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failed cement disposal
Friday, September 30 2022
In the remote workplace today, I was systematically querying databases to find where data being displayed by a web application was coming from. Since 90% of the tables in one of the databases are empty, it was good to first establish which tables contained data. This is a good query for that information:
Doing this, I eventually determined that the data I was looking for must be in a sister database to the one I was looking at. But even then, changes to that data weren't reflected in the UI. The application was pulling its data from a reporting table.
Such work is tedious and dull (though not as tedious and dull as debugging a large slow-to-compile Angular application). But today I was helped by having taken a recreational percocet. Later in the day as I was coming down from it, I would want to lie on my back (something I'd do in the greenhouse upstairs) but initially it was a pretty good study aid.
The focus today when cleaning the garage was to get rid of all the bags of concrete, mortar, grout, and portland cement. The last time I'd used any of that stuff had been more than two years ago when I set and grouted tile in the upstairs bathroom, so all of it had gone bad due to having absorbed moisture from the air. Since these materials cure into a material similar to limestone, there's never a reason to cart them to a landfill when they go bad. I always have places to put extra stone or surplus fill. One such place is the bottom of a dip in the trail leading to the base of the mountain goat path that leads up to the back of the woodshed, the most arduous part of the trail that I use for bringing firewood back from the Stick Trail. If that dip could be filled with something, then the final incline would be gentler. But getting material over there isn't easy and there's plenty of loose bluestone that could serve as fill instead (and I've gradually been filling that dip this way). So instead I put two old, solidfied 80 lb bags of concrete at the base of the mound of earth piled against the north wall of the greenhouse foundation. That mound, which was mostly put in place in 2009, has settled several inches in the past few years, exposing some styrofoam on the outside of the foundation outside. So I piled smaller bags of other failed cement-containing materials (along with some old furnace cement) at the top of the mound to cover the exposed styrofoam. At some point I'm going to have to get more fill for that area, which will bury these bags of failed material. But their minerals will leach out and benefit the ecosystem (the rock here is poor in calcium-containing nutrients).
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?220930 feedback
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