Hard Labor

I've spent the last two days helping Danny build a solar powered gray water system. This is his brain child and if you ask him about it he can tell you all about how it works, but really my only contribution has been manual labor. Well, manual labor and whining. An integral part of the system is a series of pipes leading from the shower and the washing machine to a 300 gallon container we have housed in an old chicken coop. Pipes that have to be buried. Buried in trenches that have to be dug. By me. Now, we live in the desert which means we do not have "dirt". We have sand, dust, and rocks. To make it even better, we live right by a solid rock mountain, which means that we live on top of solid rock, covered by a thin layer of smaller rocks and dust. You can stick a shovel about a 1/4 of inch into the ground before you hit rock. If you pound on it with aforementioned shovel you can break through another 1/4 inch. The last time I tried to dig a hole I ended up with a disabled pinky finger. But since I had no idea how to assemble the system of pipes, I was stuck digging the trenches. Oh, and it's 100 degrees out. I took a break to go to the hardware store with Danny, mainly so I had an excuse to be in air conditioning for a while. But I was tired, cranky, and dirty. So when Danny started showing me low energy lightbulbs and talking about how much less of an impact our house would have on the environment, especially with our new gray water system, all I could say was "the environment can go fuck itself." He suggested I go home and lie down for a while.