Zach has taken on a job with my neighbor and co worker. She has 3 small children and someone gave them a play set for their back yard. It sits right by the woods at the back of their yard and she needed someone to clear the woods from around the play set.It's a pretty big job but Zach wants to pay me back for paying his fine . It doesn't help that he sleeps til noon before going over to her house and it gets dark before six but he is on day three and has made a lot of progress. Unfortunately when he completes the brush removal he still has to cut her lawn and bag all the clippings from the front and back yard.
I decided that I will ride my lawnmower over tomorrow when I get off work and cut the front and back for him and then all he'll have to do is rake and bag.
He has done a pretty decent job and she is going to pay him $100.00 when he finishes.
My only worry is that it may take him two weeks to get it all done. He's not the fire ball of energy that I am ...he takes his time doing every thing and moves slowly and methodically.
He said when I called home from work that he worked til dark and told them he would be back tomorrow after school. Let's see, he gets home at 4... takes him til ten after to get down the driveway and into the house...another ten minutes to eat a snack, about 8 minutes to walk to her house in the sub division behind me. That leaves him about 45 minutes of daylight to work.
Maybe I can get him a coal miner's hat with a light on top so he can work past six. I asked him when I took him over today if he needed any tools out of our garage to help. He said no, they had all the same kind of clippers and tools we have except all of theirs were sharp. Let me point out all my clippers and hedgers WERE sharp until my kids left them all out in the rain time after time or back in the woods for weeks at a time when building forts and such in the woods behind my own house.
Zach is a skinny kid but he is scrappy. It has been good to see him go over day after day and do some manual labor for a change. He hasn't complained once and I take him lunch and drinks over every day. I figure at the rate he is going the swing set will be usable by the first of Spring.
He still reminds me of the little boy he was in the above picture. A "Thinker."
At least now he is a "Working Thinker."
Til next time....COTTON
1 comment:
Maybe I shouldnt share this...but your blog reminded me of something that always makes me and my siblings laugh. When we lived on Long Island my Dad refused to pay people to do his lawn work like everyone else did. We never had that kind of money, and his lawn looked just as good if not better and he did it himself. And he is a complete workaholic/perfectionist like yourself Cotton...he would put in 12-14 hour days, then come home and mow. Ever wonder why there are lights on a lawn mower? I dont. And he would trim the hedges with those "coal miner" lights. Im not joking. To this day I cannot fathom what our neighbors thought.
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