Soggy Armpits and Cold Knickers

Posted on Thursday 18 January 2007 at 07:51

I woke up this morning, and nothing was broken. Nothing was even going wrong. The kids (who always manage to beat me to the daily game by half an hour) had even eaten their own breakfast.

I spent the morning.... Sitting there. I went and visited some blogs (probably yours, if you commented here, cuz that's how I remember to visit people). I tried to come up with a working scheme for my last, newest and most nebulous web concept - I'm trying to calculate the best way to create a site that will actually absorb you into my countryside. In other words, lots more visuals, and maybe some audio - and, if I ever get my higher-speed uplink, possibly even video. (Yes, some of it could be hilarious.) It's all just a dream for now.

We got some lunch, and then 10-year-old Spazzerific and I headed outside. He had earlier confirmed to me that the tractor was in fact plugged in. He now started it for me, because I had an impeccably-timed tantrum from Brat Boy to deal with. I confined the child to bed and ran away from the screaming.

I had Breakneck's trusty longjohns on, and I snitched Breakneck's big Tough Duck jacket. If you don't know Carhartt and Tough Duck, you don't know winter outerwear. These things are built out of tarping canvas. They come in hoodie, suspender-pants, and long-underwear styles. (We call the full ones chipmunk suits, 'cause Dave looks like a giant cartoon chipmunk in that gear.) Only Breakneck can routinely ruin one a year.

Spazzerific, who is really a bright boy when he's not being dumb, had already pulled the tractor out of the barn. I climbed aboard, and we debated a bit over whether or not to bother detaching the 3-point snow blade off the back. We chose not to wrangle that heifer, and the Spazz then reminded me how to shift the thing into gear and how to make the bucket go up and down.

It didn't take too long to remember. I had once pushed some dirt back in the summer, and ours is a friendly little yard tractor.

And so, away I went to push the wide-strewn coal into a pile. The Spazz sat nearby on a snow pile and gave his mommy directions about how low to drop the bucket and at what angle. I granted him the illusion of being smarter than his mother until he got bored and hucked a snowball at me.

I picked away at it carefully at first, trying my best not to pick up much snow, and still get as close as possible a shave on that uneven ground. Snow mixed into the coal causes consistent problems. The coal will stick to itself like caramel popcorn lumps, and then you have to hit things really hard to get it to feed through the hopper and into the auger. That's after you wake up to a freezing house yet again and wonder why on earth you decided this was the one place in the world to live. (Voice of experience here, in case you were wondering.)

After awhile, I realized that my upper half was quite toasty in the big jacket, except for my windblown face. My toque (woolen hat, you Yankees, pronounced suspiciously like "puke") is actually a full-face mask, so I pulled it down. Because it's comfy, and because sometimes it feels cool to look like you're capable of carrying an Uzi over your shoulder.

Then, presently, I realized that while my uppers were warm and my face was comfy, my theft-procured longjohns were inadequate even with jeans overtop. My feet were fine, because my steel-toed boots happen to be precisely three-quarters of a size too big, and I can always fit a stolen pair of Dave's big wool socks into them. But my knickers were refrigerated.

Oh, well. Being of the slightly chubby persuasion, I felt well-layered enough to survive. And survive I did, for an hour straight. Because I was thoroughly distracted by how much fun it was.

I revved up the engine, swung into position, and raised the bucket to peer through the narrow line of sight and size up my target. Then, at the bracing pace of 5 miles an hour, charge! The tractor shoved into the low strip of coal and grunted its way through until a pile as tall as me was in place. I even started engineering my bucket technique. Back and forth, charging, wheeling away, analyzing and charging again! Yay, me! Yay, little tractor! Yay, Spazzerific!

The Spazz parked the tractor for me, glad to have one last stab at manly supremacy before we went in. Then came the really fun part. I emailed Dave at work and told him What We Did Today. I had the fun of being downright self-sufficient, and shocking my husband's socks off for a bonus round.

Sometimes, repetitive tasks aren't really boring at all.