Weed-wacking and total body pain

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Another physically exhausting day. It was overcast in the morning so I didn’t bother putting on sun screen. The plan was to work on clearing the weeds near the fencing of one of the pens since it wasn’t supposed to rain until the afternoon. Took a while to find the weed-eaters and be shown how to use them, etc. Keep in mind my arms and legs were already sore from our day in the swamp on Tuesday lugging the fencing around through the water and constantly bending down to tie zip-ties. So the prospect of lifting a semi-heavy piece of machinery to clear away weeds was not so enticing. But we set to it. Had such trouble with the weed-eaters. Couldn’t get the one to start. Neither of us could get them to feed the thread so every few feet we had to stop and manually re-thread it. I spent all morning clearing weeds. By 12:30 my arms were literally screaming in protest. Oh, and the sun decided to show up at times throughout the morning and I noticed that my skin seemed a bit warm. Didn’t think much of it til later when I realized that I got sun burned. Whoops. Seriously was not expecting that on a day when it was supposed to thunder storm all day and only be around the upper 60s. Ah well I learned my lesson. From now on, sunscreen goes on every day. Haha. After many toils, we FINALLY finished the inside portion of the pen around 1pm. Back for lunch and by that point it was 1:45 so we didn’t have time to clear around the outside of the fence. So instead we got loppers and went back in order to clear out some nasty thorn bushes that had prevented us from weed-wacking a small corner of the pen. Turned out there were more thorns than we thought so it took us about an hour to clear it all, during which I scratched up my arms a bit and repeatedly was stabbed with thorns. We finished the day completely sore, exhausted, and in my case, with red arms. But it did feel like we accomplished quite a bit. So I guess there is that. And as Ingrid pointed out, at this rate I may actually gain some muscles on this job, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. I am quite a weakling at the moment. However, nice as it would be to not be so weak, I’m not a huge fan of the process of getting there. Tonight, everything hurts. Mostly my arms and shoulders, which between the sun burn, weed-wacking, and heavy fencing carrying, feel as though they would like to simply fall off. Hehe kay, done complaining. In all honesty, I still love the job. I love that I am getting to do tons of different things and I feel I will learn a lot over the next 6 months. =)

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