Eventually he came back in the house and–get this–actually asked for help. This mostly just ended up involving me helping pull the fencing taut and then holding it in place, with the occasional help bringing more wire fencing panels out of the barn or scavenging them from fencing that was wrapped around the yew bush near the house.

We need to trim that. Anyway–

My mom came down to watch, after I brought a bench down so that people would have a place to rest while working in the garden, and she snapped exactly two progress shots. I think this one is the more flattering of the two.

As I write this, she’s helping to add compost to the garden. I’m hanging back because my meds make me heat intolerant and it’s pushing 90 farenheit. (I had to briefly dip into the house during the fence building, too. Once we got past the hottest part of the day I was good to go.) Even walking into the shady side yard to go investigate the sound of a tree falling was pushing my luck, because every second out on the field in direct sunlight to get there is brutal.

LiZiQi and them make it all look terribly easy. Working a remote call center job, while amazing for my sense of safety around covid, and while allowing me to actually have some energy on my days off, has made me horribly out of shape. I thought the fact that I sit on my ass during my free time was just me compensating for the fact that I have tended to work physical jobs. When I was unemployed (or at least just not gainfully employed–I do have some volunteer gigs) between March and June last year, even without a day job I was doing a fair amount of yard work, tidying and trying to keep after the house for my parents. And I was definitely more sedentary than the average person, but that’s always been the case any time in my life that I wasn’t playing sports. But with this sit-down job, and living with family again, I feel like I do an awful lot of nothing in my spare time. Even when I am doing business prep in some way.

More on that…whenever my cardboard deodorant tubes get here from abroad.

I would love to be able to to get into the habit of actually getting up when I wake up around 6am because the sun came up. I had it in my head that I could somehow train myself to get up at 6 without the lure of coffee and the reassurance that I wouldn’t be bothering anyone by puttering around. My brother manages to pull it off, but he also doesn’t talk loudly to dogs in the morning, which I do. I’ve also just never, ever been an early riser. It’s weird.

I’ve also never really been a self-starter. I’ve done random assistance jobs through, like, Stuff, or Shiftsmart, who are not paying me to mention their names. Getting myself to work on a schedule that someone else isn’t setting for me is inexplicably difficult to do.

Maybe it’s just my personality.

But if we can build a fence to thwart a deer’s insistence on eating our cornstalks–a not-insignificant part of the deer‘s personality–then perhaps I can build a metaphorical fence around my desire to loll about in bed until 10am.