Real Steel

The picture is of the moon last night.

Over the weekend, I planted fifty trees. (It seemed like a good idea to order them when I was laying around doing nothing over the winter. We wanted to replant a windbreak of trees that are growing old and dying.) Then, after planting the trees, squatting and digging and squatting and pounding, then I thought some of the older trees needed some protection against the incoming sheep. I put up fence posts around the fruit trees. The posts were eight feet tall, so I parked the truck next to each tree, climbed up into the back, pounded each fence post in, and then hopped, soft knees, back onto the ground. I figured if I kept my knees soft, my joints would be fine.

(This is not my real truck, nor my real person, but she is standing just as I was. I went up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, for about an hour. I gave Little Z a blaze orange flag and she ran around in circles, chasing off Tom Turkey, who kept seeing himself reflected in the truck and attacking the truck.) Okay. My joints are fine. Really. But my thighs, on the other hand, are now made of steel. They are made of steel in the sense that they do not want to move or bend or stretch. They just want to burn. And burn. And burn!

(This are not my real legs.) Yes, I feel the burn. That earth gym is more brutal than any exercise partner I could ever find.