Thursday brought storms and chaos to my house. While nature was busy dumping 5 inches of rain in one day, I was busy driving my dad to the doctors and the hospital. He was given a strict no lifting order- including and not limited to lifting boxlots (which is necessary when your business is comprised of selling things) until they found out exactly why he was in such pain. Thursday evening was spent watching movies, and Friday was another day at home because it was deemed too much for dad to go to an auction. The auction was not to be his therapy that day, his way of focusing his attention defficit in one area that he just happens to love, because at an auction he would, undoubtably, lift tons of things he wasn't supposed to.
Saturday is normally a day of preparing for Sunday. Many people do not realize just how much work goes into maintaining such a large stand as my dad has. They think he gets up Sunday around 7ish, and his boxes magically unpack and price themselves. People don't realize that my dad works over 50 hours in a normal week, buying, loading, delivering, unpacking, rearranging, etc. It's a lot of physical work. Saturdays he goes to the market around 2pm, and he sleeps over so as to have more time to set up his stand, works til about 11pm when he goes to sleep, and wakes up at 4 to answer the demands of his early morning customers. He gets to go home when the last customer leaves, usually around 5pm. He goes home, sometimes eats dinner, and finally catches up on his rest. It's a lot of work.
I think I lost my point there somewheres. Lets start again. Saturday is normally a day spent preparing for Sunday. Never has that been more true than this past Saturday...
Because of the days of mandatory rest, we had not been down to his stand to check on it since the nasty rainfalls. It turns out that his stand is a complete mess. There are things that just floated to other places, tables overturned because of the rain, the creek flooded in places over a foot deep, there are literally holes in the ground over 1 1/2 foot deep, and 8 feet wide. The gravel that is usually spread out relativly evenly by thousands of feet over the week is now in piles 8inches deep in some spots, and completely bare in others. The one rug had a huge bump underneath it of gravel, and yet the rug stayed in place. It looked like on those cartoons where the kids just sweep everything under the rug instead of disposing of it.
We had a lot of work to do. And my dad wasn't allowed to do any of it.
I spent 5 hour there Saturday, 4 of them were spent strictly raking up the gravel, and shoveling it into ditches. I got my workout that day, arms and thighs were worked, pushing the gravel around.
There is, however, something to be said for how satisfying it is to see an area go from a complete mess, to a nicely raked, smooth path. It's immensly gratifying to know you had a major role in the end result. And I was proud of my sore muscles, every single one of them. They were earned, and I was proud of how hard I worked to earn them.
I've been on vacation the past few days, swimming and sleeping in a hotel with an indoor pool and uncomfortable beds. And while some of my sore muscles were from the amount of walking around I did at an amusement park, the majority of my sores were from the painful bed, and I was not near as happy to have those sore muscles as I was the past Saturday.
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