Jimmy the Entombed Rat, and other stories...

Gad, that's a couple of days gone by that make these old bones creak. This morning was supposed to be the hard one, and when I mentioned that yesterday was worse than this morning, M gave me a really, really dirty look. Of course; being the youngest and with all his limbs intact, he was the one who had to schlep all those bags of concrete.

82. Bags. Of concrete. At 80 pounds each. Into a spinning cement mixer, and I can speak from experience when I tell you there are easier jobs on this planet.

Yeah, those are the ones. Of course when he was cursing them and being broken beneath them, they were still full of concrete. Long morning. And then, just to add a bit of insult, we made him buy lunch.

W and I took the concrete out of the mixer and poured it, one coffee can at a time, down the last five courses of that dry-stack block building behind the bags. So technically we lifted as much concrete as M did; we just did it in much smaller increments. I can also speak from experience when I say, that's the best way. Though after a few hours the concrete does start taking the skin off your hands for some reason. W was smart and went to get some vinyl gloves when his hands started hurting. I was an idiotdemonstrated my machismo and now basically have no skin left on my right hand and not a lot on my left. But we both know who's the real man, so...I'm the winner.

Alas, the morning was not without its casualties. In fact we can truly say the building contains a rather old-fashioned foundation sacrifice, in the person of Jimmy the Rat.

It wasn't our idea. We gave him a choice. Really.

We were approaching the end, and M got ready to put together something to block that hole in the concrete block just beside the door. He looked inside for some reason, and exclaimed, "Holy shit! There's a rat in there!"

Magnus loves him some rat. Magnus had been disconsolately nosing around the pile of empty concrete bags, because Magnus knows that where there are piles of things there are rats. It's one of the more fundamental laws of Magnus' universe, but it just wasn't working out today. There was a pile of bags, but not a whiff of rat. The whole time factor thing, you know. Hey, Magnus does the best he can. Most of that walnut-size brain is needed to run the functions of his brontosaur-size body, and it doesn't leave a lot of wiring for logical deduction.

But he does know the word "rat." So when M said the magic word, Magnus came ambling over to see what was on the menu. It was just about then that I poured about a quarter of a coffee can's worth of concrete into the top of the last blocks, to encourage the rat to leave. The rat instantly popped about halfway out of the hole, saw the Jaws of Death waiting, and made a very poor choice: He popped right back in again, and met the rest of the concrete. So now the little guy is a permanent part of the structure. M named him Jimmy. We'll probably mark the tomb entrance before we frame in the door.

But seriously; this morning was nothing like yesterday for sheer excruciating endurance of suffering and tumult. I've said it before: I'm a hermit. My idea of a good day is one in which nothing whatsoever happens, and it does so quietly. Yesterday, at one point, we had:

• L the neighbor finishing the insanely-long trench with her diesel backhoe, from the well to the cistern and all the way down the ridge to The Secret Lair.
  
• S the road guy breaking gigantic boulders out of the side of M's excavation with a tractor-mounted jackhammer. Oh My F'ing God those things are loud.
  
• R the delivery guy interminably shuttling back and forth with concrete bags and blocks in an enormous forklift.
• D the other neighbor showing up with his demented puppy.
• Magnus employing his apocalyptic methods to teach manners to the puppy.
• D getting a phone call from a rancher friend who wanted to sell him a solar power system, which caused him and M to jump into D's Jeep and drive away to look it over, while:
• I tried to encourage water from the well to run all the way down the hill and fill barrels for this morning's concrete pour, which involved sticking hoses together with Gorilla Tape, which worked about as well as you'd expect it to.
  

This went on, at varying levels of intensity, from 6:30 to about quarter to five. Yesterday it was my turn to make supper for the group, but by the time I made it back to the property my stump felt like it had swelled to a six-foot-in-diameter column of pain, not to mention how completely tired and frazzled I was. So upon my arrival I rather grumpily announced, "That aroma you fail to detect is me not cooking dinner tonight. You will continue to fail to detect it for the rest of the evening." And then I took a shower, and then I went to bed.

So I owe the group supper this evening, which is why I need to wrap this up and go boil some rice.

Sometimes, I must admit, I liked it better when I was a lazy, solitary hermit. But mostly it's kinda fun. And we really are accomplishing a lot. I'm trying not to neglect the dogs too much.