And So It Begins

What a difference between yesterday and today. The chief difference being that today I made progress. Real progress.

It took a meltdown to get me there. Sometimes that's just the way it is. Genetic I guess. The mother is the same way. (She just gets obsessed by more things than I do.) When she can't figure out how to make it work, she can be a real pill. She is like the calm before the storm and then she flies through like a tornado until she gets whatever it is done. And I'll be damned if that wasn't what happened to me. I'm sure I was a whole lot of fun last night and early this morning.

Clearly, last night I was frustrated beyond imagination. My plan was not working yesterday, and I didn't know how to fix it. I'm still not entirely sure I know how, but at least today I ran at it from another angle and it seemed to work. (The bricks look a little weird in the photo because they're still wet. In the top photo, that's what the porch looked like on July 8. You'll see there's still sidewalk in front of it.)

Of course nine hours of sleep and some pain meds didn't hurt. Then I drove to get more supplies before I got under way today and it was like the iPod knew just what I needed giving me everything from The Ramones' "Sheena" to The Cure's "Hot, Hot, Hot!" to Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" and K.T. Tunstall's "Black Horse and Cherry Tree.'

When I got home, a few things had happened. I was calmer and I had a plan. I also had the bullseye, which did in fact happen to be the perfect solution for the porch posts, and I decided some door plinths (Gene's gonna love this) would would work for the mother's plan for the old salvaged post (that's for a different blog item)and all felt right with the world.

I got my shovel and I took out most of the sand and put down more gravel and more gravel and more gravel and then sand and mortar. And from there, I got to here. There's a lot more to do, but I finally got it started.

I'm tired. I'm sore. I'm happy.