Trencher Anyone?

Winter: the time when normal people are cozying up to a warm fire. I on the other hand, find myself standing around in a muddy lot wearing seven layers of clothes and holding a shovel. Slowed by a reluctant bank, my brother and I doggedly plug away at our construction project when others of tougher ilk high-tail it to warmer regions and wait for spring. Yeah, they go inside.

But not us. Unfazed by temperatures hovering at freezing and endless rain, we splash around our lot, loading truckloads of mud into a dumptruck, digging holes, and fencing while the locals drive by shaking their heads. Despite all evidence to the contrary, things were actually going quite well until our last day with the excavating equipment.

I must preface this event with the disclaimer that my brother is a notoriously poor communicator. Accomplishing tasks together requires me to do a great deal of mind reading, a skill I have not completely mastered yet.

The task was to scrape a thin layer of grass off the soil along the sidewalk. My exact statement was, "So you want me to put the dumptruck on the sidewalk." The answer was yes. 

As you can see, driving on the sidewalk turned out to be a bad idea. Furthermore, apparently "put the dumptruck on the sidewalk" actually turns out to mean "put the dumptruck on the lot nowhere near the sidewalk." Who knew?