I had a fantastic day at work yesterday. It was really easy. Got to a new site in North Van, almost Deep Cove. Building a fence. Fir and Cedar. Pressure-treated. Ted explained how he proposed we build it. He had spent sunday setting the first 7 posts street-side in concrete. I started building the panels which would link the posts to one another. I have to build about 16 of these panels. I built three on monday, and today i built three as well but cut about two hours off the overall build time. I will only get faster at building them. so it should only take me another three days or so to finish building all the panels. ANyway, i was talking about my fantastic day YESTERDAY. Time just flew by. It was lunch before i even really thought about it. Then what seemed like only a couple hours later Ted told me to pack up. I thought we were leaving early suddenly, but it turned out it was already 5pm. So, 9 hours Monday, and then today I just felt good enough to work a long shift – 10 hours. I may be motivated because I enjoy working with wood a lot. Other tasks like painting and finishing carpentry makes time seem to drag. Framing and rough carpentry such as fence-building are really fun for me and i kick ass at both.
In other news, I was unloading bags of concrete out of the van and i noticed that each bag was 55lbs. One bag certainly didn’t seem like much of a stress for me, which was surprising. I guess I always thought 55lbs would be heavier. So I tried two. No problem. Then I tried lifting three bags at one time. It was tough, but i’d say i was still only at about 85% of my lift capacity. If that estimate is correct I should be able to max out my lift capacity at lifting 195lbs dead weight. I weigh around 185lbs. I was pretty proud of that. I almost wanted to tell Ted, but i thought it’d come out sounding like I was a ponce.
Ponce is my new word fascination. Every week or so I get a new word stuck in my head. Not necessarily a new word, but just a word. Sometimes they’re insults or cusses swirling around in my head. Last week it was ‘goof’. This week it’s ‘ponce’. That internal monologue in your head? The sound of your thoughts whirling around consuming your life with an endless chatter of useless pondering, judging, calculating, organizing, evaluating, worrying. It’s that voice. But the last few days that voice has been astonishingly quiet. ALl it says today is Ponce. Ponce. Ponce.