Evolving

Ask me what time I got up this morning. Go ahead, I dare you. The answer may surprise you…I don’t know. That’s right kiddies, I have no idea what time I actually woke up this morning. And to top it off, it is the middle of the freaking week. All I know for sure is that when I got up the sun was already high in the sky, the birds were singing and life had started without me. For those of you who have no idea why this is a spectacular I’ll give you a hint. For the past eon my work day actually started at 6:30am, and that was after an hour drive there. Which means that my life pretty much revolved around my watch and the fact that I had to be in bed early so that I wouldn’t feel like a great big pile of shit during the day. Oh and it also meant that coffee wasn’t a beverage to enjoy while reading your emails, it was a necessity without which I wouldn’t be able to function, or maintain a façade of civility. In my opinion coffee has saved more lives than seat belts.

Even during my vacations I would rarely allow myself the luxury of staying up late and sleeping as long as I wanted to with the fear that it would take me forever to get over the fact that life had just dealt me a shitty hand when I got back to work. So today as I was stepping into the shower at 11:30 it dawned on me that after being off work for over six months I have finally evolved into a different person. The kind of person who doesn’t have to wear her watch and look at it constantly to ensure that her schedule hasn’t strayed too much. The kind of person who can sleep until the sun is in the sky and she doesn’t feel guilty about that fact. The kind of person who can actually contemplate watching a movie at nine o’clock at night and keep her eyes open the whole time it is on. The kind of person who’s life isn’t being dictated by time. This perhaps is the best gift of all.

All I can say to those of you who are still in the nine to five rut, or as in my case, the way too frakkin early to way too frakkin late rut, I feel for you.

Speaking of evolving, the other day the hubby and I were out in the back forty where we decided to cut up a tree for firewood which the beavers have thoughtfully cut down. Waste not, want not, right? Normally this would not be an issue, but the problem with this particular tree was that it was cut down a couple hundred meters from the trail. Which meant that we had to decide what kind of work we wanted to do in order to get it out of its resting place, and into a place where, at our leisure, we could throw it into the wood stove. We finally decided that the quickest and easiest process would be to cut it into three long pieces, run the quad down to it, throw a sling around the pieces and then drag them up to the trail one at a time.

Sounds easy don’t it. Did I mention that we were a couple hundred meters from the trail? So we walked around a bit and decided on the flattest route to and from the tree, then we cut out a couple of small impediments, trees, branches, brush, etc, so the quad could get through, and then we went to work. I bumped my way down the “flat spots” to the tree and we slapped the sling around the first section. Then leaving the quad in low gear, and four wheel drive I commenced to pull it up the hill. I managed to move about four feet before the plans had to change. Did I mention that where it wasn’t muddy there was still a lot of ice under the forest debris? So I got off the quad and waited for hubby to cut the section in half. I then took another run at the hill, and after a couple of tiny setbacks to the process, I managed to power my way up the hill. It ended up taking me seven runs to get the whole tree up to the trail.

On my forth trip down, while I was running through potholes, over huge rocks and squeezing around trees and stumps suddenly the picture of my mom flashed through my head and I started to laugh. You see she has one of those four wheeled scooters which a lot of seniors are driving around these days. It really has been a godsend for her because she isn’t very mobile. But the thing that struck me as funny is that she is afraid to drive the scooter on sidewalks because they are too uneven. So there I was going over a particularly shitty spot, the kind where one second you are looking straight down from the top of a big rock, and not knowing if you are going to do endos, flip sideways, or get stuck vertically and not be able to move. Oh I know that seniors get a lot more cautious as they get older, mostly because they are no longer indestructible, but I am hoping that if I ever get to the point where I have to drive a scooter to get around, after what I’ve been taking my little ATV through, I certainly hope that a bumpy sidewalk isn’t going to be too challenging for me. I’d like to evolve into the kind of granny who would be able to take her scooter and drag a log or two from the woodshed to the house.