While Meg is attending the IGMA Guild School this week, I’m taking care of the horse and the chickens. I tried to write a post about the experience, but I’m not really an animal person, so nothing I wrote about the animals was any good. I threw it out.

Chickens made me think about my grandparents, all of whom grew up working on farms. Personally, I don’t mind working all day if I’m writing or designing. It could be software, documentation, fiction, non-fiction… it doesn’t matter. But I’ve never been a fan of physical labor, and because of that, I always felt as if I didn’t quite measure up to my grandparents’ standards. I tried to write a blog about that, but the more I worked on it, the less I liked it. I threw it out.

Then I realized that I had missed an important point: By the time my grandparents were in their early twenties, they had all left their family farms. They didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives working that hard, either. They worked hard at their new careers, but it wasn’t as physically taxing as the farm work. So maybe it’s not so bad that I went into computer engineering and spent my entire working career indoors with air conditioning.

Writing is difficult, but it’s not hard work like farming. The time goes by quickly. Sometimes I sit down and write for what feels like an hour, only to have the clock say that three or four hours have passed. That’s not a bad working definition for “a job that’s enjoyable.”