Imitation draft horse.

I spent two hours - on four or five hours of sleep from the previous night - loading mulch into wheelbarrows, one pitchfork's worth at a time. We needed to spread huge piles of the stuff around a large area to protect the exposed soil over winter. The project was scheduled for three hours; since about forty student volunteers from NYU showed up, we finished in two, right about when we ran out of mulch.

The worst part was a tie between the smell and the dust: small particles get all over and hop onto eyeballs at a moment's notice, and since this is organic plant matter undergoing rapid decomposition, when I got a deep sniff I thought of my dad's compost bins and the times in the Raptor Center when the birds didn't want to eat their mice and I had to pick the ant-infested food out of the cages the next day. It's pungent, all right. Still, it was pretty cool to see steam rising from the piles once the top couple inches were stripped off, and to take off a glove and feel the heat right on my hand.

The best part was spending two hours loading the wheelbarrows with a pitchfork. I didn't bother with the lighter models with longer handles - I went right for the heavy-duty, heavy-weight, short-handled man's pitchfork. Because I could. And because I've got a low enough center of gravity I was able to get some great leverage, really get the pitchfork into the mulch and throw load after load into the wheelbarrows. And because someone asked me why I didn't use an easier one, and I asked them right back, "Where's the fun in easy?" I'd switch bracing hands every so often to keep my arms from getting tired, lifted with my knees and kept good posture, and eventually just stood in the piles and loaded right out from inside them.

At one point, I was loading next to a young woman who'd worn mascara to the gig and was using one of the longer model pitchforks, and told her to put her back into it, lift with her knees. "Dig like a man!" A little while later, I was loading next to a man using a longer model as well, and told him to work harder. "Dig like a girl!"

There's probably a great commentary on gender roles and performance in there, but I'm still pretty tired, so someone else will have to say it for me instead.