"I built horse barns the past two years"- is what I tell people. But really I was a helper driver carpenter on a horse barn building crew. I used to emphasize that they were Amish, and I had all these takes and experiences to share about the Amish. Not as much anymore. Year-and-change with the barn builders, and about four months with an Amish hardscaping crew. Hardscape is digging out footers and gravel drainage bases for paver patios, and applying stone veneer to CMU blocks, and building with CMU and stone stacking walls and fireplaces and that sort of thing. Mixing mortar, lots of digging, some demolition and finish work on outdoor kitchens and stuff like that. Those four months I count as six months, there's hardly time in my life to review and count the exact amount of time I was with them, so I'll call that a half year, and the carpentry I'll count as two.
Going to grad school at UDEL soon here. Delaware and I have no relationship; except I have been three times to graduate critiques in the UDEL arts building. Seems like a cool little school with a good intuitive vibe.
I don't have further thoughts on the school that are valid here yet. They did say no outside employment, so I quit my job and now I'm just taking side work. I built some nice stairs for a good budget, and I dug a French drain for a high budget. Now I'm working on a garden path in a neighboring town and the budget is high. I subcontracted my best friend Riley to come up from Baltimore to help out; who's been spending his time bartending and making art and constantly networking- he's a scene kid. So it's a lot of work, and I'm trying to get a portfolio out of it kind of- (I mean, really the homeowner has a nice garden and the vision that appears to me happens to be a very beautiful project- even though it might be considered overkill).
Anyway, so Riley hasn't been doing manual labor and I'm trying to help him out with some money. He gets out of his truck from his drive up from Baltimore and announces that he just got his test back for Lyme's disease and lets the silence hang. I say, "Oh, jeeze, what is it?" and he says, "Positive". I say "Man, I'm sorry to hear that." Then I don't remember just how we got back around to the topic of digging out this path, but I described the project to him and we started cutting a flat plane out of the burm. He was alright at clearing the dirt; we were both fresh to the job and eager. The first day he put in six hours which we counted as eight because of his waiting for me to get to the jobsite (I was waiting on the contractor too, by running errands gathering supplies for the project, but whatever, I am expecting a bigger payout anyway, so I comped Riley for waiting around), Three hours the next day; he spent most of the day on the phone mitigating beef in his circles, and five hours the final day. His ethic really slacked off after the first day. It happens. He went home after three days and I gave him $400.
I've worked myself to fatigue on this job too. We ran into a bunch of rocks in the hillside and either have to dig them out or break them apart with a sledgehammer. It's a railroad tie retaining wall along a hill to make for a garden pathway where the customer can service her garden while not climbing akimbo hillside. I'm building steps and a recessed walkway (below the level of the railroad ties, to accommodate for decorative stone. It's getting close but recently I've been returning home to collapse on the couch for a necessary nap. It happens on these big projects. How much can a single person tackle- that's the idea of designing a project. You vs. the project. A will-to-power kind of thing. Or the participation in the Power Process. It's a natural thing, as far back as I can remember, before I knew the terms, a challenge. blah blah.
So this is what I have to deal with and wrap up soon here. Should go fine. I will staple those verticals into the hill with rebar, no deadmen to speak of but the wall has those LVL braces front and back and there's a good drainage system behind it, so the idea is that it won't need to do much retaining- plus half of that hillside is buried boulders. Anyways, the company that I'm subcontracted under is happy and thinks I'm going plenty overboard and is happy I'm working for him. As evidenced by my blogging, my mind is approaching a better state. I put in about seven hours of work a day in this fatigued state- once I get going it's not so bad, and I'm actually working the whole time. That's a huge improvement from the hardscaping job where I had little say in my tasks, often felt useless and I was.. I don't know, it was demoralizing and I lost a lot of respect for them.
My guilt has to do with how I treated Riley. I got to step into the lead role, which rhymes with what I'll be doing in UDEL- teaching the undergraduates, and I got to see what juggling cats was like a bit. Compounded by the fact (idea) that he's my friend, I have to pay him well and accommodate his personal life. Well, my idea was to let him participate in the power process a bit; because that's what I needed so badly from my last job; agency, but when you're green you're green; and Riley was a green worker. It went alright at first, but at some point, when he asked for something to do I gave him a big trench to dig out, and he instead grabbed a push broom to brush out a big boulder to see how large it was before he got to digging. He set to cleaning off the rock with a push broom. It's very frustrating to interrupt someone's logic while also paying them to do work they're obfuscating. He was tired. I kind of invited him to leave. This will have to be something I get better at.
I'm going to help the company owner who subcontracted me for this job today soon with moving his home from an apartment to a house outside of town. He's got a wife and a baby and a dog and is a good guy who I'm learning lots from and I'm very paranoid about the durability of landscaping projects, so I do a lot of research and my expanding knowledge base has proven valuable to him; so we are good friends now, at least symbiotic friends.
That's it for now, My fiance is annoying me saying stuff like do you want to get a dalmatian. More dogs. I do not. Elsewise things there are good. She was watching me type so I jokingly wrote a dig.
