Keeping character, or restoring a pond

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Every pier hole filled up with groundwater immediately. So the routine was to pump it out right up until Iris arrived with the concrete. Each hole took almost two buckets of the good stuff.

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I'm going to have to build part of the wall on the opposite side to facillitate pouring the floor.

We'll build this wall and then make it the new ramp. When it's all done we'll remove the dirt that's the ramp.

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Here's what the north wall looked like quitting time last night.

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Guess who's back after a vacation in Dallas for twelve days?

She had some surgery, injectors replaced.

I haven't had A/C in a year and a half. It worked until I hit the Dallas city limit. Then it died again.

I'm sending the best thing about me down to talk to them about that. We're going out west in October and we're taking Lucy. The best thing about me is confident her discussion will guarantee us a comfortable trip.

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We got the south wall piers drilled and filled with concrete this afternoon.

It was an absolute bugger bear.

You see the clay is wet under a dry layer. So Iris would go in and get stuck. I'd use the mini-hoe to dig her out and give her some dry stuff to move on and then we'd move to the next hole.

It was tuff.

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We're going to have four inch and a half conduits running from the south side to the north side under the floor of the concreted area of the pond.

We're also going to have six one and a quarter inch ones from the columns in the floor of the pond going to the same central location on the south side of the pond.

And there's the lighting conduit, we're looking at ten three quarter inch conduits also being laid under the floor.

And since they all have to go under the south wall........

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Looking north

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North wall quitting time today.

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When we started we had seven ten yard loads in front of the mixer. The pile started where the pallet of portland sits now.

We're down to two dump truck loads left in the pile.

Every shovel full went through the mixer and became some variation of concrete for the pond area.

Today we did sixteen mixer loads after lunch, nine cubic foot plus to a mixer load, five plus yards of wet concrete.

That was done by a fifty seven year old, going to be fifty eight this month, and yours truly kicking in occasionally. I just turned fifty seven.

The man's a monster when it comes to feeding the mixer. I hit the lottery at the day laborer site when I got him.

It was a hundred and one today and there was not a breeze within a state or two.

We had a good day.

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Hopefully by Thursday this pile will be history. If we get the pipe in place tomorrow, pour the south wall beam, and then start filling in the cavities in the Halite blocks.

When we started it looked impossible. Now it just looks almost gone.