dirty jobs

Aaaaaand, we're back. Uncle Tom and Grammie Slack were in town for most of the weekend. They seemed to have a great time with the little ones, and graciously let Julie and I slack off on the kid watching duties to get some things done around here (there are always things to do). Julie also got to hike Hunger Mt. with me this week, AND we all got to go out to Sarducci's for dinner on Saturday. What a treat.

I did my best Mike Rowe impression yesterday, picking two of the dirtiest jobs I could find around here to occupy the hours between 8am and 8pm. First was hole digging. Our lumber yard had a sale on pressure treated lumber, that plus skyrocketing prices for EVERYTHING led us to believe that it was time to build our deck; even paying interest to VISA for a year would potentially get us off cheaper than waiting until next summer to buy (even if one of these presidential contenders was a bonafide miracle worker could they POSSIBLY begin to turn this guys mess around after only a few months?). I got the rim of the deck in place on Friday, got the outside boards leveled and squared, then dropped a line to determine where I wanted my footings to be. Yesterday I polished off 4 holes, each at 4' deep and about 18", and Julie and I mixed up about 10 bags of concrete to get the deck footings in place.

Finishing that up at about 3pm, I decided to move onto the harvesting of the first 4 of our chickens. I'll post more about this later, leaving out some of the more graphic details; needless to say by the end of the day yesterday my body was covered in mud, concrete and viscera. Not a pretty site. Julie and I did, in fact, unwind with an episode of "Dirty Jobs" after clean up; and even after a long day I still didn't have it as tough as Mr. Rowe.