Weekend Warrior, or just old?

So finally I find time to correspond with my millions of devoted readers. Okay, two or three, but they're worth a million. Besides, I feel guilty if I go too long without writing. Thursday I got a call from my friend and neighbor, Martin, who works at a local pool store (actually the place would collapse without him). Seems they were doing some cleanup and was I interested in some cut-up palettes to use for firewood? We heat with wood, and I have spent practically nothing the past three winters heating the place, so cut-up wood is always welcome, even though I still have a pretty good stack out in the back still waiting to heat our humble abode. Friday he pulled in with a huge truck that took the two of us about half an hour to unload. By which I mean grab some wood, toss it out onto the ground, repeat—no time for stacking. Big pile in the driveway. Well, it saved them having to pay to have it hauled off, and as they say, wood heat warms you twice. Examination of these fine specimens of dried cellulose revealed that most of the pieces were one to ten inches too long to fit into our firebox. Hmm. Good thing I have a nice chop saw. Shouldn't bee to hard to trim the pieces up. Besides, everything could stand to be stacked a bit more neatly. Saturday he delivered the second truckload! Bigger pile, and some of this is clearly not cut up—eight-foot two by fours. Well, the two by's might be good for building a porch and a shed and a couple goat shelters this summer (come to the pig roast and you'll get to see the fruits of my labors, but I digress). So I set up the saw bright and early this morning, marked the right length with a jig, and began to cut. Woodpiles are always bigger than they look. And I'm an experienced wood cutter. I stood and cut lumber for at least six hours, not counting stacking time. The front porch is now fully primed with firewood, I have a large hand cart holding must be a cord of wood sitting covered by the front door, and a large pile of uncut lumber in the driveway. I must have made a big dent in it, but you can't tell. I commented that I couldn't believe how beat I was when I came in that afternoon. I must be a bit out of shape, after all, the work wasn't that hard... Val said maybe I'm just getting old. Old!? I can't get old! Don't have time! I have too much wood to cut. I did relax with my poetry book for a while, and I think I figured out how to make it possible to subscribe to this blog—It's the bottom link on the left. That way you'll know when the blog has new material. You won't have to to take the initiative to look and then go away disappointed (I hope) if I haven't added to my deathless prose. Poetry book. Yes. I remember in high school my English teacher mentioning that there were other metrical feet besides the basic four—iamb (ta Tum); trochee (Tum ta); anapest (ta ta Tum); and dactyl (Tum ta ta)—but I didn't need to worry about them. I just now learned about them and why I don't need to worry about them. But they're interesting. The reason we don't need to worry about them is that they don't lend themselves to English. Mostly they are from classical literature (Greek and Latin) when meter was measured by how long a sound lasted. In English we accent with volume, not length. And those Greek and Latin guys liked to play around with vowel length, perhaps made easier partly because word order wasn't so important in those highly inflected languages, so they could move things around more than we can. I will mention two, because you'll recognize them immediately. Remember the song "America" in West Side Story? "I like to be in America/Everything's free in America" and "I like the city of San Juan/I know a boat you can get on." Notice how the last three syllables in the word "America" all get a heavy accent? That's a molussis, normally really hard to do in English. And the two syllables "San Juan" (and "get on" in the next line) that's a spondee, and you see it occasionally in poetry, used for effect. Can you think of a very common example of two spondees in a row? And now it's time for bed. I have wood to cut tomorrow, and I'm getting old.