Last night, I worked on a freelance manual labor job with my brother-in-law, who has a vent-a-hood cleaning business. I joked at the end how this maiden voyage of mine into this work might be Titanic in quality. A true one-off.

Here’s a real purty vent-a-hood in a private kitchen:

It doesn’t need cleaning. It is kissed by the gods every other Wednesday.

Here’s the kind–if not the extent–of the vent-a-hood we cleaned in the commercial kitchen of a well-known local restaurant (which makes really awesome chicken fried steak):

Though I’m trying to keep to BxW photos in this blog, this natural patina had to be retained for your viewing pleasure.

But, yeah, I haven’t experienced work as physical as this since I got sober in 1994 and went to work at Burger King, where a black girl saw me put on a back-support belt while unloading the delivery truck and said to me, somewhat teasingly, “you just a spoiled white boy who ain’t done a hard day’s work in your life.” She was wrong then (about the hard day’s work at least), and I’ve proven her wrong again.

That makes at least two days.