The weather forecast I heard yesterday called for showers in the morning today, clearing this afternoon. Actual weather: moderate snow (yes, I said the “s” word) most of the day. If you love working in the cold, wet, and mud, this was your day in heaven. Josh and Perry arrived at 8 o’clock to uncover the footer forms and begin getting them straight, square, and level, with accent on the latter. Not too much of the south bank had collapsed; Josh was able to clean up that mess in about an hour of shoveling. Found the new and rather expensive carpenter’s level that had gone AWOL last trip, exactly where I thought it might be… and in a location that Josh and I had looked at least a dozen times. Obviously a case of either a perturbation in the space-time continuum or severe male pattern blindness. Perry brought along a leveling transit, so determining how unlevel the forms were was quite easy. Getting them level proved to be another matter entirely, especially as Mr. Type-A (semi-retired) wanted everything to within ⅛ inch of perfect. But, by mid-afternoon everything was aligned and ready for a final check. At that point, we discovered that the leveling transit was no longer level… which meant that the tops of the footer forms were in perfect alignment with each other, but the plane they formed was not perpendicular to Earth’s gravitational field. Ooops! Fortunately, it only took another three hours and many non-family-friendly words to set things to rights. After a late “dinner” (open can, slightly heat contents in microwave, inhale), spent a half hour trying to get mud off and out of the more delicate parts of the electric tools we had used today.
27 April 2010
The weather forecast I heard yesterday called for showers in the morning today, clearing this afternoon. Actual weather: moderate snow (yes, I said the “s” word) most of the day. If you love working in the cold, wet, and mud, this was your day in heaven. Josh and Perry arrived at 8 o’clock to uncover the footer forms and begin getting them straight, square, and level, with accent on the latter. Not too much of the south bank had collapsed; Josh was able to clean up that mess in about an hour of shoveling. Found the new and rather expensive carpenter’s level that had gone AWOL last trip, exactly where I thought it might be… and in a location that Josh and I had looked at least a dozen times. Obviously a case of either a perturbation in the space-time continuum or severe male pattern blindness. Perry brought along a leveling transit, so determining how unlevel the forms were was quite easy. Getting them level proved to be another matter entirely, especially as Mr. Type-A (semi-retired) wanted everything to within ⅛ inch of perfect. But, by mid-afternoon everything was aligned and ready for a final check. At that point, we discovered that the leveling transit was no longer level… which meant that the tops of the footer forms were in perfect alignment with each other, but the plane they formed was not perpendicular to Earth’s gravitational field. Ooops! Fortunately, it only took another three hours and many non-family-friendly words to set things to rights. After a late “dinner” (open can, slightly heat contents in microwave, inhale), spent a half hour trying to get mud off and out of the more delicate parts of the electric tools we had used today.
