Got offered a job yesterday, $20/hour.

[Robb]

So my neighbor wandered over yesterday while I was working in the front yard. I spent most of the Independence Day weekend slogging about with a shovel and wheelbarrow in record heat.

We have an arrangement these days, I've told him not to come over when I'm working unless he's carrying a shovel or a beer. In his brilliant style, he tries to catch me working and come over with one beer, in his hand, drinking it himself. :D

I've given him good-natured ribbing about the trucks in his driveway, two trucks made from three trucks, if you understand. His brother runs a reasonably successful auto wrecking operation. He himself runs a quite successful landscaping company. They're the only Hispanic family on our block, a working-class post-war rambler sort of neighborhood, and I believe I'm the only one he talks to. In addition, we probably are the youngest on the block by a few decades, which is not unremarkable as we ain't young. I tell people, when asked to describe the neighborhood, that's it's a bunch of small houses with well-attended flagpoles and fucking awesome lawns, except mine.

I apologize, I'm usually guilty of telling the part of the story that interests me most, readers be damned. I'll get to it here.

Anyhow, he's noticed that for my not-so-spry age, I'm doing quite well moving 13 yards of mulch around the house with a wheelbarrow. Good repetitive physical labor, I say, makes you feel old but keeps you young -- chop-wood-carry-water sort of thing. There was also nothing else for it, sadly, other than pulling the old fence apart to get the delivery dumptruck in closer -- and that fence is more screws and nails than wood at this point, I doubt it'd survive the operation. I clipped a piece of it with a Kubota the other day and it exploded like glass. :D

Doing it again. Sorry.

Anyhow, he tells me he'd hire me to do just what I'm doing, even at my pace, for $20 an hour. And I'd work all summer. And he needs about ten guys who will keep showing up and shoveling bark and gravel into wheelbarrows, carry rolled-up sod, move big stones around, and hammer stakes and what-not.

He just can't keep people, he said, especially people under 30. The "kids" don't want to do the physical labor; last year he offered a $5 an hour bonus to anyone who worked three months solid with him. He handed it out, too, he said, three times. He employs about 40 people, generally.

I have to admit it was tempting.

Anyhow, this struck me as food for thought, after the thread the other day about the young woman who didn't want the job of writing down license plates to check cars for repo status. I would've been all over a summer job that paid $20/hour when I was younger and less beat-up -- even in 1877 dollars. :D