Some Days Are Like That

I partially woke in the middle of the night enough to notice that Phil was not in bed. In the morning, I asked if he had been up until 4am, and he said, "Something like that. But I finished my book!"

He had been reading Jane Austen's awesome Annotated Pride and Prejudice. He mentioned little insights throughout the day: the annotations make the book even more stellar, more understandable, than the basic text.

If his one vice is to stay up most of the night once every half decade or so reading classics, I'm okay with that.

But we did get off to a later start than the last few days. (The overhead sun, making shadows of the back corners, tells the tale.)

It was just as well. The .3" of rain had made our little road and ramp impassable. I was impressed that Phil attempted to get down with the tractor: he didn't get stuck, quite, but it was a close call.

First thing to do, then: spread a layer of peastone to ensure safe(r) travels.

He then mixed up a half batch of mortar and started to do the third corner.

But it was as if the mortar was bewitched: everything went wrong. Apparently, a few pieces of peastone got scooped up with the sand (my fault for trying to scoop close to the gravel pile). The little pebbles were too small to see, perhaps the size of a raisin, but a single bit in a joint makes it impossible to compress the joint to make it level. After a few times, Phil started to watch more carefully for anomalies, and did find a few large gravel chunks.

Then, his arms were more tired today. In order to make sure he didn't just drop the heavy blocks into place and smush the joint into oblivion, he would hold it a bit longer: just long enough for the mortar to fall off. This happened over and over again.

He had one corner block that he worked on for literally 45 minutes. (I did many dishes and fed all the boys lunch, and he was still wrestling with that single blasted block.)

The next block was one that I had cut to go around rebar. He was lifting it out of place for about the fifth time when the block simply broke in two. It was tired of being set down and picked up and decided to refuse to do so again.

He had two other blocks break on him while working. The mortar was either too wet or too dry, but no matter how he adjusted it, it wouldn't work better. That corner's foundation happened to be a bit higher than the other three, so even trying to determine with the story pole whether the joints were correct or not was difficult.

In four hours, he set 21 blocks. At that point, he was totally demoralized (and out of mortar, which would be, I suppose, demortarized), and so he was done. I had been watching a few of his attempts, and I would have called it quits, too.

What is the line at the end of the (rather nasty) children's book about the boy who has the bad day? Some days are like that, even in Australia.