I wake up for work every morning from 4:00 AM to 5:30 AM (depends on time of year). Breakfast is usually a hurried affair so I have time to drive to the bosses house (exactly 13 minutes away if the road isn't iced up). Recently we've been working around my area, so I've actually been getting picked up every morning which was nice. But we finished the last of that work today.
I pile in to bosses pickup with the other guys and say goodmorning; everyone else looks about as enthusiastic as me. 99.9% of the time we stop by a gas station for coffee, diesel and saw gas, and whatever we need for the day. We'll stand around waking up for about 15-20 minutes and then it's off to the job.
Sometimes we do hazard tree removals, but our bread and butter is cutting underbrush and thinning trees out around people's property. So I strap on my
chaps, my safety glasses, and my earplugs, and put my gloves on...time to get to business. The rest of the day is pretty much clockwork.
Follow brush cutter/chainsaw guy. Bundle up what he cuts till I can't see around my bundle. Throw it in to the (nicely stacked) burn pile, or the chipper if we're chipping. Return to following weedeater guy. Look at the other piler and think mean thoughts because he's slow and useless. Keep bundling brush. OW, ****. It hurts when the metal saw blades on the weedeaters fling **** at you and it pings you on the nose.
Continue ad infinitum, with occasional pauses for the boss to give the other saw guy crap about doing something wrong. Around 8:00 or 9:30 we'll take a break for a snack and water. On good days in the winter, we have the burn piles burning and we can huddle around that to get warm. If it's summer, hopefully there's a breeze and some shade somewhere.
By 11:30 we've take our lunch. Usually it's about 30 minutes, or an hour if we're having a **** day. Mmmm, food. I sure am glad I like sandwiches, because if I didn't, this would have gotten old a year ago. I usually do 1 or two meats, mayo/mustard, pepper jack cheese and about half the time some onions/tomatoes. Sometimes I'll do a tuna sandwich for variety, and if we're burning in winter we usually just bring soup and stick it in the fire. I like those days kinda.
Lunch time is occasionally punctuated with festive activities, like boss throwing sticks/rocks at one of us and laughing. I'm glad he is so amused. Ha. Ha.
Now that we're all full and cooled down and pretty much ready for an awesome nap, it's time to get back to work. I mean, unless we actually -take- a nap, which we do every so often; about once a month on average. We don't get paid for it, but it's nice sometimes. It's hard getting back to work after a break because your sweat has time to get cold. And it sucks.
After work we go home, sometimes we stop by town first to mess around a bit. I get home and change clothes (hanging my work clothes to dry if it was a rainy day), then sit down at my computer. If it's Monday, I have English class from 5-8PM, and some other college homework on other days. Every other Tuesday is a fire dept. meeting/training night, and twice a week I go to the gym (also a college class, but I decide what/how I lift).
My leisure consists of this, some other forums, video games...and editing my buddy's writing project which is coming along *really* well. There's a chance he could work this up to at least be able to be self published.
I usually try to cook dinner, but sometimes I'll eat out. After dinner I like to have some wine, and on a rare occasion I'll have a cigar. In fact I just ordered two CAO Criollos online. Hope they get here soon!
That's my day. I shower, stretch my sore muscles, and go to bed. I have about 6-7 hours before it all starts over again.