Today I’m kinda celebrating because I’ve almost finished “the endless paver stone project” which included lots of Mother Nature messing around with me. I actually did the bulk of the work during the hottest week we’ve had in years which was last week when we had seven days of 107 to 111 degrees of heat. That was exactly what I’d hoped to avoid. Anyway, I discovered I could drink gallons of liquids and not piss once. I didn’t know that was possible, but it is when you sweat it all out. I think that’s weird as hell.
Below is a video smileycreek took one day a couple weeks ago in the evening when the temps were merely in the low-90’s. In case you didn’t know, Smileycreek is the “Director of Serendipity.” It says so right on her business cards. I was playing Radio Paradise (https://www.radioparadise.com) in the background when she took this video. The music was perfect and ended right on cue (she says you should turn up the volume when you watch it). Of course, our dogs were all around and our puppy Cayden has been with us almost an entire year now. Go below the fold to see some videos.
In the next video smileycreek took you’ll get to see what it all looked like before I could actually really get to work. The soil here is clay. Clay soil holds ten times the water compared to other soil types. When it is wet, you have to wait about 10-14 days before it is dry enough to work with. So, playing with our puppy was all I could do during the earlier part of June. See, it rained from October through the first week of June. Normally the rainy season is November through April. Not this year. We had record breaking rain and snow in northern California. It just kept coming and coming.
Locally the Oroville Dam had a problem develop due to all the water. The spillway broke down. The Oroville Dam is beyond huge. Oroville Reservoir provides water to more than ½ of the entire population. We have 40,000,000 people here and this sucker gives water to about 22,000,000 including cities south of here and the bulk of farms and orchards in central and southern California. Since the spillway broke, they had to let a lot of water out of the dam. They were able to save the salmon eggs and fingerlings (about 12,000,000 in total) as this is also the largest salmon hatchery there is.
But there’s some real irony about what happened later. 1) The water level is lower than normal for this time of year because they had to drain so much out of it to work on the spillway. We had the most rain and snow ever and the Oroville Reservoir is well below average for this time which sucks for watering crops. 2) They worked around the clock for two weeks...24 hours a day to save the salmon eggs and fingerlings. It was so heroic! Well, a couple weeks ago they all died because a pump broke that fed water to them. So, the salmon industry will be devastated this year and for years to come.
Anyway, here I am in the video below before the clay soil could be worked. The music in the background is again Radio Paradise. Smileycreek thinks this sounds like a great commercial. BTW, I look quite ugly in those socks. The reason I'm wearing them is due to working in the garden and dirt. They keep the lowest part of my legs from getting scratched up to smithereens. You’ll be able to see my right shoulder doesn’t work properly from nerve damage, but I can still toss a ball to Cayden.
In the next video, I’m cutting one paver stone. You really have to put your back into it. I cut several hundreds of these suckers. The temperature that day reached 104 at our home. You might notice the way I walk after cutting the paver stone shows how drained I was from the heat.
I was very fortunate as my buddy had a brand new diamond encrusted brick cutting saw blade. I rented the machine at the rental place. Their blade was very well used meaning the cuts I’d make would have taken a lot longer to do. We had to argue with the rental guys about swapping their used blade for this top of the line blade (the blade my buddy has costs $185). Eventually, they succumbed and we had our way. I bought face masks that filter out anything larger than 0.95 microns in size. That’s good enough to filter out cement dust. As you’ll see in the video there is a lot of it. When we are inundated with smoke from forest fires here, we have to use masks that filter out anything larger than 0.30 microns in size. Smoke for weeks on end is quite unhealthy to breathe and the particles are so small they’ll lodge very deep within your lungs.
Here’s a picture of discarded bits on the ground. I wanted to have as little waste as possible even though I had to make hundreds of cuts in the pavers. This is all the waste I created. Not bad for such a large project. We have leftover bricks as well which will be used to make pathways in our garden.
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