Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2004
Dear Diary:

Normally the spousal unit is an island of quiet calm no matter what is happening around him.

But Friday ... well Friday was the big cement pour involving a couple thousand dollars and the possibility of something going wrong in the spectacular kind of wrong, the kind of wrong that gets talked about for years and years afterwards.

Things started to unravel a bit on Thursday night. His two older brothers confirmed that they'd be there to help but the young guy we'd hired decided to take Friday off. Without telling us he wouldn't show up. The only way we found out he'd decided to blow us off was that the spousal unit called him to confirm his presence.

Fine.

This is the busiest time of year in construction around here. The odds of us finding another pair of hands on such short notice were about as great as me getting a date with Harrison Ford. Oh yeah, things were that grim.

The spousal unit gave me The Look.

The Puppy Dog Look.

See, I had begged off the cement pour. I have helped with cement before and it is a stupid amount of work. Cement is not some sort of lovely liquid that glides in place. It's more like insanely heavy, sticky oatmeal that wants to congeal. Cement wants to form air pockets. You have to bitch slap it into a solid mass. In a pour like ours which involved all sorts of odd nooks and crannies, this involves tampers, vibrators (oh yes, there are some serious cement toys out there) and even hammering on forms.

I did not want any part of this. It would involve two hours of very, very heavy use of my pretty little gym muscles. It would involve doing this either while balancing precariously on planks over eight foot deep trenches or scrambling into the trench and contorting around elaborate bracing all the while making sure that no one dropped something on my head, such as oh, say, a hammer or half a ton of cement.

This is the sort of work for which men were expressly created. You know, so women wouldn't have to do it. We are, after all, delicate blossoms.

But, oh, crap, the spousal unit had given me The Look. So reluctantly I said I would hang around and not disappear off to the gym as I had originally planned. You can well imagine my bitterness.

The cement company said the big pumper truck and the cement mixer truck would show up at 9 a.m. so the spousal unit's brothers said they'd show up at 8 to help with the final prep work. Just as the clan drove into our yard we could hear the tell tale whine of very heavy equipment starting the quarter mile climb up to our home. EEEEEEEEEK, the cement was early.

The spousal unit, who never swears, let out a string of profanity that would have made all the fur on our three cats fall out, if they spoke fluent profanity. Fortunately, the only three words the cats actually know are "in", "out" and "food" so we did not end up with three bald cats, just three cats trying to figure out why four humans were running at speeds seldom seen in people of such advanced years.

We bought eight cubic yards of cement, a whole cement mixer's worth. The particular mix we had would only stay viable for four hours and after that the company would have to dump it whether or not our pour was completed.

This would be "dump" as in open the cement mixer and spit an enormous pile of cement on the ground without regard to getting it into our forms. It was an hour's drive from their factory to our home, which left us under three hours to get it done.

I have never seen a pumper truck before. The sheer size and noise of it was overwhelming. The hose was enormous and just wrestling a hose that size full of cement was going to be exhausting.

The spousal unit has been on a job site where conventional cement foundation forms installed by professional crews have failed. Having tons of cement ooze into an amorphous pile is not a happy thing. His forms were far from conventional because our log home is far from conventional.

The spousal unit had done everything he could to build the most solid forms possible and brace them well, but the pumper truck was going to be shooting a stream of stupidly heavy cement into those forms with a great deal of pressure. Would they hold?

The man was frazzled.

Once it started, there was no time to be worried. We all grabbed hammers and tamping rods and set to work tamping cement down into the forms while the hose travelled back and forth along their length. When my shoulders got too tired to tamp and I started to whine pitifully about that, the spousal unit helped me scramble down into the trenches and I hammered against the forms to jar the cement down.

It is a testimony of his affection for me that he did not drop me into the trench head first, what with my whining and all.

When I was too tired to do that, I whined some more and was handed a trowel and set to work smoothing the top of forms and cement cores. So much work. So little time before the cement starts to set and it can no longer be worked. Above and around me the spousal unit and his brothers worked insanely hard. Each of them easily did twice what I did.

There is always a moment near the end of a pour when you wonder if you've calculated correctly. Too little cement and you have to finish the pour by hand later.

We have a small cement mixer here that fits on the back of the tractor. Mr. Man, let me tell you that this is the sort of work for which the words "back breaking" were created. I so did not want to have to be part of wrestling wheelbarrows of cement around, of hand shovelling it into forms.

I resolutely refused to imagine too little cement.

Too much cement, though, and you have to pay for several hundred dollars of gray goo you can't use.

The spousal unit got it just right, bless his little heart.

All told, it took just over 2 � hours. The forms held. At the end, we were four very tired but very relieved people.

The spousal unit wants to give the cement a few more days to cure and then we start peeling the forms off and seeing whether all the tamping, vibrating and hammering paid off. Will we have perfect, smooth walls without any gaps? Keep your fingers crossed.

You might think that's enough fun, but the work has barely begun. When the forms are off�a major job in itself�we have to lay drainage tile in the bottom of the trench and then cover it with crushed rock. Then the big earthmoving equipment comes back and tops up the trench with gravel, pushes dirt back in place.

When this is all done we will be many thousands of dollars poorer and what will we have? A cement wall jutting out of the side of our house about eight inches, and ten cement tubes protruding out of the ground about eight feet from the house.

Oh man. I thought by this time we would almost be finished the wraparound porch. I had dreams of hauling duvets outside and sleeping out on it this fall. Not. Gonna. Happen. The rainiest summer on record here has put us months behind schedule.

Rain, rain go away. We have porches to build now.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 621.34 miles. Ten percent there rubber duck.Ten percent there rubber duck. 25 per cent thereTen percent there rubber duck.Ten percent there rubber duck..Ten percent there rubber duck.
Oh man. This is going to be hard
Goal for 2004: 1,000 miles - 1609 kilometers

Going Nowhere Collaboration

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