Third week of hard labor down. “Churching-up” the house in Todd’s lingo. If the churching-up will bring some equity return, then gawdammit, I’m in! Except for aching hammer-struck fingers, sun-burned eyes (in the +95F sun), dehydration, and crazed physical multi-tasking… Making piles for charity, piles for the library, piles for the land-fill, piles for recycling, piles for the Natural History Institute, piles to take to Boulder, piles to store for awhile, piles to store for less than a while, Home Depot shopping lists, argh! It will all be over in 3.5 weeks. Anyone need a nice worm farm??
well, a shift
Just signed the offer letter for the “Technical Media Specialist” position at the Colorado Geological Survey in Golden. The Survey recently was absorbed by the Colorado School of Mines, although its remit continues as defined under state law.
This is probably the biggest shift in life since leaving Big Oil some time ago. The most challenging issue, though, is getting the house finished ‘enough’ for sale, and getting life packed up and moved to Golden by 06 September. Stress-and-a-half! David is helping with ‘project managing’ the house work, although I need to do as much as possible, as my labor is free, and that of everyone else is expensive and paid in gold, jewels, cash, or Bitcoin.
No time to share the to-do list here, on with it!
sheet rock
Finished sheet-rocking the living room ceiling with help from Todd and one of those clever sheet-rock installing devices. It would have been a killer job doing it solo, so Todd’s experienced direction kept it to a single six-hour manageable task. Still have to do the skimming, painting, molding, and such before re-assembling the room (before getting house-guests in a couple weeks!).
Art as life as art.
Documentation leaves the floor.
one thousand hammer blows
(00:28:51, stereo audio, 69.2 mb)
Concrete is a major energy-intensive product that makes a significant contribution to total global energy usage. The house had a tremendous amount of poorly poured concrete in a variety of forms that I’ve been breaking up and putting in two large piles. Because of the energy issue, re-use of that concrete is a priority, but it first has to be turned into a form that is usable. This means breaking large pieces, some weighing up to thirty kilos (50-60 pounds). The initial removal was accomplished with a large steel pry-bar and a lot of “elbow-grease” as my father would say. The subsequent work of reducing the size is with a 3-pound hammer. To break the material into hand size requires, on average, one hammer blow for each reduced-size piece. To take care of all the material will take many tens of thousands of hammer blows. This piece is a meditation on that process; it is also an homage to The Book of One Thousand Buddhas, itself an homage to Buddhist prayer books more than a thousand years old.
house-work: berms, retaining walls, and catchments
Determining where water catchment berms need to be constructed, within the confines of the yard, and within the constrictions applied by the existence of neighboring yards is something of a challenge. As all the work is being done by hand (with body, shovel, wheelbarrow, rake, hoe, hammer, bucket, and so on) there is an explicit desire not to have to repeat a task or tear anything out once built. Perhaps this is inevitable, though, as it is a learning experience — and one that is tested only sporadically via rain-fall and long-term functional testing. At present I have a lot of bare soil that has not re-vegetated naturally. But there is plenty of decent mulched soil coming from the north retention wall excavation that I’m now spreading around several catchment basin areas and also using as fill uphill of the white quartz retaining wall in front.