I have the tendency to bury myself with projects that I could never hope to complete.

However, inside my deluded mind, I find myself thinking that finishing the work really is possible.

So long as I continue to do more than one thing at once, I know that it isn't going to happen. This past weekend I took Friday off from work to get some stuff done that I have been holding off on for some time. I started at home, which is in Alleghany, in case anyone else is getting confused. I did about five loads of clothes and assorted cleaning duties. Then I went to my land, where I was plumber, carpenter, woodcutter and manual laborer. I am happy to say that I have constructed a couple of nice-sized decks without purchasing anything but a box of screws. The larger deck already has rails and steps on it and I should have enough stuff to finish the other one as well, except for the motivation.

I get a great deal of pleasure from using materials that cost nothing to make something. A friend of mine said he has been doing so much for so long with so little that he can do anything with almost nothing. I told him that I thought Winston Churchill came up with that one, but I wasn't sure. It is like my father said of the great depression, "We were so poor we didn't notice." Perhaps Y2K will roll around and I still won't have power and water anyway, that way, I won't even notice. I can consider Y2K a joke, laughing at my neighbors who have gotten "soft" with modern amenities. But I have a friend who is getting prepared. "I got some canned stuff put up for 2KY," he told me. "What does that stand for, enough food stored up 2 Kill You?" I asked him, chuckling. He didn't get it.

As for my construction, I had a friend stop by and tell me it looked like my porches have been there for years. I told him that was good, especially if the revaluation people come knocking. Earlier, he commented on my gate, which I got for free and hung on my own blackgum posts. He said it looked ancient. "It's like it's wore out and you just built it," he commented. What a compliment. I even built a little fence out of my leftover wood. I did buy a lock and chain for it, but it liked to have killed me.

Now I am waiting on water and power. Have you ever heard the saying, "Hurry up and wait?" I have been waiting on a call from the power company for several weeks now, to no avail. I don't think they are in as much of a hurry as I am.

You see, I have to build everything the old way - just manual hand tools, with the exception of my chainsaws and battery-powered drill. You don't know what kind of shape you are really in until you saw through a 6" by 8" post with a rusty crosscut saw. About halfway through with that dull, binding rascal and I decided to use the chainsaw and darn the consequences.

It is a very difficult thing to cut a vaguely accurate length with a chainsaw, I found. But it still is much preferable to cutting anything with my crosscut saw. My father came over and helped me drag some brush out of the woods with the truck and cut up some more logs for firewood. I told him how rough it was going and he commenced with one of those walking-to-school-barefoot-through-the-snow-up-hill-both-ways stories. He told me that he used to cut everything with a crosscut saw, including firewood. I suppose he was so hot from sawing the wood that it would be hardly necessary to heat the house. At least he didn't have to gnaw it in half with his teeth, which would be faster than my rusted wonder.

On a more serious note, I can't imagine working like that just to stay warm, but sometimes I would like to try, just so I could brag about it to my kids. He told me about the snow blowing through the walls and piling up on the blankets. "We had to work like this everyday, there wasn't any waiting for power," he said. "Even if we had got power, we didn't have anything to plug in. We had it rough, life was all just a bunch of slave labor back then," he told me. "There weren't any slaves in the 30s," I prodded him, joking. We both like to joke.

"There were at my house," he said, referring to himself and his five brothers. "But I never got much out of you." (I wasn't a very good slave laborer and there was only one of me). He couldn't say much, since I learned by watching him, my role model. This is the man who, since climbing out of a snow-covered bed to hand saw huge timbers, has forgotten how to make a sandwich. He's a very bright man, mind you, but when it comes time to cook or clean or move something, he conveniently loses all knowledge of the operation. "Aren't you hungry?" He asks my mother. She knows that this means he is hungry, sometimes followed by "What are we going to eat this (whatever time it is)?" "Make yourself a sandwich," she replies. "I don't know how," my hero says. Why can't I get away with that? Usually my mother just puts out some kind of a malediction and makes the sandwiches, rather than argue something as silly as how easy it is to make a sandwich. "Two pieces of bread and something between it, how hard can it be?" I heard her say one day. He didn't answer, most likely the wise choice under the circumstances. He just sat quietly munching on his sandwich.

Perhaps he was just using the barter system - swapping silence for future meals. I never learned that trick, hence my experience: I tried that once and almost starved to death waiting on someone to come by and make me a sandwich. I decided to make my own sandwiches and be done with it.

So I am awful glad I don't have to barter my skills for everything. What would someone like me do in that case? Let's see, I'll trade you a good story and three columns for a cabbage and some pole beans? Perhaps more of a just trade than I care to consider, if you think of the terrible end the two might share in an old timey privy.

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