Buckets

Well, half our team has left us. Just the others are left. I guess it'll be a bit easier coordinating things now with only four people, but it's still sad the other four are gone. A bit bittersweet. Better bitter and then sweet than sweet and then bitter though, by which I mean we'll see them all back at FSU in the fall, so all's well that ends well.
We got to put in some solid work this week, just about as hard as I've ever worked with the possible exception of a couple days in Honduras last year. One day we were doing laundry in shifts while working waiting on supplies. We wash in buckets, so you need two big buckets of water, one for washing and one for rinse. These buckets are very heavy, so I carried several for the girls because they have to walk really far to the girls' dorm where they wash their laundry. So I was really sore and thinking I could go without lifting another bucket for a while, then go back to the work site and we immediately have to carry buckets of sand from one spot to another, buckets of water from a reservoir to mix and to pour on the concrete, and then buckets of cement from the mixing spot to pour in. We succeeded in getting all 12 pillars set and poured concrete around, by keeping doing this until an hour or two after dark on the last day we had at the school. It was pretty intense, my shoulders and biceps are just now beginning to feel normal again. I'm pretty sure I could life my life satisfied without ever lifting another bucket, but I'm sure I'll be lifting tons more of such things throughout the summer.
In all seriousness, I was really excited about it and enjoyed it, I'm not complaining at all. It's really nice to put in full days of hard manual labor, there's something simple and fulfilling about it after years of academia. I'm looking forward to putting in some hard work through the summer, strengthening myself physically and spiritually.