Self-Sufficient Steward

So we were away this past weekend, helping friends with a project of theirs and just goofing off, Super Bowl, etc.

From a couple of comments that I’ve received since starting this blog, it seems that it comes across as more pretentious than I intended. I tried to explain in “Why Read This Blog?” and in various other posts, that I’m just trying to be more of a do-it-yourself type than most. But I should have been more clear that most of my projects are fraught with stumbles, re-traced steps, wasted materials, busted thumbs, etc. all loudly ‘celebrated’ in the moment by a short list of predictable four-letter words. On average, most of my projects involve more time spent being frustrated than time spent feeling smug. In fact, the ratio is down right depressing. Part of what makes it tougher than I seemed to have indicated is that while I’m willing to tackle a lot of different things, I really don’t have notable skills in any of them. Considering all the time I’ve spent swinging a hammer, I’m pretty lousy at driving nails. For all the countless knots I’ve tied, my repertoire is very limited – I just can’t remember the really good knots from one time to the next. Which leads me to my last point and my example du jour. Because with my lousy memory, I can’t seem to remember how to do something from one occasion to the next one, which may be months or years later. This weekend, for example, part of my friends’ project involved mixing and pouring concrete. When we arrived, they had a thousand pounds of concrete mix (in 25-30 bags of eighty pounds each), and (THANK GOD) a small rented concrete mixer. The division of labor was as follows: one of them supervised the adding of the water to the mixer, the consistency of the concrete and the pouring into the wheelbarrow. The other troweled the mix into the desired shape in the two large pads we were pouring. And my job was to open the bags of dry mix, dump them one at a time into the mixer, and then deliver the wheelbarrow of finished concrete to the hole. Simple enough, and I’ve done a fair amount on concrete over the years. But it’s been almost four years since the last time, and probably six the time before that. So, just as I do with everything else, I had to re-learn the basics as we went.

It took three bags and several snootfuls of Portland cement dust before I remembered that you dump the dry concrete into the empty mixer first, followed by the water. Critically important if you intend to use your nose for breathing or smelling in the coming weeks. It took about the same number of bags to learn the right angle of tilt for the mixer bowl. And it took at least a dozen bags to get the right rhythm of sneaking the wheelbarrow in and out from under the tilting mixer bowl without concrete going everywhere during the dump. But the one that slayed me was the simple act of tearing open the bags. Now I have more years of college than the average mason has of public school, but those masons would have howled at the various ways in which I tried to open a bag, so that it would pour easily into the mixer without pouring onto the ground before even getting to the mixer. Add in the fact that I’m lifting an eighty pound bag to chest height each time, so that a slow pouring bag is more than a mere inconvenience, and you can see why they would have laughed themselves silly. But finally, after about twenty bags, I was pretty consistently able to cut open a paper bag with a utility knife without wasting too much mix or taking too long. Pretty impressive, huh?

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll remember for the next time.

So here’s a picture of the aftermath; the pile of empty bags watched over by Emmett the gargoyle.

Posted on February 4th, 2008 by jack-of-all-thumbs
Filed under: Leisure Projects, Rants and Musings