Too busy to get old, too old to get busy...

Ooooh. Six hours I spent on that thing. Back hurts.

My neighbors have this old horse trailer they've been rehabilitating. It's one of those situations where they bought a big, elaborate trailer perfectly capable of hauling a ridiculous number of horses to any conceivable event and all but living out of it for the duration - and then discovered that what they mostly needed was just a little, bare-bones trailer for one or two beasts, simple and easy to hitch and unhitch and haul. Having spent all their money on Trailerzilla, they are now slowly rehabbing the small "fixer-upper" trailer that they actually use, which they bought for a song and a lot of work and aggravation. They replaced the plank floor, hired a local guy to reweld a bunch of rusty bits in danger of falling off, and now they're getting ready to paint it. That's where I came in: They hired me to do all the sanding.

Six hours. Honest ones, too: From ten to four, I used their nice Milwaukee orbital sander with no more than a couple of brief smoke breaks. I was proud.

I was also, as always happens, put in mind of the fact that this new life of mine contains aspects more suitable to a young man. Such days tend to send me into meditations on Social Security, its pros and cons, and the extent to which a person can bend his principles and still sleep at night. Claire outed me yesterday as a birthday boy, and yesterday outed me as a birthday boy who's starting to get, as the saying goes, 'too old for this sort of thing.'

But them's the breaks. The purpose of the exercise is to see how inexpensively I can happily live, and whether I can satisfy my money needs with local cash gigs. The answers are "quite inexpensively" and "mostly yes." But those gigs generally involve actual labor, and some of them hurt this old man. Not complaining, I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, Fred. Just stating the fact.

Not at all sure I'm done with the trailer. I've got to go back this morning for shit-shoveling, and I hope he's ready to point out deficiencies at that time so I can finish it up and not have it hanging over my head.

 Oh, and getting paid would also be wery nice.