I Dig Holes

For the past few weeks, I'd call the ads in the Sunday paper on monday morning, and come up mostly with nada. My luck seems to have turned. I got a call back--finally!--from the cabinetry shop. They're going to call my references, and things look good. They were a little put off by the huge paycut I'll be taking compared to my last job. (Oddly, the folks at the SPCA had no problem offering me a slight fraction of what I had made running a non-profit agency and the office of a State Senator so I could clean up dog shit for them.)

Anyway, I had a good phone conversation with a guy who works as a subcontractor for a swimming pool company. He does the excavation. He's looking for someone to work with him, and he pays $150 a day to start, and if I'm good, he'll up it to $175. So at the end of a week, I'd be making roughly twice what I'm seeing from Unemployment.

Cool.

Well, there are downsides. Pretty much, the job will go away around Christmas, when the ground becomes too hard and frozen to dig. And, he starts his day at 5:45 a.m. (What is up with these people?) So I'd be stumbling out of bed and into a hole.

This all begs the question: am I afraid of hard work? And I think that this would be really hard backbreaking work. Shovel work. Sledgehammer work. Rock-hauling work. In the mud. And the cold. No doubt for the worst kind of Bucks County resident: New Yorkers who move down here and build McMansions on land that was previously a dairy farm when I was growing up. ("You guys walked all over the beds where I planted spring bulbs!")

But damn. I guess I wouldn't need to worry about doing my back and shoulders routine at the gym. I'd have deltoids like bowling balls in a matter of weeks.

My schedule is pretty much clear next week, so maybe I'll give it a shot.

"What do you do for a living?" asks the guy I'm chatting up in a gay bar on one of the two nights a week when I can go out because I don't have to be in bed by 10:30 pm.

"I did holes," I reply, stretching as I say this, to show off my impressive latissimus dorsi.

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