Rain Delay (Hooray!)

I went to bed with the boys at 9:15 last night. I was wiped out. (Then I woke up for over three hours in the middle of the night, which sort of defeated the whole go to bed early plan, but that's okay.) Phil sat up, and suddenly a deluge started. He came to bed and said, "I don't think we'll be pouring tomorrow."

We only had about .4", and much of it drained away during the day. But as we talked through what needed to happen before we pour, we realized it was better to take a day to manage various farm things. Feed the cows; mail a report; pick up a few supplies at the hardware store; plant the comfrey roots I dug up last Saturday (oops: I meant to get to that earlier).

We also hooked up our small pump, that we used to use for watering the cows from the creek, and pumped out as much water as we could from the foundation area. It didn't work well (had to be primed every few minutes, it seemed), but after an hour, the site was reasonably dry. I also retrenched to make sure the corner would drain.

The other thing we needed to do was determine how best to mix concrete. We think our mixer will handle one 94 lb. bag of cement at a time, and one of the standard "recipes" for concrete is one part cement, two parts sand, three parts gravel. Which is very well, except that a bag of concrete doesn't have a clear volume measurement.

We dumped the bag of cement into two 6-gallon buckets, and the cement was about 5 3/4" from the top. So we'll need four buckets of sand and six buckets of gravel. And another bucket of water.

Phil is hoping to do this in a day, because otherwise the bond between concrete won't be as strong. He has a plan for how to manage. However, it seems a bit ambitious. We're looking at over 6500 pounds of cement, plus 280 buckets of sand, plus 420 buckets of gravel. Add 70 buckets of water.

Pray for the intrepid Lykosh six tomorrow, if you think of it. I think we'll be needing some supernatural help.