"You stink"

Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Each day I begin work with a plan.  Each day something happens and that plan flies out the barn door.

“John…come listen to this gurgling sound in the drain,” a barn staffer suggested.

I listened to the water trying to drain through a floor drain in one of the horse aisles knowing there was likely hay and other horse debris trapped in the pipe about twenty feet away.  That didn’t stop me from dropping to the ground, pulling the cover and sticking my arm down to the point where the vertical line intersected with the horizontal.  Nothing there as far as I could reach, but I did pull back and arm covered in the wonderfully smelling sewer goo.

“Holy shit, John, you really stink,” Justin – Captain Obvious – told me.

“You could have put your arm down there,” I said.

“Yours is longer,” he concluded.

We worked the line trying to free the clog, but it became apparent that a jetting was in order.  We then moved back to what we’d been doing, which was loading dirt into a gator and shoveling it out into tire grooves cut into the front lawn over the winter when the ground was soft by the same vehicle. 

I went home with every intention of doing a Survival Workout, but looked at the debris sitting on top of the Jeep in the garage and realized how I'd be spending my time.  I'd heard a crash the previous evening, but could not locate the culprit.  Turned out a shelf, which housed scrap wood and hung over the Jeep, had cut loose and dumped about a hundred pounds of wood on the hood.  I dealt with it, but ran out of time to be in the woods. 

In total, it was a dirty, exhausting day and one in which I managed another 14,000 steps.  I’d brought my ice wrap to work in hopes of using it during the day, but the frantic nature of the work not only left me with no time to do it, but also caused me to leave it behind when I packed to go.  Consequently, I did not ice at the end of the day either, though I must admit by bedtime, I was feeling very little pain.  Maybe doing nothing to make it better is better than doing something?  Probably not, but that’s how it played out on Tuesday.
Bonus: 14,300 steps.