I've succumbed to my day-laborer side. I am officially a blue-collar worker. I wear a blue shirt with my name embroidered on it. Everyday I wake before the sun and am on the road in my four ton truck before six am. On good days I unload my full truck, all 16,000 pounds of salt.
My first two weeks I worked with someone else. He showed me where the sites I'd be visiting were and helped me get my feet under me. Everyday I was exhausted. My arms and back got sore. The joints in my hands and wrists hurt. When I wasn't working I was sleeping, or eating.
At the end of the two weeks, I felt pretty good. I was finally getting use to the work, and we were getting home early. That's when I started to work alone.
It was just as bad as when I started working, except the days were longer. I averaged fourteen hours a day. I stopped riding my bike. I had already stopped working out. I stopped my life other than work. I began to question whether or not I could really do this. But, little by little I saw progress. It kept me going.
I still get tired, I still eat all day, and I still wake up before the sun, but I have two months that tell me I'm man enough to do this.


"How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm" by Andrew Bird

Have you ever wanted a really big poster, but have been thwarted by poor selection, high price or unavailability? Of course you have. Fret no more, I've found the solution to our problems.

The RASTERBATOR!!!

What it does is tiles a picture, frequently called rasterbating. You take the tiles and put them together to make a picture much larger than your available paper.

On the Rasterbator site there's a gallery of some cool rasterbations. Some of my favorites: The Raven, The Wall, and Overpass.

So have fun rasterbating everybody! Just one hint, go with the guidelines if you want to lose the margins. Trust me.

I've really enjoyed waking up before the sun. For a good while now I'd been nursing a secret envy of those early risers. I'd see them with their worn in smiles, casually boasting how tired their predawn wake-ups made them. Somehow those few hours gave them elite status. It was like I could feel them looking down out of the side of their eyes at my slovenly life of late mornings and later nights.

Sure I was proud I could sleep in. I dreamt past all the ungodly hours into breakfasting lunch. But, inside I knew I was cheating. I wasn't sleeping in. I was just compensating, offsetting for my late night. And, though I told my self late night was when I was most productive, it wasn't true. Darkness is very forgiving. It can hide two hours of clicking for something to watch with a load of laundry. Large swatches of nothing are swallowed efficiently. And I'll tell you a secret...no vacuuming gets done in the dark. For some reason it belongs to the day.

But, now I'm one of those "morning people". I can fancy myself kin to the farmer, a brother to the garbage man. I leave work at lunch and eschew the late-night blabbermouths. I give my warmed-up smile to everyone I see, while I think to myself, "Man, I can't wait to go to sleep...I'm tired." And somehow it doesn't feel like cheating.