My Wet Cold Shit Day

Today was absolute hell. We planned to pour concrete even though the forecast was for thunderstorms and heavy rain but we had no idea what we were in for. As soon as we got to the job we rigged up a tarp from the roof to some timbers to keep the rain of the actual slab but in the process we got absolutely drenched. That was just the start though.

The concrete pump turned up and not long after the first concrete truck came. It was going pretty well until the second concrete truck came with concrete that had the consistency of water. It was that wet that when you walked in it you would almost make waves. We couldn't do anything with it. We couldn't screed it, couldn't shovel it and definitely couldn't make it flat because no matter what you did it would just move and swell up or sag down. It was shit. After screeding the floor for the third time we finally finished. I have never seen concrete that bad. We order concrete at whats called 80 slump and this came at about 180 slump. The slump is the water content and if you shovel 80 slump concrete into a pile it will stay as a pile and only slump a little where as the concrete today was like water. I could barely keep it on a shovel let alone put it in a pile.

We had lunch before trying to finish the slab. It dried out pretty quickly but only the underneath was tightening and getting hard whereas the top centimeter was still slop. In the end we scraped all the slop off the top of the slab before finishing it flat. It was a shit day. I was drenched to my jocks for the whole day and just everything was hard. I was so glad to be home so I could have a shower.

Last night on the other hand was good. The girl and I headed to Marion to do some Christmas shopping and I also got a haircut because I was starting to look like a palm tree. We cruised around buying prezzies and went and saw Steve who was working before heading to the movies to see the new Nicholas Cage movie, National Treasure 2. The girl bought the first one a long time ago but I had only watched it recently, it was a good movie and the second one was just as good. It had the same sort of wandering storyline but it was a good movie to watch.

I take a lot of pointless photos so I created a photo blog so go and check it out too. The spud photo blog. Enjoy.