Day 20: Diggin' away at the salt mine.

I'm a couple of days behind on blogging. I'm not sure why, but I am. It is a discipline to do this everyday, and I guess I just didn't have it in me for a couple of days. Now that I have to catch up I've learned my lesson and will just do it daily.

So it was back to the salt mines. Yes, that is salt on my shirt. I work really hard and sweat just a bit. Even though there have been days just as hot and I've worked just as hard on some of them, I was excreting extra special today. I went through two two liter bottles of water while I was a diggin' away.

So Shelby left. She had been working on what will now be referred to as the Shelby Dam because she got heat stroke working on it. She was down for three days, and then she had light duty for a few more. But, to her credit or not, she went back out and worked on the dam. Shelby was an amazing 20 something Canadian who is traveling a bunch this summer before she goes home. She brightened up the room with her kindness and stories.

Okay, so now I'm working on the Shelby Dam. I had to dig into a berm so that the dam can go into it. You can see the front where Shelby started, but I decided to work from the top down. It just seemed easier to me to throw the dirt on the other side rather than the side where we will work. So I dug and dug and dug; and I moved some rocks that were in the berm. I had to use an adze and a shovel equally because there are so many rocks. So it was a pull, pile, and toss method.
You can see by comparing the shovel and the adze to the massive stones how tough the work can be. But it really is so much fun just to move dirt. And I have like to dig. I can think of so many times when I was a kid that I dug with great vigor and sometimes great reward. One time our neighbor, Ms. Marge, who was an older woman (a widow I think), had a problem with her drainage system. I cannot remember exactly what it was, but she needed some diggin' done.

Ms. Marge baked bread--cinnamon bread to be precise. And I know I loved it. I can still close my eyes and see it with too much melted butter to top off the sweetness. So I dug up her cesspool and she made me some bread. I don't remember how much but I definitely remember how good! A good trade.

So I've just about dug out the berm where the dam will live, but I have some more work to do. If you are thinking this looks like a fighting position, me too! I didn't think about it until I stepped back and took a picture. It reminds me of when I was in Iraq. We had to make fighting positions because every day and night you had to stand-to and stand-down because the enemy is most likely to attack then--only if he was an idiot because we did this every day at basically the same time. Plus, if there was a barrage or an attack of some kind you would rush to your positions, which defended the perimeter of your camp or protected you because they were also covered. So one day I filled in my best friend, Pat's, position because our frontal lobes weren't done cooking and we played stupid dangerous jokes on one another. How could I have known that an alarm was going to go off that day. Everybody grabs their gear and weapons and runs to their hole, and, because there was an alarm which meant exigent circumstances, you sometimes dive into your hole. I dove in mine, and Weigel, my TC and battle buddy, was already there. Pat's was one position over to my right. I don't remember who we was holed up with. Everybody but Pat knew what I did; his battle buddy knew and went into another position. All's we heard was a big thud, and a loud "What the fuck!?", knowing that Pat dove into his now covered fighting position. We were all laughing so hard that I'm glad nobody was really attacking our camp. Pat ran and jumped in our hole, which wasn't made for three.

Soldiers do stupid things to one another. Maybe that is why we are so tight? Pat rolled over a mine of some kind. He left the army slightly disabled.

This is peanut hay. It goes to the goats. We glean from it the good nuts so that we have a snack. They are not always the good nuts, but it is better than no nuts. We feel special when we get a good batch. But this last batch has a bunch of empty shells. Disappointing, for sure. I think the goats are chuckling, though, since we usually take the good ones from them.