I’m really sore this week. Last weekend I was at my brother’s place, sleeping on the floor in my swag and helping put up a trellis on his block. Even though that was light duties comparatively to picking pumpkins, fixing sprinkler lines, or god knows what else I could have been doing; it’s still exhausting to do on only a couple of hours sleep.
Ahh… The ongoing plight of night shift. I slept a couple of hours to move my sleep pattern to be awake during the day and then when we get there, we stay up drinking and talking until four in the morning. Then the kids are up by seven and I’m looking at six hours sleep over 48 hours.
This weekend, instead of taking it easy and focusing on getting my writing done, I’m fibreglassing up some of the many rust holes in my 43-year-old car. I have an old 1976 Holden, she needed work when I got her a decade ago, and I either had the time but not the money or vice versa for the whole decade. I would like to have the car looking as good as she did when she was new, and if not that then at least waterproof. Some of the holes in the roof where large enough to put my thumb through. I’ll except the wrinkles that come with age, but open wounds are quite another matter.
So instead of keeping night hours and getting some rest this weekend, I had to get up during the day again; because I can hardly use power tools at midnight and not have the neighbours upset.
Oh well, some things are more important than rest. And there’s no point lying to myself either, that nagging voice of resistance in the back of my head tells me how much more productive I could have been if I’d spent the weekend writing. No, I would not have plotted out the short fiction series if I wasn’t working on my car, I would have instead spent the weekend wasting time playing video games.