I bought a new rototiller today, so you know what I was doing.
Got the garden all tilled, so tomorrow I will be mowing grass while the General does the planting. Certainly worked some different muscles today!
Many years ago when I was still a young man, my 7 months pregnant wife wanted me to rototill the garden. I was having a bad gout attack in my wrist at the time (had a metal brace that covered from my palm to half way up my forearm, wrapped in an Ace bandage) and begged off and told her I would do it when the attack was over.
Next thing I know she’s “walking” the tiller over to the garden. Now I’m talking a full sized gas powered rototiller, not a wimpy little thing you see advertised in the magazines. Ok, I was properly shamed, so I pulled off the brace and wrapped a couple of Ace bandages really tight around the wrist to keep it immobilized as much as possible. Now our garden isn’t what I consider to be that large, but with my wrist being vibrated, torqued, and jostled about it felt like I was tilling the back 40. I actually had to use pain pills to be able to sleep for the next few nights.
A few weeks after this incident, I had to have some surgery done on my hand and they happened to x-ray my wrist. That’s when the doc told me that my wrist was actually broken in three areas, but that it was healing nicely and that I should just keep it wrapped up and avoid introducing any trauma to the area. As I was looking at my wife, I asked him if rototilling a garden would be classified as introducing trauma, he gave us with a quizzical look and said “that would definitely be on the do not do list.”
My wife has called me a lot of things since then but “Wuss” in not of them. How I wish I could recapture those manly days of yore.