The Dis-Rel Adventure of 2016

I have a giant deck and due to the grade of my neighborhood, I get a tremendous amount of rain runoff which has confounded all of my attempts to control it, especially under the deck (the lowest point in the entire neighborhood). My footings keep washing out and it's a annual pain in the ass to move dirt around to cover them again.

Well, Saturday I had 5 yards of fill dirt delivered and I've been shoveling it by the wheelbarrow under there, raking it flat, etc. Plus I had 900 pounds of concrete to go beneath the bridge from my deck to the gazebo.

Well, the dirt I got is really hard clay and it was a motherfuuu to move. My neighbor saw me killing myself breaking it up with a mattock and offered his tiller. It's an attachment for a whiz-bang weed eater, so it's light.

So, Saturday afternoon I'm using it and it jumps...my left middle finger gets caught in the handle and it gets twisted a full 90 degrees to the left, complete with a loud snapping sound.

I've broken fingers before so I just assumed I broke it. Didn't really hurt a ton except at the moment the nail was facing my wedding ring. But it spun right back to the normal position, so no biggie. I was just worried about not being able to play guitar for a while.

I drank a lot that night at a party so it didn't really bother me. The next morning I couldn't move my bhand without it hurting enough to make my hand go numb. But...I have a job to do so I figured I'd just use the left gingerly and get it done.

So, I start shoveling with my middle finger stuck out. About an hour in I hit some hard dirt and the shovel sticks...with the head of the handle just beneath my left hand's middle finger knuckle. POP again. And it stops hurting immediately.

Dislocated/Relocated, apparently. Still a little sore, but it works and I played some guitar last night (although B and C chords weren't going to happen).

FML

You lost me at "shoveling."

Brother, you've got 4 kids. You haven't done manual labor for years LOL

I haven't taken care of my back yard in over a month. This weekend I noticed that nature is reclaiming my backyard with super long grass, weeds and such. I open the back door with the intention of going to the shed to mow the lawn but there’s a big spider web (owner is home too) totally blocking exit from my house. I shudder, close and lock the door and play video games until the Rob Lowe roast comes on.

I put this story for scale so people can clearly see the difference between an actual man and whatever the hell I'm supposed to be.

Jeez, and I thought that I had a tough weekend. I spent Friday night and Saturday clearing out the ground floor of my house. Sunday, I spent the whole day running a rental orbital sander across my hardwood floors. Yesterday, I sanded the edges with another rental sander. My wrists and arms are sore today from controlling those spastic bastard sanders, and my back is sore from lifting the 130 pound orbital sander in and out of my car, as well as lugging it up the front steps into my house. Last night, my girlfriend stops by to see how it's all going, and points out that I have done a crappy job. It's true that the sanders were difficult to manage at times, generally for minutes after each new sanding disk was in use, and I spent more time focusing on certain stains in the wood over doing extra passes over everything. So I may need to pay pros to finish the sanding, because I don't have the will to wrestle with that orbital sander any more. No, I didn't use a drum sander, because those are reportedly even harder to control, and more likely to do actual damage to the floor in unskilled hands.

Shellhead wrote: Last night, my girlfriend stops by to see how it's all going, and points out that I have done a crappy job.

You'd be more than justified to quote Llewelyn Moss there:

You keep runnin' that mouth I'm gonna' take you in the back and screw ya'.