have curb, gutters, and sidewalks. Does that explain the "do it yourself" set-up?) A few hours of yard work followed. In addition to the mowing and trimming, I weeded the rock retaining wall, raked up a pickup load of pine needles that have dropped recently, and filled a wheelbarrow with pine cones that either the wind or the red squirrels have brought down. The wind brings down the dry open ones; the red squirrel harvest the green closed ones with the seeds still in them. The pickup was emptied at the site the city provides for such yard waste. A wheelbarrow of sand was cleaned out of the culvert and the ditch. I suspect it is the same sand that the city crew spreads on icy streets in the winter. If I don't remove it and the culvert gets stopped up, rain water will be diverted down the driveway and into the yard. The birdbath got cleaned out and filled with fresh water. The potted flowers on the deck were watered and fertilized. I then moved to the garage to straighten it up. My extension cords and trouble lights have somehow outgrown the pegboard hooks that have held them for the past several years. I decided to make a couple of larger/longer hooks out of a broken broom handle to better accommodate those items. In that process, I found that I had to sharpen the drill bit I needed, so as I was cleaning up from that project, I sharpened the entire set of paddle bits that had become dull over the past year. One or the other certainly encountered something much harder than wood (read "nail") during that time as well. I have not acquired the skill needed to really put an edge on tools, but the paddle bits are one thing that I can take a file to and achieve reasonably effective results.
I ran out of time, before I could get to washing the truck, which is another of those regular weekend tasks, at least on my list. Even if I would have had the time, I wouldn't have tackled that task. There is road construction that I must drive through several times each work day. It is dusty or muddy; often rotating between those two conditions several times a day. The mud can be the result of rains or the crew watering the roadway down to reduce the dust. I have decided to tolerate a dirty vehicle until the road work is complete. We have had frequent rains during the past month so the truck gets washed au naturale on occasion.
Even though, I had a regular Saturday, I was not able to complete all of the regular Saturday tasks. That is okay. There are more regular Saturdays to come. Besides this is day one of a three-day-weekend.
By the way, the yard looks good. Yard work during the past two months was limited to mowing and trimming and, most often, hurriedly completed some evening after supper. There wasn't time for the little extras that put the finishing touches on the job.
