song sung in the soil
I'm a jazz fan and the people I work with are not. Each one of them has their own favorite and only two of them are the same. One guy likes hip hop and for an hour each day, he gets to listen to his hip hop. When his hour passes, another guy gets to listen to country for an hour. Then we have a two hour block of rock for the two rock guys, one is more classic and the other is more of a Godsmack kinda guy, but you can't tell which is which by looking at them. When I get my turn, I listen to jazz baby, yea! NOW, during the hip hop/country/rock block, no one says a damn thing, nothing. They just work and endure the flavor of their coworker's taste. But when the dial hits Jazz for Daniel, no one can keep their mouth shut. It's hard to escape the fact that my music is the only one that doesn't have lyrics and perhaps this is why they talk over it, to make it sound more like their favorite. It doesn't work and it's irritating, but what can you say? Is it worth commenting on? Coltrane himself, would probably be terribly surprised to hear the lyrics to his songs that he didn't know had lyrics when he wrote them.
The days pass under the hot sun and I dig my hole, think to myself a lot, and inhale deeply the rich smell of dirt that is all around me. The nearby hose offers a nice treat of cool calm in the midst of all this dirt slinging. Hose flavored water - a taste that I haven't tasted since childhood. It's pure, clean, a bit warmer than I like but very refreshing nonetheless. Word to the wise; never drink from the front of the hose, always drink from the side. This keeps you from drowning or getting water up your nose which, for some reason, burns a lot.
The landscaping on this project is almost half way done and a noticable trend of one day at the nursery and one day planting is beginning to take shape. I must admit that I am really enjoying the nursery and all the plants that are there so I don't complain much when I am asked to tag along and pick up the plants that the boss picks out. I wasn't aware that plants had such colorful sounding names or that there were so many to choose from. I thought a lawn was a bunch of grass with flowers that came in seed packets. But it's those names that grab my memory. For those of you that know the make-up world, you'd be astonished to find that most of the names of lipstick colors come from plants.
Fire bush plum
Mock Orange
Blue Danube aroma
Hot hump pink
And that's just a sample.
I said in a previous post that the nursery was a few football fields in size, I need to correct that. It's one square mile. I'll take a photo of it so you can see. You won't believe it either.
When I am not picking up plants at the nursery I am digging up a deep trench on the backside of the property, to place a bunch of Thulia trees around a retaining wall.( I know that name and what they look like... now. That's a first for me in the plant world.) Being so far away from the others on the property line, I was also too far away from the radio to hear it. This meant that the rest of the gang got to listen to a four hour rotation of their music without my jazz fucking it up.
I didn't mind the silence of the back lot and in a way, I preferred to be back there by myself where no one could bother me and I didn't have to listen to their music either. It took me back to days on the ponderosa when work was all done alone and it was refreshing and healthy for my mind, body and spirit. I liked the feeling and I could have spent all day planting those trees, but I ran out of them and had to return to the flock near quittin' time. The hands on my watch indicated that I had an hour before I could leave....
The last hour of any work day is the slowest crawl of productivity in any profession. How many of you would want to be the patient having that Hawkeye Pierce performs surgery on at the end of a 40 hour block of work? Who wants to eat the final prepared plate of a caterer at an event that is feeding 5000? Ever seen an athlete try to finish a marathon or bike race? In the world of construction, the final hour is the "look busy but not really busy" hour. You can't really start a new project because that would mean sticking around until it was finished and that could mean staying later than quittin time. No one wants that. You can't leave something undone, can you? Can a surgeon?
You also can't just leave because that's an hour of time you won't get back and everyone is here for the money. Better to try and find little easy shit to do like stare at others working and commenting on it or looking at the BIG PICTURE and pretending to plan out the next day in your head. These are effective, proven methods of wasting the final hour of work in any profession. If you're a smoker and everyone here is a smoker but me, you stand around and smoke a lot and drink a lot of water and make it look like a really, really long smoke break. I must have drank two gallons of water and I didn't pee once. I had to pee, but the toilet still smells of my death from earlier in the wek and I just can't go in there. I am also not allowed to just whip it out and pee anywhere I want to, it's against the law, OSHA standards and my hands are covered with mud and I don't want to get any on my dick. That's not the real reason. The real reason is that there is a day care center next door and we can't have children getting the wrong impression of us, if you know what I mean. They need to see us as respectable, upstanding, moral members of society, not meth-head, junior high drop-outs that are missing teeth due to prison brawls and who can't be trusted around anything flammable, peeing on the shrubs next to their slide. It's against every form of decency in the books.
[note: there is a note on the fence just outside of the day care center that warns the children to stay away from us because we are "strangers" and strangers are bad. I wasn't aware until I saw that sign just how early we start to train our children to be paranoid and untrusting of others. And we are shocked when our kids grow up fucked up]
I'm home and the first thing I do is pee and bathe. Sadly this rids me of the smell of dirt, flora and garden hose water that graces my body, but it's best in the long run, isn't it?
One of the other guys learned a new valuable drinking lesson today; never drink water over the radio. That tends to short it out thus making it garbage and sending us hurdling into a work place filled with silence. They see it as a loss, I see it as a gain. Nature is best experienced without Godsmack, Kenny Chesney and Ludacris playing in the background. It's moderately okay with Jazz, but that's even pushing it.
Final note; I have the best forearm tan in the world. The rest of me is blood-drained out of me by a vampire white, but my forearms are very, very sexy. By the way, I think blood-drained out of me by a vampire white is a short, leafy plant that flowers late in the summer. Good with Rhodies and Azelias.
The days pass under the hot sun and I dig my hole, think to myself a lot, and inhale deeply the rich smell of dirt that is all around me. The nearby hose offers a nice treat of cool calm in the midst of all this dirt slinging. Hose flavored water - a taste that I haven't tasted since childhood. It's pure, clean, a bit warmer than I like but very refreshing nonetheless. Word to the wise; never drink from the front of the hose, always drink from the side. This keeps you from drowning or getting water up your nose which, for some reason, burns a lot.
The landscaping on this project is almost half way done and a noticable trend of one day at the nursery and one day planting is beginning to take shape. I must admit that I am really enjoying the nursery and all the plants that are there so I don't complain much when I am asked to tag along and pick up the plants that the boss picks out. I wasn't aware that plants had such colorful sounding names or that there were so many to choose from. I thought a lawn was a bunch of grass with flowers that came in seed packets. But it's those names that grab my memory. For those of you that know the make-up world, you'd be astonished to find that most of the names of lipstick colors come from plants.
Fire bush plum
Mock Orange
Blue Danube aroma
Hot hump pink
And that's just a sample.
I said in a previous post that the nursery was a few football fields in size, I need to correct that. It's one square mile. I'll take a photo of it so you can see. You won't believe it either.
When I am not picking up plants at the nursery I am digging up a deep trench on the backside of the property, to place a bunch of Thulia trees around a retaining wall.( I know that name and what they look like... now. That's a first for me in the plant world.) Being so far away from the others on the property line, I was also too far away from the radio to hear it. This meant that the rest of the gang got to listen to a four hour rotation of their music without my jazz fucking it up.
I didn't mind the silence of the back lot and in a way, I preferred to be back there by myself where no one could bother me and I didn't have to listen to their music either. It took me back to days on the ponderosa when work was all done alone and it was refreshing and healthy for my mind, body and spirit. I liked the feeling and I could have spent all day planting those trees, but I ran out of them and had to return to the flock near quittin' time. The hands on my watch indicated that I had an hour before I could leave....
The last hour of any work day is the slowest crawl of productivity in any profession. How many of you would want to be the patient having that Hawkeye Pierce performs surgery on at the end of a 40 hour block of work? Who wants to eat the final prepared plate of a caterer at an event that is feeding 5000? Ever seen an athlete try to finish a marathon or bike race? In the world of construction, the final hour is the "look busy but not really busy" hour. You can't really start a new project because that would mean sticking around until it was finished and that could mean staying later than quittin time. No one wants that. You can't leave something undone, can you? Can a surgeon?
You also can't just leave because that's an hour of time you won't get back and everyone is here for the money. Better to try and find little easy shit to do like stare at others working and commenting on it or looking at the BIG PICTURE and pretending to plan out the next day in your head. These are effective, proven methods of wasting the final hour of work in any profession. If you're a smoker and everyone here is a smoker but me, you stand around and smoke a lot and drink a lot of water and make it look like a really, really long smoke break. I must have drank two gallons of water and I didn't pee once. I had to pee, but the toilet still smells of my death from earlier in the wek and I just can't go in there. I am also not allowed to just whip it out and pee anywhere I want to, it's against the law, OSHA standards and my hands are covered with mud and I don't want to get any on my dick. That's not the real reason. The real reason is that there is a day care center next door and we can't have children getting the wrong impression of us, if you know what I mean. They need to see us as respectable, upstanding, moral members of society, not meth-head, junior high drop-outs that are missing teeth due to prison brawls and who can't be trusted around anything flammable, peeing on the shrubs next to their slide. It's against every form of decency in the books.
[note: there is a note on the fence just outside of the day care center that warns the children to stay away from us because we are "strangers" and strangers are bad. I wasn't aware until I saw that sign just how early we start to train our children to be paranoid and untrusting of others. And we are shocked when our kids grow up fucked up]
I'm home and the first thing I do is pee and bathe. Sadly this rids me of the smell of dirt, flora and garden hose water that graces my body, but it's best in the long run, isn't it?
One of the other guys learned a new valuable drinking lesson today; never drink water over the radio. That tends to short it out thus making it garbage and sending us hurdling into a work place filled with silence. They see it as a loss, I see it as a gain. Nature is best experienced without Godsmack, Kenny Chesney and Ludacris playing in the background. It's moderately okay with Jazz, but that's even pushing it.
Final note; I have the best forearm tan in the world. The rest of me is blood-drained out of me by a vampire white, but my forearms are very, very sexy. By the way, I think blood-drained out of me by a vampire white is a short, leafy plant that flowers late in the summer. Good with Rhodies and Azelias.
posted by Daniel Loomis | 9:46 PM
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