Mandatory Quarantine: Day Six

It may not be the same for you, but in quarantine, time loses all meaning. I just rolled through a weekend, and it felt exactly the same as each work day last week. Even worse, I didn't really have the inclination to do anything with that weekend. There is a ton of stuff I could do here at my house, but I just couldn't make myself do any of it. All the same, I finally got tired of being tired and hopped out of my comfort zone to do at least one constructive thing for the whole weekend. I trimmed trees.

While that doesn't sound like much, keep in mind, I don't have any trees in my yard. My neighbor has trees. Big, ugly, fragile, tinder spreading cottonwood trees. I hate them. Every time there's a good gust front, I end up with his tree limbs in my yard... so the obvious solution is to get ahead of it as much as possible right?

Let me just say, I'm a good neighbor. I didn't go hacking on his trees without his consent. I brought up how they needed trimming last year, and he told me to trim whatever I wanted to. I have carte blanche. I also have a new manual limb saw, so as I was fighting the urge to close my eyes yesterday afternoon, I decided to get up and get to it.

I am amazed how we live in 2020, and the design of this tool is basically unchanged in my lifetime. Based on how it performed, you can't convince me that this is peak technology. It's clunky and difficult to get a good clean cut when you've got it extended the full fourteen feet. Perhaps the fiberglass pole just isn't thick enough, allowing too much bow, and Lowe's doesn't have a care because that thinned tube is the difference between making $22.50 in profit vs only making $22.20 in that margin. It sounds like they're being cheap, but thirty cents of a few hundred thousand units adds up, and if you've ever watched Shark Tank, cheap is the name of the game.

For the record, I have no idea what the profit margin is for that tool. This is just hyperbole.

By the time I got to the back side of my property (which is Oklahoma speak for back yard) I decided to put the pruning blade on a sawzall since I could hop up on my shop and cut limbs without a ladder or stupidly thin fiberglass pole. Job done, I didn't fall, truck loaded, we're good.

Bring on the cough.

Now I've never been tested for allergies, but I assume it's safe to say I'll be allergic to needles. Have you seen how we're still doing this? It's barbaric. They just poke you with a bunch of needles, and worse, if you don't react, they poke you again even deeper. Can it not be done through a blood test? Or is it that insurance won't cover a blood test, favoring the needle torture because it's "cheaper?" I have no idea if I'm allergic to cottonwood trees, but after I got cleaned up in a nice steamy shower, I couldn't stop coughing last night. Did I over-exert myself allowing the rona to take hold? That's the whole reason I'm forced into isolation for these two weeks, is it finally happening?

As I realized this morning, with a hint of postnasal drip, it's allergies.

Current temperature - 97.8f. We good.

Event though it's still relatively early in the day, I have no benchmarks to look forward to. No anchor points if you will. All I know is lunch is coming, and Wayne's is closed. I've been craving it all weekend, but the responsible thing to do is not go to get it myself. Even though I really want it, it's not cool considering I could potentially spread what my father calls a "political conspiracy." We'll talk more about that tomorrow after I've had my double-double and fried pickles delivered. Until then, I guess I'll sit here doing busy work listening to This Old House in the background.