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.
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.
posted by fuqstik @ 7:21 PM
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