What a Difference

As of yesterday, I’ve been back in the carpentry business for three months. In that short time, my body has undergone an impressive change.

My weight has gone from 183 pounds to 166 pounds at my lightest. (I weighed 167 pounds today.) I’ve lost 17 pounds in three months, that’s impressive. The important thing is that the weight I’ve lost isn’t just water weight, or lack of food, but real weight loss through body transformation. My fat pockets are burning off.

The pants that I purchased before this all started don’t have a chance of staying up without a belt anymore. I’ve dropped four inches off my waist in three months. My arms and shoulders have developed a nice muscle tone to them, and I’m getting those little muscle-ly things that connect your shoulders to your neck. The woman loves my new “buffness.”

Even my gut and double chin have been shrinking, and those are the hardest to lose. I still have some pounds to take off, but the progress so far is incredible.

The key to the whole thing is that I’ve eaten whatever I wanted the entire time. I didn’t go on a meat only diet, or cut out junk food. I drink beer, eat snack cakes, pound Doritos, and devour fatty meals like it’s going out of style. The difference is that I’ve been active and working off the things I eat.

I think I’ve proven (As much as a statistical test with one observation can prove something) that it isn’t our diet which shoulders the blame for the fattening of America, it’s our lifestyle. Our grandparents and great grandparents spent their days toiling away performing mostly manual work. The few fat people you saw were usually lazy business owners or politicians, hence the term Fat Cat. Our ancestors didn’t gain weight because they worked off the calories that they ate; we’re ignoring starvation and poverty for the time being.

Our current American standard of graduating college to live life trapped in a cubicle (How do you think outside the box when you spend all day trapped in one?) does nothing to improve our waistlines. While an office job brings the luxury of controlled heating and paper cuts as major injuries, it also creates the responsibility of maintaining a regular fitness regimen.

Our bodies require a certain amount of use to stay fit, there’s no way around that. With my blue-collar job, I can knock out fitness and work at the same time. What’s more efficient that that?

Given that it’s been three months, and that I’ve pretty much made my point about weight loss, I’m going to wrap up the project at the end of this week. The website will still be up for people to read, I just won’t be adding daily updates. I may periodically add postings, but not at the schedule I’ve been maintaining up to this point.

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Phrasing is Everything

A couple of hours into the day, Hefé walked up to me and said, “You want empowerment, you got it. After you finish what you’re doing, I need you to come over to the other site with me. I’m going to get you squared away on a project and it’s up to you to execute.”

I told him that I was more than disappointed that he had managed to slip a couple of bullshit business school jargon words in there, but that I was still ready for the challenge. As a little background, I spoke with him last week off to the side indicating my desire to step up and take on more responsibility.

In my interview, Hefé and I talked about my ability to step up and be a leader as well as taking on some different challenges based on the different skill set I bring to the table with my education and previous experience in the business world and all. I’d like to start making good on that now that I’ve had three months to work out my rust.

Hefé elaborated that I’d be supervising the waterproofing of the foundation on our new project. This meant I’d be involved in some digging, tar application, and just all around dirty, nasty work.

Because of the way he had presented the job to me, I couldn’t wait to get over there and get started. This was a rough task that pretty much anyone would be right to dread, but I was jumping in my pants to get over there and start it. It’s all because Hefé presented it as my chance to prove I can be in charge. The cynical part of me wonders if he’s just a smart enough manager to know how to pull those strings to motivate people, but what the hell, I was all about giving it a shot; treading water only satisfies me for a short time.

He told me that I would be in charge of making sure that this happened correctly. We went over the project and he gave me The Lumberjack to direct. Unfortunately, I would have to tell The Lumberjack to dig out some footings while I was working on something else.

I felt bad telling him to go dig in that rock-hard soil while I was off doing something else, and I tried to communicate to him that Hefé had instructed me to have him dig; it wasn’t just me being lazy like someone else we all know and love. I think he understood; I’m planning to have one of the bi-lingual Mexicans translate the situation for me next chance I get. I don’t want them thinking I’m just another lazy white man that wants the Mexicans to do all of the hard work. But I’m pretty sure they already know that, hence my title of Gringo Mexicano.

At the end of the day, I went home covered in tar and happy at my ability to “manage” the situation. It was at that moment that I contrasted my current situation with the tar experience of a couple of months ago. I realized how differently my outlook on doing the work was given the way the job request had been phrased. Hmmm, maybe I’ll have to turn “phrasing” into the next new-wave management cult. I can travel around and get paid to pontificate at workplace conventions on the benefits of asking in the right way. On second thought, I’ll stay in Tahoe. I weighed 166 pounds today.

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More Destruction

I got to start the week off right by destroying the homeowner’s living room. I grabbed my trusty sledge and crowbar and went to town forcefully removing the fireplace, a couple of closets, and the entertainment center.

As we were killing a wall, I was trying to pull off the metal corner bead underneath the drywall. Somewhere along the way, it had got a break in it and developed a razor sharp metal edge protruding that I wasn’t aware of. My hand eventually slipped, jamming firmly into the jagged chunk of metal.

I was left with a half-inch gash, about a quarter of an inch deep on the meaty part of my hand, just below the thumb. It was a bleeder; just wouldn’t stop. After performing my usual technique of wiping the blood on the front of my shirt, I ended up looking like I had taken a shotgun blast to my chest. I had blood everywhere.

The cut eventually stopped bleeding, and I sucked it up and continued my path of destruction with the vigor of a newfound hatred for the item that just gashed my hand propelling me forward.

We ended up with a huge pile of debris that needed to be trucked outside to the dumpster. The FNG and I got about halfway through cleaning it when the dumpster was packed to its limits. The rest of the removal would have to happen at another time. I weighed in at 168 pounds this evening.

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Final Day in Paradise

Today is The Bitch’s last day working in Tahoe. He is due to fly back to the Midwest tomorrow morning; poor guy. As usual, we had our half-day Friday to kick off a fantastic weekend night.

We spent this morning framing in a drop ceiling that tied into the wall we built yesterday. As the work progressed, we traded chalk line smacks and insults back and forth like the children we are. The lady at 7-11 asked me why I had blue lines on my face when we stopped after work. I told her it was because that guy over there is an asshole, as The Bitch stood there laughing at me.

It’s been nice having The Bitch here, and I’m definitely hoping him and his wife decide to move out. I think he’s going to have a hard time going back to the horrible weather and bleak landscape of The Midwest after being here for two weeks. Ultimately that’s something him and his better half will need to figure out for themselves; everyone needs different things to be happy. Speaking of happy, my Friday afternoon weight reading was 166 pounds, a new low.

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Tearing it up with The Bitch

The Bitch and I got to start the morning tearing out the front wall of the house. The old conventional size front door would be replaced with a massive opening in the wall leading into our newly framed hallway. We would also be tearing out the old window to close up the opening.

The Bitch doesn’t enjoy the demo work to the extent that I do as he is used to building new homes. He managed to nick himself up a few times on old nails and such doing some demo last week. Mr. The Bitch said that he hadn’t gone home with that many new cuts in years. I, being the supportive male role model that I am, called him a pussy.

We made it through our demo without any major incidents; the next step was framing it back in with our new parameters. Hefė gave The Bitch the set of plans and let us go to it. It’s still weird having The Bitch as the journeyman carpenter that I’m trying to learn from. He’s definitely picked up a ton of knowledge in the years since the last time I worked with him.

Incidental side note about Hefė. It turns out that Hefė is actually spelled Jefė. One of my Mexican coworkers kind of chuckled at me when I asked him if it was spelled with an H. “The H sound is a J in Spanish fool,” he laughed. So, anyway, I’ve decided to stick with Hefė anyway. I’ve already been using it this long, might as well ride it out, and I think it makes it easier for the Spanish-deficient to read, so what the hell. I weighed 168 pounds today.

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Don’t Talk Smack

Once again yesterday, The Bitch found a way to anoint my face with a blue racing stripe courtesy of his chalk line. With the rain in the afternoon yesterday, I went home with blue smudged and dripped all over my face. When I walked in the door last night, my girlfriend nearly fell on the ground laughing at me, thus congratulating The Bitch in the process.

As we prepared to eat dinner, The Bitch started talking some trash about getting me again with the racing stripe. I told him he would get his, and waited patiently for the drama to unfold.

Unbeknownst to The Bitch, I had retrieved the blue chalk line from his tool belt downstairs and placed it on the desk next to me, waiting for the perfect chance to spring my attack.

As he stood by our counter, preparing his plate of food, I walked into the kitchen and gave him a nice blue racing stripe down his arm. As we laughed at him, I tucked the chalk line into a safe place to avoid his attempts at retribution.

This morning, as we were getting ready for work, I grabbed his chalk line from the hiding spot the night before, walked down the stairs to find The Bitch kneeled down tying his boots, and promptly smacked him across the face to produce a fantastic blue line.

Given that he still wasn’t even fully awake, the attack was even better than a mid afternoon strike. It made the time between him looking up at me with a blue lined face and registering what had just happened just a little longer, thus prolonging my entertainment. I told him that was what he got for talking smack.

As we went to work, I prepared myself for his eventual revenge, fully knowing that I lacked the ability to effectively counterattack due to the fact that my red chalk line doesn’t really show up on skin too well. Counterattack he did; I went home this evening covered in various blue lines. I still think my offensive in the morning was the best though. Surprisingly, after I washed all of the chalk off, my scale showed a new low. I weighed in at 167 pounds.

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Biggest Storm of the Year

We arrived at work this morning with a heavy cloud cover; I was cautiously optimistic that we would receive a heavy rainstorm and get to go home early. Unfortunately, the clouds just teased us all morning, even giving a few rain drops now and then to make us believe a storm was imminent.

About 10 minutes before our lunch break, it started raining. Since we had ripped a hole in one of the exterior walls and framed our structure into it, well everything but the roof that is, we had water running into the existing house.

As we frantically scrambled to patch up leaks, we decided to drill a hole in the floor of our new hallway to let the water run down below. Without the holes, the water was doing a pretty good job of running into the former kitchen of the existing structure.

After we had everything buttoned up, we took our lunch and enjoyed the gentle storm. The rain lasted for about another twenty minutes after our lunch, so we were able to enjoy an extended break. Unfortunately the rain stopped, so my dreams of leaving early in true slacker form were quickly dashed.

We went back to work, once again teased by clouds that looked like they wanted to spit on us. The rain finally came about a half hour before it was time to go home for the day.

The gentle summer shower of the morning was replaced with a maelstrom of an event in the afternoon. It started off as heavy rain, progressed to dime size hail, then to a full out torrential downpour.

Our half-assed attempts to “waterproof” the existing structure were no match for the volume of water falling from the sky in the afternoon. I had to stand in the hallway, in the rain with a broom to keep debris from clogging the holes we had drilled earlier. The water was running so fast that it was picking up sawdust and wood chunks and carrying them to the drains.

As the homeowners reported new leaks to us, we did our best to find ways to stifle the damage. At the end of the day, we were soaked and freezing. Evidently the clouds that had given us the hail was also carrying some water that was pretty close to being hail because it was friggin cold.

Not long after we started driving home, the rain stopped. I told The Bitch that he had just witnessed the biggest rain storm we had experienced since the snow stopped in May. He was shocked to find out that we hadn’t been rained out all summer, and once again he laughed at us for thinking that was a real rain storm. He thinks that we’re spoiled on account of the mild summers, but we more than make up for it with foot after foot of snow in the winter. There’s nothing like opening your front door and seeing fresh powder up to your waist. Speaking of my waist, I weighed 168 pounds tonight.

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Which Are You?

We finished up sheeting the roof of the garage this morning. It had rained a little the night before, so the roof was a little wet.

As we were pulling sheets of plywood up onto the roof, I kind of ran down the roof to grab one from the guy lifting it up from the ground below. Afterwards, my Mexican counterpart asked me if I was stupid or just crazy for running on a wet roof like that. I told him it was probably a little bit of both.

After we were done sheeting, I once again was nominated to install some metal hangers. By the end of the day, we had finished our third box of A35 hangers on this job. There are 100 in each box, and each A35 hanger requires 12-10d nails, so that’s 3600 nails on those hangers alone.

The rain we had overnight seemed to make the afternoon more humid than usual. We were complaining about the humidity when The Bitch overheard us. He asked if we were in fact complaining about the humidity, and when we replied that we were, he just laughed at us and walked off. Evidently he has no sympathy for a bunch of spoiled Tahoe carpenters complaining about humidity that is still half the norm in the Midwest.

At the end of the day, I weighed 170 pounds. As I walked in the door, my girlfriend got a great laugh out of the blue racing stripe running across my face. The Bitch got me again today.

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Every Friday is a Holiday

Today was the first Half Day Friday for The Bitch. He was pretty excited about getting off early, said it felt like a holiday weekend of something.

I told him that every weekend was a holiday weekend for us on account of the whole half day thing. I said it was nice to get off early, but it carried a curse of the longest four hours you could ask for.

When you know you’re getting off early, it tends to make you more accustomed to clock watching, and that tends to make the day go by pretty slow. What should be a short four day ends up seeming just as long as a normal day on account of the drag factor; at least while you’re at work it does, time quickly stops dragging once you drive from the jobsite.

I weighed in at 168 pounds again. I’m pretty sure my weight on Monday will be a little heavier, as The Bitch and I need to do some hard drinking this weekend for old time’s sake.

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The Racing Stripe

My buddy The Bitch has been working inside the structure on framing in the new kitchen. I’ve been giving him a hard time about coming all the way to Tahoe just to spend the whole time inside.

I’m pretty sure Hefé is just testing him, giving him a set of prints and letting him go to town so he can get a feel for what he knows. It still sucks that he has to be inside because the weather this week has been partly to mostly fantastic.

At one point in the day, as I was running my mouth, The Bitch pulled his chalk line from his tool belt, pulled out a couple of feet of string, then whipped it at my arm. Before I knew what had happened, the chalk line had wrapped itself around my arm leaving a blue line in its wake.

I had been given the racing stripe. Until you wash it off with soap and water, you can’t really do a whole lot about it; you’re stuck with a blue line on your arm when you get the stripe. Evidently The Bitch has learned much since our last encounter because the racing stripe was a trick I had never seen. Rest assured that it will be added to my repertoire though. Once the blue line was washed off this evening, I weighed 169 pounds.

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More Digging

The Lucky Three got to spend most of the day digging again. We started the morning finishing up our trench from yesterday.

As we were digging the trench, we uncovered a boulder roughly 4 feet in diameter right in the middle of our path. We had to dig around it to get it out of there.

There was also a tree fairly close to the spot of the boulder, so the massive rock was entangled in roots that needed to be cut away. Apparently, our elder Mexican and one of his friends chopped and formed fence posts when they were fourteen. They were able to sell them for 12 pesos each, which I was told would translate into about a buck. Between the two of them, they could make the equivalent of a hundred dollars a day, which back then, and in Mexico to boot, was very good money.

I told him he was the lumberjack because that man knows how to work an axe for sure. They didn’t know what that was, so I explained it was the huge guys wearing flannel chopping down trees in the forest all the time.

The lumberjack tried to explain to me a few times how to chop like him, alternating hits from either side to remove the most material. I told him that chopping wood, like so many other things in life, was something that I understood how I should do in theory, but in practice the execution was much less elegant.

We got most of the material removed from around the boulder and I decided to think it out the rest of the way. I went and grabbed the hydraulic jack from the trailer, dug a hole underneath one side of the boulder and proceeded to jack the rock up out of its centuries old spot. As the rock raised up, we shoved smaller rocks underneath to prop it up.

After I got one side free, I did the same thing on the other side and we had the boulder loose finally. We tied a strap around it, looped that around the hitch on Hefé’s truck and let him give it a pull. As the massive chunk of stone popped up and out of the trench, we gave a little man cheer/roar for emphasis. We just whooped that rock’s ass dude.

We spent the rest of our time at the site cleaning up the footings and making sure everything was ready for the foundation work to begin. With two hours left in the day, we went back to the old site.

We were all exhausted from two days of digging and quite relieved to be as far as possible from that hole in the ground on the other site. When I arrived at the other site, I discovered that I would once again get to install metal hangers. This time I needed to put them up under the overhang of the roof, hence I would be climbing up and down an extension ladder once again. I was less than thrilled to discover that my day of physical torment was not over.

I decided to suck it up, and installed quite a few hangers with my remaining time. Each one requires twelve nails, so they can eat up some time. After a long, hard day of work, I weighed in at 168 pounds again, more than ready to sit on the couch and not move until bed time.

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Stupid Boulders

At the end of the day yesterday, Hefé told me I would be working at another site. I was excited to get a change of scenery and looked forward to this morning.

When I arrived at the new site, I discovered to my dismay that two coworkers and I would be digging an eighty foot trench for a sewer line. Even though it all pays the same, some things still suck more than others, and digging a trench by hand on the side of a mountain is definitely one of the suckier.

The ground here is hard and full of rocks, nothing like the soft black gold beneath the feet of Midwesterners. Back home, you can almost always grab a shovel, step on it a little and dig a hole. Here, not so much.

The only way you can really use a shovel here to remove dirt is if you spend some time hammering on it with a pick axe. In itself, swinging a pick axe pretty much sucks, but toss in the fact that our “dirt” is riddled with various pebbles, rocks, and full-out boulders and you clearly have the makings for a long, painful, sucky day.

Our trench eventually needed to tie into the existing sewer lines, so we would go from level with the bottom of the foundation at one end, and about four feet deep on the other end. Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us.

As we hacked in the dirt for nine hours, we had plenty of time to contemplate life’s pressing mysteries. We were able to question such things as why in the world would Hefé allow us to collectively waste 27 hours of labor in place of renting a trencher, and why didn’t the excavator dig the trench when he dug the footings and foundation, and how in the world did we end up being the “Lucky Three” chosen for the task?

Despite enduring a task that clearly sucked, we didn’t grumble too much. We toughed our way through it and went home completely beat. I didn’t even want to lift my arms when I got home this evening. I weighed in at 169 pounds.

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The Bitch is Back

Early in my construction saga, I told the story of a good friend of mine who had been dubbed “The Bitch” by a crusty old carpenter who felt he was way too fancy to be on a construction site. The name stuck because despite eventually rising up to be a superintendent, he is still occasionally called “The Bitch” by people in the know.

I’ve been talking with him over the past few weeks trying to convince him and his wife to move out here to Tahoe. The construction market is a lot better here so you can make more money than the Midwest and the weather and scenery are infinitely better than back home. Toss in the limitless extracurricular activities available and it is easy to see how living here is thousands of times more appealing than the Midwest.

He talked with my boss, and they agreed that having him come out for a couple of weeks to see the area and work to get a feel for how we run things was probably the best idea. He flew into Tahoe on Saturday, and today he came to work with me once again.

It was weird working with him again after all these years. When I got my first fat-inducing office job, he stayed in the field. I can definitely tell that he kept at it because he’s pretty much a journeyman carpenter and clearly has a lot more knowledge and skill than me. Last time we worked together, I had more experience and he was the green one, seems like the tables have been turned.

I told him that I wouldn’t call him “The Bitch” at work or tell anyone the story, but that outside of work, it’s fair game. I had a hard time not calling him “The Bitch” but made it through the day without a slipup. I finished the day out at an even 170 pounds.

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Monkey Man

Once again, I got to spend a half day Friday installing metal hangers. We have to put a total of six steel hangers on each of the outlookers we built yesterday.

Three of the hangers can be installed from the roof with the palm nailer. The other three must be installed from underneath, by someone climbing around in the rafters.

I got to be the rafter monkey today. I was glad that I was chosen today instead of my first day. There wasn’t much space in there and I really don’t think I could have managed in my previous hefty glory.

After climbing around and using the palm nailer for a couple of hours, I was more than happy to start doing our weekly cleanup. The woodpecker vibrates your wrist like crazy; it can get painful after a while.

We always try to leave the site clean and organized on Fridays. We want to avoid leaving a bunch of debris for the homeowners to stumble over on the weekend. I think it makes the relationship work better that way.

We finished up and left early as per our Friday tradition. I’m not sure, but I think every half Friday is better than the last. There’s something about ditching out of work early without risk of negative repercussions that makes your afternoon particularly enjoyable. I finished the week out at 168 pounds again.

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Better Pace

Hefé met us at the site this morning, set to run the crew for a change. We were all given our various tasks, aimed at getting the roof sheeted.

I was once again the cut man. The combination of switching to pen and over two months of getting rid of the rust have made my cutting ability more than proficient so I was ready for the challenge.

It is amazing what a difference having the boss on the site makes, as for once, everyone was making a contribution to the project. It is refreshing when you see slackers having to bust their humps for a change.

We were able to install a big chunk of the sheeting and get the outlookers installed and squared. Our progress was impressive. I weighed 169 pounds again today.

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Be Careful

I arrived this morning to happily discover I would be the selected person to tear out the old deck. Nothing cheers me up like finding out that I get to do some legal vandalism.

Unfortunately, I was not able to destroy the entire structure. We just needed to remove the planks and replace them with the recently relocated redwood boards.

Pulling the planks was a quick job; the next step would be replacing them. As we decided on our plan of attack, I was designated the cut man. This meant I would be taking measurements from the other guys, giving them the cut board, and then moving on to the next one as they installed it.

In case you’re not aware, redwood is rather pricey, in fact, I had never even been on a job where it was used before moving here. From what my coworkers tell me, an eight-foot redwood 2x4 costs somewhere in the area of $15-16. Compare that with a pine board of the same dimensions costing you roughly $3-4, and you can see how the material is not to be wasted.

So given that I was the cut man, the task of making sure we wasted as little wood as possible fell on my shoulders. I’m proud to say that I made some awesome cuts today, and the issue never came up as zero boards had to be tossed for being measured and cut incorrectly. My weight this evening was 169 pounds.

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Are You Sure?

My stint as a newly appointed Mexican continued today as we were assigned to siding and trim once again. As the day progressed, we were able to complete one side of the building; it looks awesome finished.

Not long after we finished tearing down the scaffolding, we received a lumber delivery. It was a huge stack of redwood 2x4’s, destined for the deck around back. Given that the wood was dropped off in the road out front, the wood was going to need to find a way to the back before it could be used.

Four of us set about the task of moving the pile. Evidently, the foreman pulled his old trick of asking for it to be moved then leaving. That’s based on hearsay though so I can’t say for sure, but I have a sneaky suspicion that there’s some truth to it.

As we were moving the wood, I set my pieces down, stepped back, and said, “Man, that pile of lumber is really red.” Then I waited. Wait for it, Wait for it.

One of my amigos turned around, with that classic look of, dude, are you really that stupid, and said to me, “That’s cause it’s redwood dumb ass.”

I told him I knew but wanted to see if he’d tell me I was an idiot or not. He tends to enjoy busting balls almost as much as I do, so I thought he would, and he did.

Given that moving the pile of wood happened at the end of the day, I went home pretty worn out. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be something about climbing a mountain about 30 times in a row with a stack of lumber on your shoulder that takes the energy out of you. I weighed in this evening at 168 pounds again, must have burned off some water this afternoon.

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Gringo Mexicano

My alarm clock didn’t really wake me to the full extent this morning, so I hit the snooze button two more times than normal, completely unaware of my folly.

As I frantically threw on clothes and installed my contacts, I had to take a second to scold the cat.

On every other day, including weekends, she will come down, jump on the bed, and meow to wake us up if it’s more than five minutes later than when normally rise for work. Where were you today fur-ball?

I skipped making a lunch and still managed to make it to work on time. We had six guys at the site this morning, three Gringos, and three Mexicans.

Our foreman said that the three Mexicans would work on the siding in the back, and the Gringos would work on framing out garage.

One of the Mexican guys, said, “Oh I see how it is, send the Mexicans to the back.’ He likes to bust balls a lot, so we all knew it was in jest and had a good laugh.

As we were rolling out, the boss pulled up and said he needed to take the gentleman who had just split our sides to work on another job. In his place, I was to go work on the siding.

Early in the morning, I was dubbed “Gringo Mexicana” by my companions. It basically means Mexican Whiteboy. Today, I was dubbed an honorary Mexican.

In the afternoon, the foreman came around to inspect our work, and told us we had done a nice job. I said, “Hell yeah, when you want good work, you send in the Mexicans.”

He said, “Dude, what are you talking about? You’re a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Whiteboy.”

I told him that I had been dubbed an honorary Mexican, and that furthermore, I didn’t appreciate the White Man coming around to breath down our necks. I told him my brown brothers and I were tired of being oppressed in this White-Man’s world.

My Mexican buddies were just rolling, and he was laughing pretty good as well. I must admit, he played along with my stupidity pretty well, right up to the point when I started pumping my fist chanting, “Brown-Power, Brown-Power.”

It’s nice to work around guys that aren’t all uptight about the race thing. No one cares about that sort of thing, all we ask is that you put in an honest day’s work. After my day, I weigh 170 pounds.

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Playing with a Pecker

While we were working on the trim yesterday, a few of the other guys set the trusses. Evidently, I’ve either been doing a good job of installing metal hangers, or I suck at installing metal hangers, because this morning I was again asked to install metal hangers, this time tying the trusses to the top plates of the exterior walls of our new garage.

It was time to bring out the woodpecker again. I’ve developed a habit of wearing ear plugs when I use that thing cause it is loud as hell. Anytime something is loud enough to make the inside of my ears get that weird vibraty-scratchy feeling, it’s time to put in some plugs. Years and years of loud punk rock concerts have done enough damage, there’s no reason to make it worse at work.

The FNG was asked to stay late to put in a mock up of a false chimney so the homeowners could get a feel for how it would look from the street.

He would be working on the roof alone, on overtime, so I told him it could only mean one of a few things: A) He’s the cheapest, B) He’s expendable in the event of a fall, C) He’s the favorite, or D) It’s a test. He told me to stop making him feel like he was in college again, and we both laughed, then kind of trailed off as we were reminded of our evil, evil student loans once again.

After another week of hard work, I’ve finally made it below the 170 mark. I finished the week out at 169 pounds, over ten pounds, and several inches smaller than when I started this endeavor.

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Up and Down

I spent today working on trim and siding once again. We’ve made it to a point that requires three levels of scaffolding to reach.

I more or less spent nine hours climbing up and down scaffolding for various reasons. The amazing thing is that I really wasn’t that tired afterwards.

I have to compare that with helping my parents install drywall when we were building their house. We had two levels of scaffolding to install the cathedral ceiling sheetrock.

The timing just happened to occur when I was pretty much at my peak of lardassdom. I huffed and puffed all day, and was sore for a couple of days afterwards.

I was sure it was proof that I wasn’t cut out for manual labor. Now I’m pretty sure it was just proof of the pitiful office slug I had become.

The past couple of months have really gotten me back into good shape. We went rafting a couple of weekends ago, and after rowing all day, my arms weren’t even sore.

The body takes a little bit of a beating from constant bruises, splinters, and small cuts, but I think the benefits of the exercise outweigh. When your body is in better shape, you have more energy to do fun things; life’s too short to be a dough pile. I weighed 169 this evening.

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What Do You Need?

I managed to sucker the woman into a Home Depot trip last night; I had a list, it wasn’t my fault. As we strolled through the tool section, I did my best not to linger and look at things I had no intention of buying, and she did her best not to roll her eyes and say, “Hun seriously.”

I was given the task of working on some siding and exterior trim today. I took every opportunity I had to find reasons to use my new tools. I geek-out around tools.

Speaking of tools, one of the many business trips I had in my career as a stock analyst was to the Stanley Tools Analyst Meeting in Manhattan. The company was rolling out the new Fat-Max line and wanted to present the fruits of their, well, actually, thousands-of-underpaid-people-who-never-receive-credit’s labor to the adoring Wall Street community.

As soon as I walked into the room, I was amped. There were literally hundreds of tools, all with brown-nosing senior-middle management hovering around, waiting for an opportunity to talk to “The Street.”

As the rest of my colleagues hob-nobbed with the officers of the company, I wandered through the tools like a kid in a candy store.

The Fat-Max line included a new hammer, one that the president of the hand tools division was particularly fond of. We were each shown several new features to the hammer, one of which is a magnetic grove on the end holds a nail so you don’t have to take a chance on hitting your fingers when you set it.

As each of the analysts eventually made it to his display, he made them take a shot at setting a nail with the new hammer. My lip was cut for weeks afterwards from trying to stifle my laughter, after all, these were the top names in my sector, any one of which could propel my career to the big time.

I’ve seen some people that were bad with a hammer, but words cannot explain the level of suck one attains from a silver-spoon upbringing and an Ivy League education.

After leaving to go cry from hysteria in the lobby a couple of times, I took my seat as it was time for the meeting to start. I kept my composure through the entire thing, even when the president of the hand tools division stood to make his speech, reminding the audience of their sad display of carpentry prowess.

We put in some nice work today. Trim work is tedious, but it looks so good when you get it right. Incredibly, I weighed in at 168 pounds this evening. I think I’m just extra dehydrated today or something, but between you and me, we’ll say I just worked off a lot of fat today.

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Hawthorne is in Effect

We started off the morning without our illustrious foreman. He was called over to do some work on another site. We were given several tasks to accomplish, one of which was to create one of the main walls.

We decided to tackle the wall, and all agreed to bust our humps, just to prove we don’t need the foreman’s leadership to stay productive. We made awesome progress, with every guy pulling his weight for once.

As we were finishing the wall, the foreman had arrived. Immediately, our brisk pace of the morning dropped precipitously.

The explanation lies with a study I learned of in college. (Check it out; I got something useful out of my student loan payment this month.)

There was a scientist who studied workplace behavior many years ago named Hawthorne. Hawthorne discovered that a group of workers will only work as hard as the slowest one. It has something to do with our natural instinct to try to save the weakest members of our herd, rather than leaving them behind like Wilder beasts. The phenomenon is called the Hawthorne Effect.

What we discovered this morning was that the slowest member of our group is by far the foreman. It’s hard to make a crew work hard when their leader is the biggest slacker of all.

Hawthorne’s findings were right on target because as soon as our slowest member returned, we all subconsciously returned to his pace.

If I wanted to be a slacker, this situation would be fantastic, but I’ve found in life that time moves the quickest when you’re the busiest.

If you bury yourself in things to do, you have no time to worry about how close it is to quitting time. Quitting time sneaks up on you.

Ignoring the pace of our lead, I found numerous things to accompany my time with, and the day rolled by nicely. When I stepped on the scale this evening, I saw another new low, 170 pounds even. One more pound to go and I get to see a six on my scale. 170 is good, but 169 just sounds so much better.

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I Have a List

We had our weekly safety meeting this morning. After touching on various ways for us to try not to hurt ourselves, Hefé handed out a list of tools.

These were the minimum tool requirements employees were expected to have. There were several things on there that I hadn’t acquired yet, so I was excited to have a newly found excuse to drag the woman to Home Depot on our next shopping trip. She can cross her arms and roll her eyes all she wants, but I’ve got a list.

We were kind of surprised to see some electrical tools on the list. Included were a circular saw, saw-zall, and cordless screw gun. I think most of us kind of felt that was something that should be provided for us, but Hefé’s point that we would need those things if we were ever going to take side jobs made pretty good sense.

Being much too much of a tightwad to go spend several hundred of dollars on a new circular saw and saw-zall, I’ve added writing a well-worded email to my father to my agenda for the week. He has multitudes of tools in his collection; the only question is finding the best way to sweet-talk (AKA con) him into sending some out to me. I wonder if the old, “Dad, do you love me” routine still works?

We spent the day working on walls. Our garage is really starting to take shape. We were told that we would have trusses to set on Thursday. When I weighed in this evening, I hit a new low of 171 pounds. A new lower number on the scale is a great thing to see on a Monday.

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Unfathomable

We worked another glorious half-day Friday today. We had four people at the site, so another guy and I went off to work on framing out another wall when we arrived.

The foreman and another guy decided to work on fixing a nail gun that had jammed up like three weeks ago. They spent over two hours dicking around, taking the entire thing apart. Ultimately, the nail was completely jammed in there, and they still weren’t able to remove it so the time was totally wasted.

As they were in the process of piecing it back together, Hefé pulled up. To his displeasure, he discovered that they had both spent over two hours messing with it, and the gun was still broken. Words were exchanged, and for good reason I think.

So after all that, the foreman spent another half-hour to 45 minutes, walking around aimlessly, at which point we received a lumber delivery. Shortly after the wood hit the ground, and the truck pulled away, he asked the rest of us to move it in off the street.

I asked, “Are you helping,” already knowing the answer in advance based on previous experience. He said he needed to go get some things and supposedly headed for the hardware store.

We were floored. He actually had the nerve to ask us to do it then take off to go shopping. That’s just horrible management.

A good manager would have jumped in there and helped us move it, then taken off to the store. As the old saying goes, don’t ask someone to do something if you’re not willing to do it yourself.

Filled with disgust over the spineless gesture, I was more than happy to get to leave early on account of the half-day Friday and all. Lazy people suck. I weighed in at 172 pounds this afternoon.

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Mind Games

We finally got to stand up some walls today. The homeowners were definitely excited to see the project start to take some structure.

Over the past few days, I’ve picked up a habit of giving measurements in weird fractions. For instance, instead of saying five inches, I might say 3 and 32 sixteenths. It’s the same number, but it takes a second, and since I’m a huge math nerd, my warped mind finds it amusing.

However, my natural ability to lead others down the path of the dark side has taken hold once again, as the practice has spread to my co-workers. In fact, many of the measurements now being given back and forth don’t even appear on a tape measure. Your won’t find a seventh’s mark anywhere, so good luck finding two and fourteen sevenths if you don’t understand fractions.

A little joking around from time to time makes the day go by faster, and it makes your job a little more entertaining. I challenge you to try to be angry with a smile on your face, it almost physically impossible, a fact that I used more than once to make my mom laugh and forget she was supposed to be in mad-punishment mode when she was yelling at me for being a little shithead.

We left this afternoon with two massive new walls standing up. Congratulations to the guys on a job well done. Once again, my weight this evening was 172 pounds.

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Now the Fun Stuff

I started the morning installing more metal hangers. We joke around all the time about our engineer owning stock in Simpson Strong Tie because we’ve used an incredible amount of their metal hangers.

Midway through the morning, we started working on our first wall. I like putting up walls because it is just a huge change when you go from a flat deck to a standing structure.

We got our two main walls framed and sheeted. We aren’t going to stand them until tomorrow though. I finished the day out at 172 pounds again. My weight seems to have flatlined over the past few days.

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Nice Burn

We finished sheeting the deck this morning. We are ready to start putting up walls, but once again we needed to do some demo work to prepare.

We needed to tear into the roof and the walls of the existing structure so that we can tie our new walls into the old framing. We had one man on the roof ripping up shingles and such and I was nominated to tear off the sheeting on the walls beneath.

The foreman thought it would be a good idea to wear a hard hat to protect my head from wood shingles falling from the sky. He had three to choose from; I picked the one set up to be backwards.

Hardhats have a pull-out support system, so you can pull it out, turn it around, and presto, you’re wearing your hat backwards. On rare occasions, you will run across construction workers who aren’t smart enough to reverse the support system, so they have a big knob sticking out of their foreheads. I’m not sure where a knob ranks, but I’m pretty sure it’s worse than a tattoo reading “moron” on your forehead.

So anyway, I was totally into the whole wearing a hardhat thing. I commented that it was cool and made me look like a real construction worker. My foreman just stopped for a second and said, “Yeah….sometimes looks can be deceiving.” Butt of the joke or not, it was a great burn. I finished the day at 172 pounds.

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Bad Heredity

We spent the day working on framing in a floor to tie our driveway/garage structure into the existing residence. There used to be a path across, but we destroyed it after discovering extensive water damage.

I did my second joist layout and must say it turned out quite well. My measurements, and consequentially, my cuts have been much better since switching to a pen for layout. The sharper line makes it much easier to get a precise cut.

We had a system down with one man cutting, and two guys hanging, one on the ground, and one on the deck of the driveway. We had four guys at the site, so one was taking care of the standing around for us; he seems to do that a lot.

So, I was working from the ground, on a ladder hanging the joists. On one of the last few, I was swinging my hammer underhanded to knock the joist up a bit to flush with the ledger board. I completely missed, and my arm swung up past the joist, right back into a trajectory aimed straight for my face. Actually, it wasn’t really my arm swinging to my face; it was the shaft of the hammer connected to the chunk of fingers on the end of my arm swinging up at me.

I’d like to take a second to mention that my hammer is a steel shafted Estwing framing hammer. Not wood, not fiberglass, Steel. I’ve had that hammer for fourteen years, I’ve beaten the crap out of it, and it’s still good as new. If you’re going to buy a hammer, for the love of God, pay a few more dollars and get an Estwing. You’ll have it the rest of your life.

Ok, back to the story, moron on a ladder, steel hammer shaft swinging toward said moron’s face. In the split second before the hammer split my forehead, my mind said to itself, “You are NOT going to let yourself be as stupid as your mother this time. MOVE YOUR HEAD.”

Well, there was no arguing with that logic, so I moved my face, and the hammer flew safely past my head, and amused the hell out of my Mexican counterpart watching from the deck above in the process. I have to admit, it was pretty funny, and if I had hit myself, I definitely would have wished that I could have seen it.

Now, at this point, you may be asking yourself why I asked myself if I wanted to be as stupid as my mother. Well, over a decade ago, my mother decided she wanted to be a construction worker with my dad and went to work for him in Sacramento. She loved it, and I’m pretty sure having been an accounts payable manager in an office as her career before made the experience that much more enjoyable for her. (I think ditching a clean office environment to go play in the dirt must run in my family.)

On one fateful afternoon, my mother had been given the task of installing some dock doors. As she was tightening a bolt above her head, the crescent wrench slipped off. She was using a lot of force pulling down on it, so when it slipped, it came right down and smacked her square between the eyes. None of us actually saw it, but I pictured it more than once when she was yelling at me for being a typical teenager back in the day.

The smack ended up giving my poor mother two incredible black eyes. I don’t think a Hollywood makeup artist could have painted them on better. For more than a few days, mom looked like someone beat the hell out of her.

My father was well known around the site for having a fiery Irish temper, and my mother was beloved for being the cute little soccer-mom trying to be a construction worker. When she came to work the next day, every guy on the site had one goal: kill my father.

Ironworkers, Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, Welders, Heavy Equipment Operators, normally separate by job function and trade, were now united in their shared hatred of my father for having the nerve to lay a hand on my sweet, innocent mother. Luckily for my pops, one of the guys had the decency to confirm the situation with mom before setting the lynch mob in progress.

She explained that it had in fact happened on the site before, and there was a witness to confirm the story, so for the time being, my father’s life was saved. However, for two weeks, my old man was as nice as Mother Theresa on Easter.

He knew that one pair of dirty pants out of place, or an unwashed dish left on the coffee table could be just enough to push my mom into using her new power to sign his death warrant the next day at work.

So, long story short, the imbedded memory of my mom being stupid enough to smack herself in the face with a tool was all it took to keep me from repeating it if possible. To make myself feel better, I’ll say it was all just a way of continuing my teen rebellion against my mom, but to make my father feel better I’ll say that I was trying to learn from the mistakes of others for once; he was always on me about that as a kid.

We were able to get our joists all hung and most of the area sheeted before leaving for the day. I finished the day out at 172 pounds again.

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Friday Button-Up

We worked a half day today after not having one for two weeks on account of the Independence Day Holiday. It was nice getting to leave just before the afternoon sun set in.

We started off the morning cleaning up the site so that the owners have something nice to look at over the weekend. Our dumpster was gone all week, so we had accumulated a lot of debris.

The FNG and I spent a little over two hours getting everything from our various trash piles out to the dumpster on the street. After we were done, we were shocked to look at the time. The day was already almost halfway over.

We spent the remainder of the afternoon finishing up the sheeting on the driveway so that the owners would have a clear, safe path to the road. Our half day was over quickly and we went home ready to enjoy a free afternoon. I finished the day out at 173 pounds.

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Gentleman, Get Out Your Shades

Once again, I woke up this morning expecting the day to be a scorcher. Well, at least the weatherman had led me to believe it would be.

Several times over the past couple of weeks, we have talked about working in shorts and tennis shoes instead of our typical jeans and boots attire. We all agree that it would make the heat a little easier to deal with in shorts.

Well, our foreman had said it was ok to wear shorts, and I just figured that everyone else was scared to be the first person to do it. I myself have no such problems testing the waters.

I decided this morning to take the plunge and go to work in shorts and tennis shoes. My girlfriend wasn’t sure it was a good idea, and was convinced I would just end up with more scrapes on my legs, if they even let me work at all. I decided to take a pair of jeans and my boots just incase.

I showed up to work, sporting my blindingly white legs to everyone’s surprise. No one really said anything so the spare pair of jeans were able to lounge in the truck all day.

I worked throughout the day with shorts, and as it got hotter, I’m sure the guys were secretly jealous of my edge in heat dissipation. I must say that the tennis shoes weren’t a great idea, as more than a couple of times I had to take off my shoe to pour out a bunch of dirt. Also, I lost quite a bit of ankle support, so I’m thinking a pair of high top sneakers would be a better idea.

While I did catch my fair share of wisecracks regarding the lack of pigment in my legs, the extra breeze was nice. I did kind of miss the sense of protection my jeans give me, as they do a great job of shielding me from small debris like sawdust and the little plastic things that fly off of nail clips when you shoot a nail gun.

We left the site looking forward to a short day tomorrow. We haven’t had one in a couple of weeks because of the holiday and all, so we’re ready. I was 172 pounds again tonight.

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