Monday, April 14, 2008

Self-inflicted suffering

Or, at the very least, wife-inflicted.

We spent this past weekend working on the rock garden project again. Bought a half ton of small boulders to complete the terrace walls. Bought another 1.5 cu yds of dirt. We will probably need more.

The Mrs. picked out a cute little 1-person bench with a hummingbird design on it, and I spend Saturday evening digging a footing for it and building a form for the concrete, then Sunday morning puring in the concrete. The Mrs. believes I over-engineered this. I dug down about 16 inches in a rectangle that encompassed the two bench pedestals. I added 50 lbs of gravel in the bottom. Then, I built a wooden form out of 2x6's such that the concrete only comes to the surface directly under the pedestals, and I got it nice and level. I pounded some rebar into the ground through the footings. It took 160 lbs of concrete.

I sure hope it doesn't heave all over this winter.

The watering system is next. I started on that, and got to the point where the next step was "dig 50 foot long trench" and decided to mow the front lawn instead. So I took My Beloved off of My Precious and put the mowing deck back on. I sure hope we don't have anymore blizzards. It had been snowing about 3 times a week for the last month, but none of it ever stuck to the driveway.

When the weekend was done, I was staggering around like a drunken sailor. And not because I'd been drinking. It was because everything hurt so much. Apparently, I got so fat over the winter that unloading two tons of material from the back of a pickup with a wheelbarrow wears me out.

Imagine.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good Grief - how about some pics of the rocks??

Anonymous said...

may be time to refresh "how fat is cherkyb today?"

ellie said...

If you decided to title all your posts with this title, you'd hit the nail on the head at least 95% of the time.

blogauthor said...

You? Over-engineer? It cannot be.