While building mail servers and computer consulting pays well, it’s not very physically demanding. This allows certain muscle groups to atrophy. This is never more evident than when a bout of charity strikes. Some friends are opening up a store and phase one is getting the building set up.
I stopped by and, signed myself up for some rather serious manual labor. “Why sure, I love crow bars! I’ll help tear up your floor”. In a flash of red-hot wisdom I also called my cousin Solomon and invited him to help out as well. I didn’t tell him what we were doing, and bless his heart, he just came. We spent all morning and part of the afternoon tearing up plywood and carpet.
The plywood was very thin (3/8″) and extremely well nailed. Excessively so. That made getting the plywood off the floor in sheets very difficult as the nails ended up pulling through the plywood instead of coming out of the floor. Once we had the carpet & plywood layers peeled up we spent several hours with crow bars pulling nails.
All that is little more than a good days work. However, combine that with the aforementioned atrophy of working muscles and that I’ve had a sore throat for the last two days (I think I’m fighting off a virus) and I’ve got some really sore muscles. I should sleep well tonight. 🙂