Men are indeed crying as that about sums up today (if you don't get the Roy Acuff and Jimmy Dean reference, look it up). Isaac and Dan spent about all day breaking rocks. Ever seen this done by a chain gang in an old film about the south? Yep, it's about that good a time. Isaac was even singing to boot, when you could hear anything over the jackhammer. The crushed rock ended up filling the rubble trench foundation nicely. It's nearly self-compacting by our standards. Having spent the last several weeks in CO finishing up a patio at Scott's over a base of several inches to feet of manually compacted 3/8" minus structural fill, this is kind of a breeze. It's the really big rock in Dan's kitchen giving us fits. When I say really big, I mean 15-20 tons of boulder above grade. It's so big, we can't even talk about it after we finish the day. I've spent about 10 hours on the jackhammer on this gran massif, only to make a small dent in the toe. I tried using the rotary hammer to drill a series of holes along which to split a section. Wishful thinking, indeed. I burned up a good German bit without getting more than 3" into the "sandstone." So it was back to the jackhammer, which has already burned up a rather pricey breaker bit. I have a new strategy, though a costly one. I'll rent a 14" gas-powered demo saw to score the rock, I hope on a 4" X 12" grid, and jack out the stone between my saw kerfs. I tried a diamond blade on a 7 1/4 saw to see how it cut. The stone was pretty intimidating with a 13A electric motor, but the demo saw should have more power. When I took the hammer to the cuts, the stone came out as predicted. This method is going to cost a small fortune in rental fees and probably two very expensive blades, but I'm convinced it will work. Such is life when you can't get heavy equipment and a 500 lb hammer to the job site. In the end, it will all be worthwhile, or so we tell ourselves. The good news is that this appears to be the only rock of its size with which to contend. If I were making suggestions, I'd of course suggest making sure you can get big equipment into your building site. That said, however, the cash we'll spend dealing with these problems would cover an excavator and operator for all of two hours or less. This isn't enough time to even dig an exploratory hole around here, so we will come out ahead in the end, so long as no one gets injured. As of yet, there's only so much one can get hurt by when using hand tools of this sort. It's relatively safe, if tedious. So that's the secret to the shoestring budget. If you want to do something like this, either you feel "lucky" or you have some real skills, patience, and a good team. Two out of three ain't bad. As to luck, my dad taught me a valuable lesson about luck as a kid in a little gambling experiment. I lost it all in a matter of minutes. Ever since, as he would describe some escapade by or with his brother, Dad would turn to me and ask: Do you feel lucky? The answer, one could always assume, is no. I can go into the theology of luck, but I'll spare you. Suffice it to say, it isn't something I count on in my understanding of Divine Providence. Etymologically, Providence seems to have little to do with stupid risks or presumption. "For Life" is what God built into the machinery, though ease is often a sign of impending doom. This whole problem, like any building project or climbing assault is evidence that the best plan is not just a solid idea worked out in advance. Rather, those will not succeed without the long investment in human capital: a broad base of skills, an adaptable spirit, and a great living bibliography of creative people and ideas. That rock will move. Deo Volente, Dan and I will be around to see it. If not, God will make smooth the high places, even that one that juts out awkwardly from under Dan's dining room table.
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To my surprise and delight, our first real visitors, besides the neighbor's pitbull Hoss (who may have developed a chicken-killing fetish, making him not long for this world), were John and Judy Paulsen, of Grace PCA in Jasper. They drove out of their way en route to camp on the big lake to see us. I have to brag on these good Reformed folks for a moment. As the old joke goes, in the American West, the Baptists settled churches on foot, the Methodists on horseback, and the Episcopalians waited for the Pullman car. How then came these Presbyterians to tramp into the wilderness of our home site, without so much as an address or road sign? I'll call it a work of the Spirit since it was a very good gift, indeed.
Sunday afternoon we went down to Grace PCA to see if we could find them to talk some more. To our delight, they treated us to lunch along with RE Harold and his wife. It was a wonderful time, talking about the redemption of our culture through simple means, and, as Isaac pointed out in his blog, poop. It's always a hot subject, pardoning the pun. We look forward to working with these fine folks toward some new approaches (and old, very old) to the problems of affordability and wage slavery with no end in sight, placated by the glittering allure of cheap and petty consumerism that kills through the erosion of true value. Emphasis mine, of course. On the technical side: Predictably, there is a minor problem with the rain water pre-filter that we need to solve. It appears to be a vacuum lock kind of thing, which will be fixed easily by the introduction of a design allowing some air gap between layers of filter media. All this may sound complex, and in a way it is, but we are really talking about two dumpster-salvaged 5-gallon buckets, some sand and gravel, and a bit of charcoal. It's hard science and engineering on the cheap here. You can all thank the new LDS "church" under construction for several salvage finds in a region where new construction has nearly ground to a halt. We need not go into the troubling sign of the times this represents for the Southern Baptists. My cart for hauling straw bales performed. I won't use any further adverb to describe it. Suffice it to say, I'm thinking of a new carry method involving a couple of sets of poles, sans wheel. Dad, I know you always love a good Mesoamericans without wheels joke, but without motorized machines, it might just make the most sense of our situation. The bales were lighter than expected while the cart's added weight and the resistance of the wheel on the gravel and bumps of the path resulted in pretty hard going. There is also the relative difficulty of pushing a wheeled load uphill rather than pulling. Any mountain biker can attest, it's the front wheel over the log that's the hard part. With a bit of momentum, the rear wheel easily follows the center of gravity well forward of the axle. Dan and I both ran the cart, with me at the front in a "harness" which I tried to convince myself was more like a strong-man pulling a tractor than a dog with a leash tangled under his armpit, with mixed success. Most of the day, I would wonder: Is he really pushing anything? Knowing Dan as I do, he is no shirker. The bottom line: it just wasn't efficient. It seems to me that about 80 lbs. on each of us on foot will be easier and faster. So I'm going to make a simple pole stretcher suspended from longer poles, attached to shoulder webbing. This will keep the center of gravity low and hanging rather than high and balanced. The whole thing will be cinched together with tiedowns, so it will be like carrying a low-boy version of Solomon's traveling love shack (see S of S 3:6-10). No harem, court, or armed guards needed. A long, soft rain began sometime in the night and persists into this morning. I love the summer rain here, warm and wet, adjusting the light in the forest like a camera setting. For those faint of heart toward child labor, read no further. After a Herculean day of bale stocking, I'm not so disappointed by the extra time to rest. Isaac really impressed me, moving at least a fifth of the total bales by himself. He was tireless and sweaty, just like a man-child should be. He commented early on that his eyelids were sweating, but after seven hours, there weren't any comments, nor any novelty, just the solidarity of miserable work binding us together in mostly silence. In fairness to Dan and me, we didn't tell him to do anything. He figured out that he could move a bale at a time with the wheel barrow and went to it. Up and down the mountain, he went, lapping us a couple of times. I'm often especially proud of Isaac, but this was a high point. Now if only Giddy were here, Dan and I could have sat back sipping Country Time and telling fish stories. Last time I took Gideon to work with me, he, too, tirelessly shoveled structural fill into a wheelbarrow for several hours, looking forward to his union mandated "break", jumping the fence to play on the monkey bars at the school next door. Perhaps you haven't really lived until you've seen a boy work so hard, only to rest by swinging himself around and climbing on bars. These are the moments I think, in the immortal words of Davilene Aquila: I could have had me about ten babies. |
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April 2013
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