Sunday July 4th, 2010

The exercise:

The prompt today shall be: work it out.

Which also happens to be the title of a song by Jurassic 5 with Dave Matthews.

Mine:

This morning Kat and I helped her parents get the netting off some of their cherry trees (it's used to keep the birds out, since they have the refined taste to enjoy such fine fruit). For my part, this involved taking a wooden pole, which was taller than me and thicker than my forearm, and lifting the net from one side up and over the trees. For a little over an hour.

The pole was not heavy at the start. The same could not be said at the end.

After lunch we helped them clear out a patch of weeds by our outdoor living room, which involved a lot of digging and pulling and raking. Now seems like it would be an appropriate time to share one of the views from our second living room:


I'll get a picture of the view looking the other way another time.

Anyway, back to the point. Between helping in the orchard and working in the garden, I don't think I'll be seeing the inside of a weight room until late fall. The great outdoors has become my gym and I couldn't be happier about that.

3 comments:

Greg said...

Heh, farmers generally don't need any kind of weight room :) I'm sure by fall you'll be posting pictures of your rippling muscles and telling us that you're posing for local sculptors!
The picture is gorgeous, I am completely envious!

Work it out

"Daddy?" Sylvia tapped her pencil against the page of her workbook and waited for her father to lower his newspaper. He folded the top edge down slightly and peered over the top of it. She'd just learned what apprehensive meant in school, and this seemed to be exactly what she'd been told.
"Daddy, can you help me please?"
"What are you doing? I mean, which subject?" The newspaper hadn't moved, still a defensive barrier.
"Maths, daddy."
The paper shook, and then was lowered completely to his lap, and he smiled.
"Ok then, sweetie, let's hear the problem."
"Oh, I can do most of it, I'm just stuck at the last bit."
"Well, what's the question, and what have you done so far?"
Sylvia smiled shyly, and read from her book, "Given an infinite-dimensional Banach space with a metric originating from the standard topology, define two bi-orthogonal series such that neither one is itself a Schauder basis, but that taken pairwise they form a global Schauder basis."
The newspaper shot back up so fast that there was a whipcrack of displaced air, and her father muttered something. All Sylvia caught was "...work it out."
She sighed and wondered what he'd be like when she reached eighth grade.

morganna said...

Great photo, Marc. I wish the view out my living room window was half as good :) (unless I lean over to see my side yard, all I can see is the neighbor's roof). And, I forgot to give you this link when I posted it the other day: http://lizbethsgarden.wordpress.com/2010/07/02/dragon-land-vi/

Love the ending, Greg.

My story:

"Work it out. Work it out. That's all I hear these days. What if I don't want to work it out?" Steve sat in his cubicle, complaining on the phone to his best friend, Jake. "Maybe I want to divorce her. I'm sick of all her 'little ways.' The counselor says I've lived with them this long, why can't I live with them another fifteen years or even the rest of my life? Well, what if I don't want to?"

Jake made sympathetic noises.

Andy, from the neighboring cubicle, burst through the doorway. "I've had it up to here with your work it out complaints, Steve." He strode to the phone jack and yanked the cord from the wall. "Divorce your wife already and move in with your mistress." He grabbed the phone and carried it out the door. "We all know that's what you really want to do."

Steve sat at his desk, his hand still cupped, empty, by his head. A tear ran down his cheek, towards his open mouth.

----------------
Inspired by my husband's stories of things he overhears in cubicles, although nothing like this ever happens.

Marc said...

Greg - I suspect the sculptors would be too busy giggling to do any work, I probably wouldn't be asked back :P

Poor Sylvia. Though I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I'm sympathizing more with the father :)

Morganna - that sounds like something I might have overheard during my cubicle days. Thank you for helping me to be even more grateful for my current position :)