Wired...

It was the kind of day that would have OSHA profiting.

Sledge hammers, steel posts, electric wire, a steel rod and a pickup. Sounds like a disaster, but it's just a typical day building electric fence. Sort of. Typically it goes a bit smoother than it did on Saturday, and we even had brand new wire. I even thought the new wire would help make things go even better - I was so wrong.

I've built my fair share of fence, but this is one of the most-shall we say, unique-experiences I've had.

Typically you lay out wire using the tractor and wire winder from point A to point B. This year we used the truck rigged up with a brand new spool of wire on a steel rod. It worked great until we ran out of wire. With only a short distance to the end the rookie of the group *cough* Mom *cough* stated "we've got enough" when asked if the small roll of wire looked long enough. I, however, said "no effin way".

I was right. We found this out when the small roll didn't reach the destination. I didn't think it was probably a good time to say, "I told you so."

We went and fetched more wire off the wire winder, but here is where I made my mistake. I said I thought we could unroll the old wire using the steel post. That was a dumb idea and we found out fairly quickly. As we were beginning to lay out the old wire it didn't go as smoothly and caught on the steel rod and nearly ripped the post right out of my hands. Luckily it just crashed into my shin and didn't go flying into Dad who was following the truck. Then the wire got stuck and it was a mess. The contraption we had set up would have probably violated three or four pages of some OSHA handbook, then again those types of rigs generally work the best-as long as your quick enough to get your hands out of the way.

When we finally got all the wire laid out the next step was setting posts.

Normally this is the easy part. You carry as many posts as you can, the ones with the colorful insulators on them, and feed the wire through the plastic and push the post into the ground. Sometimes you may have to give it a few knocks of a hammer to secure the post, but generally it's easy. This is when the ground isn't like a block of concrete. We had about three miles of fence that had to be set and it wasn't pleasant.

Needless to say as I woke up Sunday it hurt to breathe because it felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my rib cage. In fact swinging a sledgehammer really worked my arm muscles, it hurts to lift my arm to even shoulder level.

This is why I got a desk job.

I'm just glad I don't work for OSHA.