TIRED

Doesn't seem like two 16-mile bike rides should have tired me out, even with 4 hours of little kids sandwiched in between.

I was pretty active with them: running around their playground, having "animal parades" (we crawl on all fours pretending to be various animals while we make the sounds of the animals, an educational diversion I invented for 1.5-yr-olds), picking them up and swinging them around a lot, going down the slide with them.... that shouldn't tire out a 56-year-old woman, should it?

I can feel yesterday's biking in my legs. The trip out was against 15-25mph wind the whole time. Trip home was better, and I worked on keeping my cadence up with the gears just a click higher than I would have liked.

Guess I'll ride my easy gears today. I'm sleepy. Slept late (8:30.) I guess there's landscaping work going on here at the camp, but I get in most of my hours feeding the animals, so I don't have to go out there digging holes more than about 3 hours a week.

The landowner, faced with more work than can be finished in the week and a half most of us will still be here, has offered $10/hour for work beyond the agreed-upon hours for our sites. I'm tempted to work extra, for maybe another $100 in the till for running shoes, bike shorts, 1/3 of a really good down sleeping bag, or insurance against next month, when we'll be between work-camping jobs and relying on skimpy savings and Steve's retirement check.

Or not. I'm not Superwoman.

HOES

Where we're workcamping, most of our work is, essentially, gardening: a lot of hole-digging and shrub-planting. Six senior-citizen couples.

So one day we were getting together to start, and in the tool shed I saw half a dozen new garden hoes. I picked them all up, took them outside, and said to the older fella who was standing outside,

"Hey, Dave.... did someone go out and get you guys a bunch of hoes?"

Poor old Dave didn't get it. "Yeah, they work better than those shovels for some of the work," he answered, with a totally straight, honest face. Nope, he didn't get it.

As opposed to one of the other fellas, who saw me heading toward the planting site with a hoe and yelled,

"Hey Ellie.... you goin' ho'in'?"