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ninety year old orangutan Tuesday, November 11 2008
Regarding the greenhouse: to prepare the top of the west wall to receive glass blocks, today I began filling the cores beneath where those blocks will go. Mostly I filled the cores with loose stones segregated out from the dirt excavated for the foundation hole. Unlike most uses for these stones, in this case I didn't feel the need to clean them first. A little dirt in the core is fine. For structural reasons, though, I filled one of these cores with stones and rebar mortared with concrete. In this application, the stones definitely had to be cleaned. Cleaning stones is slow, fussy work, and it's murder on my hands unless I'm wearing rubber gloves (which I always use when working with concrete, though often they rip open without my noticing). I've found that repeated exposure to cold, wet clay slowly sucks all the oil out of skin every bit as thoroughly as exposure to wet concrete. Over time, though, hands can acclimate to such abuses. They might look like hell (or like they belong to a ninety year old orangutan), but eventually the rashes and sores heal over and the tender spots come to feel normal again.
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