today was one of those days where what looked like a small chore that should take an hour turns into a huge debacle.  today anna and i changed out our lawn sprinklers to low flow lawn sprinklers on account of the severe drought.  the drought is bad, very bad.  driving thru the central valley last week we could see how parched the land is.  dry.  bone dry.  drier than a dry martini.

so we want to switch out to a low flow sprinkler system that uses less water.  all i needed to do was take out the old sprinklers and put in the new ones.  ha!  my hands are freaking raw from all the twisting and turning.  the new sprinklers are a little wider than the old ones which makes things a bit more interesting.  the holes made for the old sprinklers are a bit small so it takes a bit of wiggling with the palm of your hand to get the new low flow puppies in there.  and then there you have to line the sprinklers with the underground coupling just right and screw them together.  underground!  you can't see what the hell you are doing.

let's just say we duked it out with the new sprinklers and the new sprinklers won.  fuck.

but that wasn't all.  we did new planting too.  our one hour chore turned into a several hours monster.  also, i ain't so young no more.  it got hot today, upper 90s F, felt like heat stroke, and in addition to my raw hamburger hands my back is aching and my knees are fucked up.

ooh shit.

just the same, i am doing my best to practice mindfulness.  dogen says somewhere -- i take this quote from the poet stefan hyner -- to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be enlightened by all things, to be enlightened by all things is to lose the barrier between self and the Other.  today that Other was our sprinkler system.  i could hear that fucker laughing at me.