Have to, not supposed to

9/7/07 Friday
You can tell when it’s been hard by the shortness and lack of journal entries. Didn’t write anything yesterday at all. Don’t know what I did other than a few fragments of memory. I called Janie to see how she was doing. I cut wood yesterday and again this morning. There are things the doctors tell me I’m not supposed to do but things that must be done. Cutting firewood for winter is one of those. It simply has to be done cause it’s needed for us to stay warm in the winter. I’m not supposed to lift heavy weights and even when I cut them small the pieces of tree trunk weigh about seventy five pounds. I backed the truck through the bar ditch to get as close as I could to the wood I cut. That saved me some pain. I took another pain pill after I got done despite it being more than I’m supposed to. Had to strip down and stand in front of the air with a towel to cool down. Swear I could have squeezed two cups of water out of my t shirt. There is still a lot of the tree left at the pond that I will need to remove but I’ll have to finish that later. I’m done for right now, worn and in pain. The poor chain saw isn’t keeping up well. I broke the file used to sharpen the chain but used the pieces as best I could to sharpen it up. I’ll buy a new one when Cherie’s check comes next week.

There are a lot of pictures we took over the last few days. They help me remember some of what happened. There was a pipe pulling rig at the oil well across the highway. They were up and running in a heartbeat and pulled all the pipe from the oil well and put it back. That’s probably a mile or two of pipe. You can see these rigs all over so this must be a regular part of maintaining the wells. Steve was telling me about some of the nasty conditions down deep in the earth, including bacteria that eats metal. Wow.

The puppies are growing so fast. I picked up Rascal the other day and he was a handful to say the least. These guys are such a blessing. I remember when I saw the Steve who is a Sunday school teacher at the first church of Stanton that I told him we got the puppies. His remark was “Good, that should help you not feel so lonely”. I thought it was a callous thing to say. Here they were realizing how lonely we felt but not visiting or even calling and then it’s good we got puppies to help. I suppose that made them feel better about things.

But the puppies are fantastic company and love without conditions. Even when they get in trouble they snuggle up for their pets. Actually, especially when they get in trouble. I love it when Rascal comes up and lays his head on my leg, looking up at me with that expressive face.

I’ve been laying down for two hours now and the pain has subsided, partly from the medication. So it’s time to get up, get dressed, and get something else done.