The home stretch...

More work on the never-ending form-building project... getting closer to pouring concrete (really!)

Chopping up a perfectly-good brand-new eight-dollar garden hose from Walmart into 10-inch lengths. Whew, that was a lot of hyphens, but I'll do what it takes to make a sentence grammatically-correct. These are going to be the prophylactic that protects my allthread form ties from the concrete. I got the cheapest hose I could find, not just because I have an unnatural aversion to spending an extra five dollars when I don't have to, but because it will kink easily. Normally, that would be a source of endless frustration and five-dollar-remorse, but in this case it's going to be a good thing. After I pull the threaded rod ties from the wall, the plan is to clamp onto an edge of the hose with vise-grips and twist-and-pull to remove it from the forms... if it kinks, it should collapse and pull out of the hole... that's the idea, anyway. I give it 50/50 odds that I'll be eating these words later. 

That's a whole lot of form ties.

Shawna pointed out this little guy hopping around on the hill behind me, eating bugs as I built forms. He was tiny, about the size of a golf ball. I don't know why I assume "he", but that's just how he struck me, so I'm going with it. Anyway... he was quite charming and brightened my day.

Getting closer... this is a garage that would make the Borg proud.

Just one more row of bolts to get through the back face of the forms. This has ended up being a tremendous amount of work; it would have gone a LOT quicker if I had someone working with me. As it was, for each of these, I had to climb out from behind the wall, hop over the three-foot forms, crawl under the scaffolding, hammer the rod through the forms, hammer the next one so that it's tight against the back form, crawl back under the forms, climb back behind the wall, line up the next one with the hole, and repeat. About a hundred times. My iPhone has this fun feature that tracks my health. Apparently, the number of steps you take in a day correlates to health. According to that metric, I am very very healthy today: I took about 14,000 steps. That translates to an average of thirty steps per minute, every minute, for eight hours. Over and under and climbing and repeat... I am tired. And happy. Very very Tired and Happy.

Another view of the forms. I'm getting so excited I can hardly contain myself. I'm about to blow concrete all over this thing!

Music 

I've had Dave Matthews Band on the brain for a few days now, specifically, Two Step.

Here's the normal-length version: Two-Step

And the extended, apparently-the-best-live-version-ever version: Best-Ever-Live-Version-of-Two-Step-in-All-Of-Its-14-Minute-Glory