Never enough time for restful slumber

I don’t know what to call the last seven days, but they just might be the death of me.

Technically, I can claim vacation for Monday through today, but applying the word vacation to these days is not just a stretch of the imagination, it’s flat out wrong.

Vacation means travel. The closest I’ve come to that is driving to another side of town. Twice. But it’s not one of those dubiously named “stay-cations,” either, because, whether your “cation” is “stay” or “vay,” it means some level of recreating is being done.

That hasn’t been the purpose of this week.

The only activities that have even remotely resembled recreation are eating fast food in town a few times so I didn’t have to cook or clean and working with my horse to get her ready to take to a trainer. The first one was to save time and energy for other work, and the second has been fun but also has involved considerable sweating and “effort noises” like grunting, sighing and a bit of swearing at body parts that just didn’t want to keep up with the progress I want to make.

In fact my week has been punctuated with a lot of grunting, sighing and swearing in general, since I’ve taken a body that is perfectly fit and fine-tuned for sitting at a computer and I’ve asked it to perform manual labor. Lots of manual labor.

The week has been all about climbing, lifting, kneeling, stooping, moving, pounding, sanding, wiping, walking, pulling, packing, twisting and more than a little bit of beating my head against the wall.

Oh, and the last of the weed-eating, too. I swear, I am so tired of whacking down grass that when I had to keep working and working to use up the fuel in the tank, in the end, I seriously just considered dumping the last 4 ounces of fuel out on our road and pretending I’d had an accidental hazmat moment. Fortunately, we had a motorcycle with a gas tank I could feed the fuel into. There will be no more of that weed-eating nonsense this year.

Along with all this, the week couldn’t even be called “time away from work” because I pitched in at the office for one to two hours early each morning. I was so tired Wednesday morning, though, I was having trouble with my eyes — I could not see myself getting up early enough Thursday morning to get to work.

Seriously, I was so tired Wednesday that the most ambitious thing I did at home was dodge all forms of manual labor until the evening when I worked my way to the bottom of a bag of potato chips and emptied a bottle of mojito-flavored alcoholic beverage.

Thankfully, I fell asleep in the living room for an hour after all that work, and the nap gave me just enough energy to get out of the chair that I had melted into and go to bed.

Thursday morning I got out of bed three times and I was still sleepy, so my instincts on staying out of the office were good.

Considering all this, I think I’m just going to say I took paid leave from the office to get work done at home. Unfortunately, I still have the rest of today and the weekend to fulfill more manual labor obligations at home, so I’m thinking that I’ll have to catch a cold or flu or some other heinous virus to actually get some rest.

Wish me luck.

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Pretty much only my eyes and fingers are fit for daily use. My fingers haven’t failed me once all week, but my eyes keep saying, “Wow, that looks like really hard work, let’s just get the brain to imagine it being done,” at [email protected].