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you always need more concrete than yout think
Tuesday, June 2 2026
At noon while Gretchen was somewhere else, it was my job to take Neville to the Hurley vet so a blood sample could be taken. If we just had Neville, that wouldn't be a difficult task. But we have Neville and Charlotte, and Charlotte insists on going everywhere Neville goes. So they both jumped in the Forester (Gretchen was in the Bolt, so I had drive something that consumed gasoline) and I took them. Initially the day had been cool, but by the time I parked at the vet, it was hot enough that I didn't want to leave Charlotte in the car while Neville got his blood draw. (She would've been very unhappy.) So I took them both into the building, and we waited in the waiting area. Initially it was empty, but at two different times a couple of big yellowish dogs came in (one a senior with a massive angry lesion on his right knee), and Charlotte immediately began enthusiastically barking in that loud, penetrating high-pitched bark of hers. In the past there would've been no stopping her, but this time when I told her to stop, she actually did! That was huge, because I wasn't forced to drag her (and thus Neville) outside to cool off. We could wait in the waiting room the way one does at a vet.
Somehow the blood draw cost $380 (with a discount!), but that practice is completely enshittified at this point, and the only reason we keep going there is logistical inertia.
I then drove out to Lowes (via Sawkill Road and US 209) to get some supplies I needed for landlording and household deck maintenance. This included two eighty pound sacks of concrete mix, a concrete finishing trowel, a sixteen foot two by six, a 12 foot four by four, and an eight foot two by six. As I attempted to strap the lumber to the roof rack, I brain fart and thought for some reason the straps I always normally use were in the Bolt (they weren't; that car has no roof rack), so I had to untangle a massive knot of ropes, bungee cords, electrical wire, straps, a two-person slingshot (I'm serious!) and other stringy crap to get the straps and ropes I needed. As I did this, I let the dogs out to wander the parking lot and sniff around for chicken bones on the grassy islands. They were a little slow about crossing the vehicle lane to get to those islands, so I had to act as a crossing guard. But people driving vehicles were moving slowly and charmed by the sight, since it's somewhat unusual to encounter people with offleash dogs in a parking lot. I didn't let them out for long, though, because the then insisted on standing in the roadway for some reason. I was able to strap the lumber down nicely, using a long rope to hold the two ends down (the beams were oriented so they could flop left and right instead of up and down). I keep meaning to weld some hooks to the Forester's undercarriage so I can easily do such tie-downs without having to lash ropes around parts of the suspension.
I wasn't home on Hurley Mountain for long before I began preparing for a landlording chore. This one would involve that concrete, so I needed buckets, a hoe, a shovel, various trowels, protective gloves, a roll of reinforcing mesh that I wouldn't end up using, and bits of wood for use building a mold.
On the drive to the house where I would be doing the work (on Brewster Street), I stopped first at the bridge on Dug Hill Road across Englishman's Creek and then went down into the creek with a five gallon bucket to gather nice river stones for use in my concrete project. There was a lot of poison ivy and stinging nettle to avoid, and I was wearing shorts. I managed to get stung by a nettle on my shin and then later had to scrub a part of my hand in the cold creek water after it came into contact with some poison ivy as I lifted the heavy bucket full of rocks to put atop the bridge abutment (so as to avoid carrying it back through the herbal minefield).
At Brewster Street, things were different than I'd imagined them. For some reason I'd thought the path to the steps would be a narrow one and it would be easy to pound stakes into the soil to secure my mold boards. But the walkway was a broad swath of bluestone, wider than the length of any of the boards I'd brought. And though I had a hammer, I didn't have a single nail. Fortunately, there were longer boards (though not quite long enough) under the steps, and there were other lumber scraps there containing old rusty nails that I was able to recycle. By cutting trenches into the turf on either side of the walkway, I could secure a line of two two by tens end-to-end the correct distance from the bottom step so that I could then add some concrete to a bluestone step that was, it turned out, not sticking out far enough to form a proper bottom step. It also wasn't quite high enough. Gretchen had thought the amount of concrete I would need would be trivial and had thought two eighty pound bags was way more than what I needed. But I know how these things go, and sure enough, I hadn't brought quite enough concrete. I mixed it all up in multiple batches in a five gallon bucket and made it work by embedding multiple river stones into the wet concrete, though even with that, I probably should've built up the entire 11 inch tread depth by at least another half inch.
In the past, I've never really had to worry about the finished look of any of my concrete. It was always just to support posts set it the ground or fix holes made by rats in a crumbling three-quarter-inch-thick basement slab. But in this case, the step I was making would be one of the first things one saw when entering the Brewster Street house. So I had to make it as smooth and solid-looking as possible. So I agitated the concrete to force all the air out of it and then went back and forth over it with the finishing trowel until it looked very smooth. As I worked, a woman sat out on her front porch across the street, eventually joined by her very little pre-teen daughter. The daughter had that unfortunate kind of obesity where the face is fattened as much as anything else. Unusual for a kid in today's world, she was playing with objects that didn't have screens on them. One was a plastic toy she kept tossing at a bird on a wire overhead. I was a little worried the kid would scratch her name in my concrete after I left, but it wasn't like I was going to sit there and guard it.
I got back home a little after 5:00pm, and soon Gretchen was wondering what we were going to be having for dinner. She ended up thawing out a couple high-end frozen pizzas, which was a good thing to eat while watching Tristan Williams, the guy who looks like he was generated by AI, finally go down to defeat on Jeopardy!.
Later I lay on the beanbag in the laboratory, drinking booze (in celebration of my tricky concrete work) and watching episodes four and five of the recent Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
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