Grunt Work

Katarina and I spent yesterday afternoon and a couple of hours today clearing the building site. Now I know why they call it 'grunt' work -- you grunt a lot with the effort involved. And now I remember why I'd previously decided to hire laborers to help with this stage.

The building site is covered with ivy several layers deep. There's also an assortment of shrubby things, a wannaba lemon tree (it doesn't get enough sun where they planted it), and a rhododendron or two. It's all got to go ("It all has to go! No money down! We'll take any offer! Se habla español!"), though we're going to transplant the healthiest rhododendron.

The ivy is incredibly tough stuff. It's a bear to get anything through it, and you have to go through 5 or 6 layers of it and its roots to dig anything up like a stump. But you can't just pick it up and pull, either, since it sends runners off in every direction to anchor itself and spread.

But we're making good progress, and warming up for the long haul ahead. Tomorrow's my day off for church (though in a lot of ways, Sunday is my work day, since I work harder running sound and media at church than a lot of my other work), though I'll probably go toy...er...tool shopping after church to look into getting a laser level. I could probably borrow the pastor's (he got one for our yearly Mexico Mission Trip, where we take the youth group from church down to the barrios of Tijuana to build a house), but I always worry about borrowing stuff that can break. There's a zillion options, but most of them look like they're for indoor, short-range use.

Tomorrow I'll post some images of the building site and the plans so you can see what all I'm babbling about.