I break from writing THE BOX (Novel in Progress) to say this...

Worked at the job yesterday for 13 hours. The job, the journalism. Worked six more hours today on a roofing project my father-in-law has been tackling by himself for the past week. Alone, just him, 63 years old, ripping away old shingles, removing felt, nails, re-felting, nailing down new shingles, and, during the in-between, replacing rotted boards with newly sawed and fitted wood. 

By himself.

My faith says I must, and my heart, my striving for honest devotion to loved ones, demands it of me. So six hours today, until 3 p.m. He was working when the sun went down shortly after 7 p.m., and had started two hours earlier than I had, a chilly 7 a.m.

I guess I needed to say it. 

When I pulled into the driveway, I limped, half bent, up the hill to my house, a tired we've all known, the kind when all your brain can register is tired. I'm tired. It can provide no other output then. I slept from 3:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. when my beautiful cat, Cleopatra, woke me, overdue for her supper and not pleased that I'd made no move to help her out with that. Who knows how long she sat beside my paralyzed body before at last deciding to begin meowing and bumping her head into chest?

I never mean to transform Bent Country, my first online home, the first time my words were sent out for consumption or deference, I never mean to make it hardly more than a public journal. It just goes that way sometimes. Writers and friends tell me I need to make my personal life more accessible to my literary community, that it humanizes things. I don't know about any of that, I honestly don't, but Bent Country is the only place I feel half-comfortable doing this. Facebook, Twitter, these things scare me, probably second only to deaths of my loved ones. It's a selfish fear, but nonetheless.

Here it is, an hour out from midnight, and I dread sleeping again because that time travel only puts me right back to morning and pulling on my workboots to go again to the roof. I'll eventually break down some early hour of the morning and give in, grit my teeth and prepare for teleportation to another morning and afternoon working.

I'm still tired, and I haven't had enough fluids today; my face is flakey with dehydration. I should drink water and go to bed. I will.