As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages, particularly the ones about digging the holes. They remind me of refactoring, and the pain of introducing a test-seam into legacy code:
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.
Using all his might, he brought the shovel back down onto the dry lake bed. The force stung his hands but made no impression on the earth.
...
He noticed a thin crack in the ground. He placed the point of his shovel on top of it, then jumped on the back of the blade with both feet. The shovel sank a few inches into the packed earth. He smiled. For once in his life it paid to be overweight. He leaned on the shaft and pried up his first shovelful of dirt, then dumped it off to the side. Only ten million more to go, he thought, then placed the shovel back in the crack and jumped on it again. He unearthed several shovelfuls of dirt in this manner, before it occurred to him that he was dumping his dirt within the perimeter of his hole.
The digging got easier after a while. The ground was hardest at the surface, where the sun had baked a crust about eight inches deep. Beneath that, the earth was looser.
Though he tried to convince himself otherwise, he'd been aware for a while that his piles of dirt were too close to his hole. The piles were outside his five-foot circle, but he could see he was going to run out of room. Still, he pretended otherwise and kept adding more dirt to the piles, piles that he would eventually have to move. The problem was that when the dirt was in the ground, it was compacted. It expanded when it was excavated. The piles were a lot bigger than his holes were deep. It was either now or later. Reluctantly, he climbed up out of his hole, and once again dug his shovel into his previously dug dirt.
Stanley kept digging. His hole was almost up to his shoulders, although it was hard to tell exactly where ground level was because his dirt piles completely surrounded the hole. The deeper he got, the harder it was to raise the dirt up and out of the hole. Once again, he realized, he was going to have to move the piles.
As he dug he was careful to dump the dirt far away from the hole. He needed to save the area around the hole for when his hole was much deeper.
"Well, the first hole's the hardest," Magnet said.
"Well, the first hole's the hardest," said Stanley. "No way," said X-Ray. "The second hole's a lot harder. You're hurting before you even get started. If you think you're sore now, just wait and see how you feel tomorrow morning, right?" "That's right," said Squid. "Plus, the fun's gone," said X-Ray.
"You're right," he said to X-Ray. "The second hole's the hardest." X-Ray shook his head. "The third hole's the hardest," he said.
That meant he'd dug forty-four holes. Stanley dug his shovel into the dirt. Hole number 45. "The forty-fifth hole is the hardest," he said to himself. But that really wasn't true, and he knew it. He was a lot stronger than when he first arrived. His body had adjusted somewhat to the heat and harsh conditions.
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