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non-cuticle arcs
Thursday, September 24 2009
The outhouse is a nice low-ambition project for rounding out the warm weather construction season. But when I'm done I'll have what HGTV would refer to as a "sanctuary" or "retreat." It will have a bookshelf full of books, a south-facing window, a sink gravity-fed by a rainwater cistern, and perhaps a few paintings or other art. Of course, it also bears mentioning that it will only have 15 square feet of floor space and will, within a few weeks, contain gallons of human excrement. It's always been my goal to have a nice place to crap in peace, and part of that peace means knowing the value of my wastes are not being wasted (or contaminating perfectly good water). The only long-term solution to the water and sewage issues faced by desert cities such as Phoenix and Los Angeles are forms of waste disposal such as this, so any squeamishness you feel from my writing on this subject is just another luxury of the Petroleum Bubble, right there with manicured lawns, dumpsters full of pink boxes on Boxing Day, reliable cell service, exurbs, cars, American military supremacy, and getting tough on crime.
This afternoon I finished digging the hole for the outhouse's southeast corner pole, where I managed to dig down more than eighteen inches. The outhouse lies at bottom of the steep slope against which the house itself was built (allowing the house's west side to begin an entire story higher than its east side). The soil around the greenhouse appears to mostly be native and undisturbed (which is what you'd expect given that it is surrounded by mature, largely injury-free trees). It contains a good many rocks, though few are so large they cannot be removed. But since the scope of this project is so limited, I'm not looking to set the corner posts in perfect holes. If I can set the posts in at least a foot of concrete and if that concrete extends at least sixteen inches down, it's good enough. If frost should heave the building upward, it will probably do so fairly evenly.
Later I set the southeast corner pole using 80 pounds of dry concrete mix. It's tempting in these quick-and-dirty concrete jobs to just use my bare hands instead of running off to get latex gloves. But because my hands were especially torn up from the excavation of the holes (whose loose materials I extract with my bare hands), the caustic alkali chemicals in the concrete had places to attack, leaving searing holes here and there across my palms and fingers. The manual digging had also destroyed the cutting edges of my fingernails in ways that affected the flesh around them, and the least comfortable parts of my body ended up being a few places along their non-cuticle arcs.
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