Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.” - neil gaiman

you can’t ever really know what something is like until you do it. good or bad. i knew that this job would be the same way. i knew that no matter how many questions i asked before i got out here everything would be different. 

i know that the way i’m describing this job to other people is maybe better than nothing, but it won’t actually explain it.

it’s dirty (WAY dirtier than i expected), and hard, and sort of monotonous, and has tons and tons of parts to it. there’s measuring and converting and weighing (in kilos, thank god, or you’d never go back and pick up the next box), and photo-ing (that’s what we call it. not photographing.), and drawing. and spraying water.

some of those parts i figured. the logging part. but not the other parts. i carried probably 120 boxes today, from a pallet to a bench, or from a bench to a scale to a table to a pallet. each of those boxes weigh between 40 and 80 lbs. that’s alot of carrying.

the water is what makes things so dirty. rocks are inherently dirty (or at least they should be). and to see anything, you need to wet the rock. so you do and then you are playing with cores that are muddy. and boxes that are muddy. because they came from outside. and rambled around in the back of a pickup and then sat in an old lumber shed. there’s nothing clean about this job. except how AMAZINGLY clean you feel after a shower.

every day i like this job more. and this is only day 5.

ps. there is another bar in town that also has now made me a veggie burger (dempsey’s). they also have fab beer on tap.