# Light blogging, heavy machinery

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2004-07-02T20:03:35Z


This week, I've been spending a lot of time in the yard. Today, we had neighbors over helping us fix our front entrance and the day turned into a community assisted day of heavy work and heavy machinery for me.

We recently fenced off an area of the yard for Bo and Pookie. The problem is, it is a dirt area and they get all muddy. Mizuka and I decided to make half of it grass and half of it gravel. I asked on DogReader about whether to use wood chips or gravel and I got good advice that I should use pea gravel. We went to the hardware store and bought some gravel. It was very heavy and expensive... (relatively speaking)

I got my wheel barrel and shovel out and was preparing to lay the gravel and the neighbors laughed at me. They said that I definitely didn't have enough gravel and that it would be too expensive to cover the whole area with enough of the pea gravel. They recommended that we get some cement gravel and lay it down first. It sounded liked a good idea.

One of the guys jumped into a truck and came back with a few tons of gravel. He looked at the fenced area and went and got another few tons. Sitting in our front yard was about 4 cubic meters of gravel, a wheel barrel and a shovel. I remember reading about how French farmers protest against the government by dumping tons of manure at the front gates of government buildings.  It's the battle between those equipped with heavy machinery and those who are not.

As I started loading up wheel barrel after wheel barrel, images of forced labor flashed through my mine. "Put your back into it!" As I moved wheel barrel after wheel barrel from the front yard into the fenced area, the neighbors who were working on my front entrance watched me with pity.

"Do you know how to work a excavator?"

"Umm... No..."

"OK... wait a sec. We'll get someone to bring one over. He'll help you load up the wheel barrel."

Soon the beautiful excavator arrived and I was promoted from shoveler/barreler to barreler with excavator assistance.

After several hours of barreling, finally I had moved several tons of gravel about 20 meters and spread it out a bit.

"You're going to need to flatten it out a bit. Have you ever used a forward plate compactor?"

"Umm... No..."

"OK.. wait a sec."

Soon a forward plate compactor showed up.

"Here's the choke, here's the throttle. Wet the gravel a bit and use the compactor to flatten it down and even it out."

"Umm... OK..."

Soon, I found myself behind a roaring plate compactor. Lucky for me, I had my new Sensaphonic custom molded ER 9 ear plugs. I could keep my ears from being blown out and still hear what people were saying.

Anyway, I'm quite tired in a pretty healthy sort of way, but unfortunately, I'm too tired to blog. So instead of something political, all you get is this silly diary post. ;-)




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