More progress

I spent the night over at my new house last night. The plan was to get up and at 'em bright and early - say, 7:00 or so - and start scraping away at the garage doors before the bumblebees had warmed themselves up to flying temperature. Then I would scrape and sand until they came out to let me know that they wanted me to stop, and then I would shift my activities to concrete. It almost worked out that way.

I overslept. I'd like to say that this is because the bed is just so damned comfortable, but that wasn't why. I had a hell of a time getting to sleep last night - it probably would have been easier if I had opened a window, but I didn't think of that until this morning. I slept fitfully, woke up too early a few times, and finally dragged myself out of bed by 8:00. Maybe later. Add in morning ablutions and a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, an apple, and tea (in my Margo! Saturn! Boxcar! mug from The Comics Curmudgeon) and I didn't get outside to do scraping until 9:00. I was able to get a lot done - pretty much the entire area of one door accessible from the ground - before the bees showed up.

There were four of them this time. For the life of me they seemed to be having a meeting in the air. All of them were facing each other, hovering, dipping up and down a bit. Then something happened that I've noticed before: one of them flew full-speed into another, crashed right into it, and the bee that had been crashed into shifted down to a position just above and behind my head. Is this the way they select the bee that may very well have to sacrifice itself by using its stinger? It didn't need to. I got the message, packed up my stuff and left.

And then it began to rain.

I expected that it would rain. I wanted it to rain. I didn't plan on doing any painting, but I did want to pour some concrete. If I covered the fresh concrete up in time, the rain would work to my advantage by keeping everything cool and moist and helping the concrete to dry slowly. If it rained before I poured the concrete I wouldn't have to worry about wetting anything down first. But having it rain while I wanted to pour the concrete wouldn't do anything but delay me.

I did manage to get some done during a brief interlude between raindrops, about 50 lbs. - again, a mortar box is probably the most wonderful invention ever. I covered it up, and the sky broke open. Actually, while I was working with the concrete the wind picked up to the point that I began thinking that there might be a tornado in the neighborhood, but that passed pretty quickly.

I still had another 80 lb. sack of concrete in the car that I wanted to use. I waited out the storm by making a few phone calls, assembling a rocking bench for my front porch that I bought a few weeks ago, partially disassembling it again when I realized I couldn't get it out of the door and onto the porch, and then hanging out on my rocking bench on my front porch while drinking diet lemon-lime soda from my Margo! Boxcar! Saturn! mug.

Eventually the rain stopped, and I lugged the sack of concrete out of the trunk of my car as quickly as I could, which isn't all that quickly when you're dealing with an 80 lb. sack of anything. Even before I got a chance to mix the concrete with water the rain started again. But that didn't stop me - dammit, I was almost there, I had almost accomplished my goals for the day. I hurriedly did what I had to do, covered it up with plastic, and had a very late lunch.

Tomorrow after my class I will water it for the first time. Then we'll see where we go from there.