Stiff Thighs

Or if you wait long enough, you too can procrastinate.

by Mary Brady

When the village where I live scheduled the first yard waste pick up of the year, (Exciting, eh?) they gave me two weeks to gather and tote the limbs and large branches out to the roadside for a 7 a.m. pick up on the specified Tuesday. If I missed the day, I’d have to look at the debris for two more weeks—without the snow, it’s pretty trashy looking. They do, of course, give you the option to pack it all up in the trunk of your Prius and haul it to the village stick pile. Like that’s going to happen.

So, did I prepare in any way for this big event? Did I start early or did I do any exercises that would get my bending and squatting muscles ready for picking up the nine hundred and fifty-seven or so sticks, branches and limbs? (I have a very large willow tree, need I say more, and the electric company was there last week trimming the branches of the eleven trees encroaching on their lines and they were all men and they cleaned up like men, need I say more?)

Of course, I did NOT do a single SQUAT. Wait! I did pick up two branches on my way to the mailbox one day.

Did I rally my husband and son prior to the Sunday before the Tuesday (don’t go there)? Of course I did not.

So on Sunday when the “light rain ending in the morning” turned into a torrent of hail that collected all over the sticks in our yard, my son called. “Hey, Mom, I was thinking. Since it’s hailing so hard, (chuckle) it woke me up, (snort) maybe we wouldn’t be doing yard work today.” Smart aleck. Medium story to shorter, I picked up the sticks on Monday, solo.

Thus stiff thighs and the sequela.

Late Wednesday, 48 hours or so post stick picking, while preparing one of those “I really don’t care what we eat” meals, walking was painful but not harmful. Bending and squatting was another story. When it came time to put a pizza into the oven, I started to bend over/squat, but realized it hurt so much, I might totally lose control and end up, even without a Hansel-type push, stuffed by uncheckable momentum into my own oven. So to keep from burning anything after the fall, I gave the Palermo Chicken Caesar a bit of a toss. Wheee! Cheese flew onto the bottom of the oven where it is now some sort of a carbon compound. My hubby, a blessed man skilled in the art of self-preservation, enjoys, or at the very least tolerates silently, everything he is fed and never complains about the smell of cheese burning on the bottom of the oven as a “welcome home honey” aroma.

The “stiff thighs” of writing gets me on occasion, usually in the form of a sore butt, when I have told myself I have plenty of time and found out that meant if I intended to keep my rear glued to the seat of my computer chair, never to sleep again. For some books I now conclude there is never plenty of time.

Why Daniel Craig, you ask. I tried to find a nice pair of men’s thighs without going porn and I concluded, guys should be ashamed of themselves. Either they are encased in those hideously long, two-legged bags they call trunks, or they are too bare to bear gazing upon. Thus Bond to the rescue, of course.

Procrastination did lead to a blog topic that I have been procrastinating about, so that might mean procrastination is good. Hmmmm.

What did you last get “stiff thighs” about? Or what do you wish you had procrastinated about but didn’t?

I’m giving away a TossOns necklace to a commenter. So don’t procrastinate too long.