Put the load right on Tammy

Almost hiking season. I'm gonna be ready, not whiny. My plan? To throw the dog food or flour bag and some weights into my pack. Forty-five pounds or so. And shoulder it while doing my chores. My outside chores. Firewood, water and laundry. For a two-hour stretch. Yikes. Yeah, I was nervous. Wasn't sure if I was tough enough. Splitting wood with a pack on. Carrying five-gallon pails of water, or just squatting down to pick up the split wood, assuming I could swing the heavy splitting maul above my head. But if I am tough enough to do that for a while? I'll be able to groove out like nobody's business when I get hikin'. Pack? What pack? Too easy.
So what bothered me the most at the end of my brutal two hours wasn't my wobble knees or the unstable snowy trails. With an extra 106 pounds (water bucket included) sinking unexpectedly is a little bit dicey. Makes one breathe out in a loud grunt. Nope it wasn't my racing heart or my dead arms trying desperately not to drop the rounds of wood as I walked them several hundred metres down the road or through the trails. It wasn't even my whiny, hungry cat, who followed behind or even underfoot. In fact we were both hungry. And, no, even that didn't bug me the most. Maybe it should have been when I had my first fight with a knotty piece of spruce, draining energy, near puking with hunger. And it wasn't even when I fell over backwards while filling my water bucket. Yes, it would be very easy to make that up. But I fell over backwards. Just about had to take off my pack for that one.
And it wasn't the second fight with the spruce. When it won. I landed my feeble blow right in the middle of the block. Damn. It stuck, and when my drenched, drippy, hungry, sore, bruised, sobbing self finally pulled it out, only the handle came free. Good, I thought, I was done anyway. Oh, Baby, if you're reading this, we need a new splitting mall.
So what the hell would piss me off more than any of those things?
My baby toe. If I hadn't been able to focus on a baled up piece of sock wearing a painful blister in my toe, I think I might've grown a brain  and thrown that heavy bag down the outhouse hole or something. Instead I can live to do it all again. Thanks to my fucked up little toe. Yay.