Saturday, May 12, 2012

The art of shoveling sh*t

It's dog shit I'm talking about here folks, so if you were hoping for a rant about what I read in the New York Times today, move along. Nothing to see here.

When I was a kid I developed a pretty mean wrist shot. Hundreds of evenings of practice in front of the garage door. Hundreds of thousands of shots.

My slapper sucked. Wild, uncontrollable, and not that strong. Sort of like my tee shots today. But the wrister? It was art!

Unfortunately, my hockey career was doomed the minute I took that wrist shot off the driveway and put it on the ice.

I couldn't skate.

Not much use having the best wrister of anybody in the arena if you never touch the puck.

I was reminded of this today when I was scooping up dog shit in the woodshed. It's where the hounds chill out when I'm not home, and obviously it's where I pile the wood.

So I was on splitting and stacking detail today, and of course since I haven't been back there for a week or so, there's a week's worth of dog doodoo for me to step through as I'm carrying in the firewood.

Scraping dog shit off my shoes isn't a lot of fun, and no matter how much you scrape, you still somehow end up with dog shit on the living room rug, so I bite the bullet and shovel up the shit before I carry in the wood.

As I scraped together a good shovel's worth I realized that all that time spent in the driveway those many years ago wasn't wasted after all.

Getting the shovel under that pile without redistributing it all over the woodshed is an art.

The art of the lightening quick release is every bit as important in shit-shoveling as it is in wrist shots.

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