I Still Can... But I Probably Shoudn't Anymore

Now that I'm on the wrong side of "middle" age, it's nice to know that I can still do some strenuous physical activity. Like operating the snowblower and snow shovel to clear off the five driveways of the other elderly denizens of our neighborhood. The line-up is: Craun (120 feet plus her turnaround area in the back), Lilly (50 feet, but double-wide), Matthews (140 feet plus a turnaround area), Kay (about 250 feet including about 100 feet of gravel), plus ours (40 feet of double-wide, plus 100 feet more single-wide to the back, plus the turnaround area). I tried doing Daddy-Bill's across the street, but he has so much stuff littering his unpaved driveway (pieces of brick, loose chunks of concrete, pieces of wood, rocks, pieces of metal, etc.) that I can't risk ruining the snowblower anymore. I've broken the shear pins on the blower twice now, both times by choking on something from his driveway. But his was only about 30 feet anyway. The snow was slushy, hard to blow, and required quite a bit of shoveling. Plus the slush kept clogging the output chute, so about a hundred times I had to shut down, dig out the slush with the little spatula, and recrank the engine. With an 8-hp engine, pulling that starter-rope gets old after the first fifty or sixty times. And controlling a heavy 8-hp piece of equipment isn't as easy as it looks. A little under five hours all total. The high today was 26. Mid-way I had to come in to sit in the shower and thaw out my toes, toss my coat/gloves/hat/shirt in the dryer, and get something to drink. But at least I still can do it. It's nice to know that an asthmatic arthritic pot-bellied gray-haired old man can still do stuff like this without dropping dead. But now, after taking a nap, eating some hot soup, and sitting still in the La-Z-boy for a couple of hours, my body is communicating very clearly that it didn't like what I did today at all. Even the triple-strength dose of Alleve (or whatever it was that Dubby gave me) has no effect on the pain I feel in every joint, every muscle, every square inch of my old wrinkled body. I feel like I've been run over by a truck. Like that rat Saturday. Oh, well, you gotta do whatcha gotta do. I guess I'm getting too old for this kind of foolishness. But then, I've been saying that for at least a decade.