Hurtin'

I decided this past weekend would be "Other People" weekend. I'd agreed to help other people on various projects, so on Friday, I decided not to do anything on the comic strip and instead did some planning for my cousin Norm's new deck, and then did drawings for a passive solar collector and an efficient house framing technique and sent them off to Re-Member, a group that I've worked with on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Saturday, Norm rented a two-man hole digger, which has a gas engine with four long handles coming out the sides. A heavy (80 lbs.? 100 lbs.? By the end of the day, it feels like a thousand.) steel auger hangs down from there and spins into the soil. You each hold two handles and assume that the auger will just dig into the earth easily. Not when there are lots of rocks! It got caught repeatedly under the edge of rocks, at which point we'd have to wiggle it back and forth and try with all our might to lift it out when it was finally freed. It would buck and toss us around when it hit an immovable object, and sometimes we'd see a big rock coming to the surface and then it would just disappear back into the hole, followed quickly by a yank on the handles. To get down to the required four-foot depth, you also need to add a (heavy) extension rod between the auger and the engine, making it even more top-heavy and harder to lift. By the end of the day, I had three broken blisters on my palms and a number of bruises and scrapes on one arm from when I backed into a hole and fell down and the machine came down on top of me. We were both sweaty, exhausted, tired, sore...yet had a sense of accomplishment. Good times!

When I got home and into the shower, my hands hurt so much that I washed almost my entire body using just my little shaving brush, because I could grip that with my fingertips and not get too much soap into the raw blisters. I shampooed using my fingertips, because the mint shampoo that normally makes my scalp tingle wonderfully also made the blisters tingle horribly.

Waking up sore on Sunday, I went over to my son and daughter-in-law's house to help them and her dad wire and re-frame their kitchen. As long as I was concentrating on doing something I felt fine, but if I stopped to rest, I'd notice how painful my hands and arms and pretty much everything was. So, on a day that I had thought I would ideally liked to have sat around doing nothing, I was grateful for a chance to work at something distracting. And at the end, I had a real sense of accomplishment.

Today I'm still sore, but my hands are not in constant pain and I don't have a half a box of Band-Aids on anymore. The cartoons may look a little amateurish for the next week or so (yes, even more so than usual!), as I am working with something more akin to a lobster claw than a human hand right now. (Oh--I also forgot to put on sunscreen or wear a hat on Saturday, but somehow avoided even a mild sunburn. I guess that's some sort of good karma payoff.)

Once the pain wears off, I'm sure I'll figure out a way to get a funny cartoon out of all this. And Norm has already sent me a funny clown cartoon by another cartoonist off of which I may be able to spin another idea. So two days of hard work could result in two strips. That's almost like working on QlownTown for the two days I didn't!