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[dragonlady7]

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Argh. So I made it through chicken processing all right. Every time, it’s a gruelling, physically-demanding day– starts the day before when I have to clean the slaughterhouse, goes all day and packaging gets really repetitive and exhausting and heavy-lifting-y, and there’s just no way to reduce any of it.

Every time, I tell myself I’ve got to make a practice of working out during the weeks I’m back in Buffalo, just to keep my body in some kind of shape so this isn’t quite so brutal. Every time so far this year, i’ve gotten sucked into working extra, and at the camera store job, I’m often wedged into closets and corners and it’s just prohibitively difficult to get up from my desk and walk around at all, let alone go do intensive activity periodically so that my body remembers it’s not dying. I console myself that my lack of working out doesn’t actually matter that much because the people who are on the farm full-time and do intense physical labor all the time are also exhausted after chicken day and it’s not even that I’m out of shape, it’s just that it is gruelling and there’s no avoiding that.

However. I would really like to figure out a way to be in slightly better shape, that’s not unreasonable. Just in general it’d be nice to get into the habit of taking, like, yoga breaks at work, I just have to make myself do it and like, if they’re going to have me working in a closet I think I can be excused for needing to go into the main room to stretch once an hour, you know?

behind the cut for length, my woeful tale of pain and agony and menstrual cramps:

Anyway. The day after slaughter day, I’m now in the ritual of going out in the morning and doing slightly more cleaning of the slaughterhouse because there’s always leftover slightly-gross residue that seemed clean in my exhaustion and in the cold light of the next morning is super nasty, and then I set up that room to use to wash eggs. There’s some moderate heavy lifting involved in that as well, but nobody’s around to judge so I work pretty slowly.

I was doing that yesterday, and I’d moved most of the heavy things and was standing in the middle of the room contemplating my next step (I knew what my next step was, I just wanted to contemplate it a moment; nobody’s watching and I can work slow because it doesn’t matter), when suddenly my back was like HEY LET’S GO SIT DOWN ON A SOFT SURFACE AND EAT BONBONS FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.

There wasn’t a soft surface within a hundred yards of me, so I just stood there, in intense pain, and after a moment (it might have been a muscle spasm), I shuffled over and leaned against the wall and explained to my back that I did not have any bonbons, there was no soft surface, and I had four baskets of eggs to wash and pack.

It did not care for this explanation, but I went on and did it anyway. I came inside when I was finished, and informed my sister that I could pack some eggs but I wasn’t going to be able to move the loaded boxes (we put the cartons of a dozen eggs each into a box that holds a dozen boxes, and while that’s not super heavy it is heavier than I was going to be able to shift much).

I sat briefly and talked to my dad, who’d come by to help fix the barn (oh I did not tell the story of BIL’s near-death, and even-nearer-barn, experience in The Big Tractor; suffice to say, he’s fine, the tractor’s a piece fo junk as ever it was, and the barn, well, he and my dad had to put the corner back on but it seems okay, so all’s well), and then I worried I wouldn’t be able to get up. I’d sat in the straight-backed kitchen table chair, not the lower soft one in that room, but I still had trouble getting up.

I spent the rest of the day in increasing pain, despite ibuprofen, and last night was not a great time, trying to sleep on this very firm mattress that feels I really ought to be a different shape than I am. Now the back pain has combined itself with sudden menstrual cramps and I am just a ball of misery.

But, I think nothing is misaligned– it’s all muscle-feeling pain, if you catch my drift, not torn muscle or sprained anythings (i’m now old enough to have experienced all kinds of things so I can tell that, lol sigh), and if i dope myself up for the cramps– you know, there’s a hot water bottle over on the sewing desk, so today may be a hot water bottle day.

Tonight there’s supposed to be a brutally hard frost, so everyone will be busy trying to clean up water lines and harvest things that will become mush or unusable, so I’ve volunteered to supervise the homeschooling. The girls are old enough that if I beg them to go easy on me because my back hurts, they probably will, and if not, I will survive. (Mostly I don’t have to do much physically anyway.) I’m just going to move slowly today.

Oh– I also did get some more flax processed with unicornduke, which was very cool, and maybe I’ll post pictures at some point. :)