Labor Day always ends up being a lot of work

Labor Day is supposed to be a day for fishing, hunting, or just lying around. But that’s never how it turns out in my house.

My wife has a very misguided understanding of what Labor Day is all about. Rather than celebrating the economic achievements and success of American workers by doing nothing at all work-related, she sees it as a day to get everything on the honey-do list done, then do some more stuff she thinks of while we’re working.

To be fair, she works hard on Labor Day, too. She doesn’t just order me around while lounging on the couch eating bon-bons. Actually, she probably out-works me. But that’s not the point. The point is, on Labor Day, I should be out in a field, putting the sneak on a pronghorn with my bow, or wetting a fly on a calm stretch of a river somewhere.

Playhouse
I still have a long way to go on the playhouse/coyote blind, but I made a lot of progress on Labor Day (though under protest).

Instead, this Labor Day, I was out in the yard, perched on a ladder, framing out an elevated playhouse for our kids. In some parts of the world, it might have been a treehouse, but the few trees we have couldn’t hold a house of cards, let alone a playhouse.

So our playhouse is built on four telephone poles buried six feet in the ground, which was a day of work in itself. Then came the floor, which is actually 10 feet above the ground, and that was another couple of days. Those days available to work on the playhouse were few and far between, though, and the progress wasn’t up to my beautiful bride’s standards. Therefore, I found myself on a ladder, a story above the yard, framing out the walls on that playhouse on Labor Day.

But I can’t complain too much. There were probably a bunch of other hunters out there that day, and besides, when the kids get through with the playhouse, it’ll make a fine platform for practicing difficult shots with my bow, or possibly a place to snipe some predators. Maybe I’ll even get to do that on some future Labor Day.