Amidst the Sound of Jackhammers

You know, I'm going to coin a new phrase, meant to be used along the lines of, "Life is like a box of chocolates," only hopefully less inane. Mine runs like this:

You never know that your house's previous owners have filled the hollows of your retaining wall with cement until you begin to tear it down.

Life here is full of dust and madness as we attempt to tear down all our old walls and put up new, hopefully so that the hillside does not slide down and crush us all this winter. And once we started the demolition, we discovered that every space inside each block our apparently mortarless walls was filled with a solid column of concrete, with a nice little strand of rebar through the middle. Meaning that it was very strong, until it started to fail, and now it's just hellacious to break through. We've had to hire a couple of guys to come in with jackhammers to try and get the thing down. Meanwhile, I'm the pick-up-discarded-chunks-of-wall-and-cart-them-away guy, and it's never been more apparent that I'm a soft, flabby white teacher. I'm just on a break from that job now, and I had best get back.

Though our crisis is nowhere near on the level that so many others seem to be going through with family, health, job, and such issues, a prayer or two winged our way would not go amiss. I'll try to get some "before" pictures up so that the "after" pictures one day may have context.

Oh--and I have to grade in here, somewhere. Yeesh.

Back to hauling blocks!