So. As you know, I work in the game industry, and even though my job is one of the best in that industry (see the blogs of some other game developers and/or their spouses for examples of horrible, Soviet-style soul crushing overtime and no respect for the workers…) it still involves a lot of long hours from time to time. I guess any job that can be viewed as “fun” has that possible downside — there are just too many wannabes standing in line behind you. You don’t like the hours, take a hike, pal.

But it was a good reminder for me last night not to confuse long hours with hard work. Face it, I press buttons for a living. By contrast, the guy at the pizza shop where I got my dinner last night was busting his tail. I mean, he was moving. Back and forth, shoveling the pizzas into and out of the oven, almost tripping over his co-workers in a kitchen that must have been a zillion degrees. This is July in Baltimore, and that means high 90s and near 100 percent humidity, so it can be a tad schteamy. I can only imagine how hot it must have been in that kitchen.

Hard worker, too, the guy my next door neighbor has building some monstrous brick structure in his backyard. Once again, July in Baltimore. I’m in the air conditioning, fiddling with buttons on a computer, drawing pictures for a living. This guy is schlepping bricks in unbelievable heat. Which do you think is truly working hard?

There are tons of jobs like that out there, and worse. The folks who work them must be made of some sturdy stuff. Here’s to them.

Me? I’ve got a novel I’m trying to push out of my brain onto the page (23,500 words for those counting).

Back to pushing buttons.

As an illustration, I should tell you about the Hammer of Sore.

I had a nice, 12-pound sledgehammer I used for years — splitting the wood, pounding in stakes, the odd discipline task (did I mention I’m a Lacrosse coach?) One day, last year, I was splitting some wood, and I missed the wedge, as I often do, and split the worthless wooden handle.

Flash forward to two weeks ago, when I decided to put a retaining wall around the newly-level area my children’s playset now occupies. My retaining walls are always the same – railroad ties (ne, landscape timbers) stacked on top of one another brick-style, drilled down, and secured with rebar that is SLIGHTLY larger than my predrilled holes. The work involved in getting that often-bent rebar down through several layers of railroad ties is, without a doubt, worthy of railroad songs.

When I set about the task of getting all the stuff together for this retaining wall, I realized I needed a new sledge. So I popped into my local hardware store, and actually had picked out a good replacement for my 12-pounder, when I saw it: The Hammer. It was bigger. It was shinier. It was heavier. It was 16 pounds of sexy rebar-pounding lovin’ with a big, yellow, shatter-resistant fibreglass handle. Mmmm. LOVE.

Now, posessing the hammer — simply owning it — is one thing. Picking it up, and feeling how heavy it was is a second thing. But using it to pound in dozens of lengths of rebar… that’s something else. It made my computer-keyboard-riding physique a tad sore. Come Monday, I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had muscles. But I got the job done, and isn’t that what such a manly hammer should help one do?

OK, yeah, I also moved a dumptruck load of dirt from one side of the property to the other (which means moving two dumptruck loads… one into the yard tractor trailer, and one back out into the new garden bed), so that might be part of it. And lest ye think I’m doing it all alone, my wife, who is a lot scrappier than she looks, moved at least half of that dirt, and even as we speak is moving a dumptruck load of mulch around the property, despite her pain.

As for me, this past weekend, it was a fence around the garden, for which I used another instrument of geek-body torture, the Post Hole Digger. So, for the second week in a row, I am in profound pain.

But not so much that I couldn’t outrun the little boogers at Lacrosse practice last night. And on the upside, I have a tan now… and the nice thing about muscle pain is that it means one has muscles. Hmm. I wonder if I should publish a fitness book — the Weekend Warrior’s Guide to Fitness through Extreme Yard Work.

Now, if only I had time to write it.

Yeah, yeah, everybody says so, but until you go, you don’t know. A tropical vacation in late February-early March is JUST what the doctor ordered. We went to the Dominican Republic last weekend. I highly recommend it.

The vacation was even more welcome because it came in the midst of a project Crunch at work. I had planned the trip before the Crunch hit, so my bosses generously allowed me to take time out of my marathon 16-hour workdays and go away for a long weekend to the D.R.

The bad news, for those of you waiting for my to return to working on my book — the Crunch seems to have emptied me this time. I feel wrung out, and don’t really have anything to create with after work right now.

I will have to wait for the muse to return, I guess. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll play around with a model of the main character I designed in November before I began writing this thing. Maybe that will get the spark back.