Picture entry holy crap pictures wow cool

Boy do I know how to sell something or what? I bet you’re stoked now. Okay there’s a real entry after the pictures too but I figured, since I blew y’all off for such a long time (and so frequently) that I’d repay the terrible emotional trauma I’ve caused you by making you the FIRST to see these delightful pictures.

Warning: Avoid injury or death by not pissing the Bobcat off or it will kick your fucking ass.

Here’s an example of some of the work we’re doing with our huge contract on a project called Lakestone. Yeah, I rock. Pun intended.

More work done by yours truly. The dude in the background is one of the people I work with. As you can see, it is hot, dry, and desert-tastic. I forgot my water at home one day and I had to drink the water that the tanker truck poured into a giant barrel. Yeah. It was full of dead bugs… yeah.

Well, I didn’t put this rock up, but I did do all the joints in between the rocks. Not surprisingly, it’s perfect.

This is just a view from Lakestone that I thought was too gorgeous not to share with everyone. It’s immeasurably better in person, too.

Okay, when I took this picture I wasn’t sober at all but don’t you think that cloud looks like General Grievous going “Oh no you DI’N’T!”?

See?

So, what’s been happening? Well of course I have my little slice of heaven (cough, cough) that I’m renting right now. The dude from work lives like one block away which is good and bad for reasons I’ll get to later in the entry.

Let’s see, there’s been so much it’s a bit of an overwhelming task to detail it all. There was my brother’s wedding, which was totally awesome. A few people said it was the best wedding they had ever been to. It was a perfectly sunny day (it was a semi-outdoors wedding) and the food was awesome. Salmon and lobster and roast beef and lots of those little potatoes and various veggies and greek salad and of course cake and cheesecake and chocolate pudding and oh god it was good. Oh yeah and did I mention free booze? Heh. So yeah lots of tanked MILFs hitting on me, good times! No but seriously it was a blast, everyone had lots of fun.

Before the wedding we were doing landscaping at his house to prepare for the open house he was having post-wedding. That was a ridiculous amount of work. We used the Bobcat to move several dumptruck-loads of topsoil around, plus we planted, I dunno, 70 plants and shrubs? Plus we planted 6 or 7 trees. Big trees. Trees so big that between my brother (who outweighs me by over 100 pounds) and I, we could just barely move. Plus we laid out something like 9 pallets of sod. For those of you who don’t know that is a freaking shitload of grass holy fuck. I think I racked up like over 90 hours in 8 days. Also, since it was outdoors and about 35 degrees every single day, I caught up on my tanning. My torso and my legs are now two completely different colors. Yaaaaay…

After the landscaping and the wedding it was back to Lakestone to finish that off. We got the main stuff pounded out in about three days because we’re hardcore.

After that, my coworker and I had the delightful job of scrubbing iron oxide (known colloquially as “that fucking black shit”) off of a bunch of rock inside some dude’s house. Allow me to backtrack a bit so that you can understand why I want to take a sledge to that house.

First of all, there are two types of stone veneer (veneer being a small, flat slab that you generally place on vertical surfaces) – manufactured and natural. I’m guessing I don’t have to explain the difference between the two but I will anyway in case somebody is like, drunk and reading this or something. Manufactured stone is designed to look like the natural thing but always falls short. It’s concrete shaped into a mould and covered with a finish to give it a stone appearance. It’s also cheaper than the real thing.

So this dude wants to have real Basalt on his house. Thing is, at the time, Basalt didn’t come in veneer, it came in big fuckin’ chunks that weigh about 40 pounds each. Cha-ching! So the homeowner opted for the manufactured Basalt instead. He wanted his rock to be black and that’s what Basalt is. Unfortunately, after we put in all the manufactured basalt, he was like, “This isn’t black enough for me.” So we took a sample piece and sealed it to darken it and he was like “Oh yeah that’s not bad let’s do that.” So we sealed the entire house’s rock (this house has about 5 or 6x more rock than the average house has) and he decided it still wasn’t dark enough. So we stripped the sealant off… this is a challenge for a few reasons.

First of all, the sealant we used was top-notch stuff. We applied hydrochloric acid directly to the stone and the sealant made it bead right off. Didn’t do nothin’.

Second of all, if we apply a treatment too strong, it can eat through the outer surface of the manufactured stone and leave it looking like a hunk of concrete, i.e. terrible.

So what we did was we used a giant paint brush and a scrub brush, and we slathered the whole house in a highly caustic lacquer thinner and then scrubbed every rock and joint with acetone. Did I mention we did this during winter when it was -25 degrees? Not counting windchill? And that we would have to do the treatment (lacquer thinner and acetone) about five times and it took two weeks?

So we finally get the sealant off as best as we can, and then we paint the rock black with a mixture of iron oxide and water. Well the dude checks it out and says it’s TOO BLACK. DAAAHH YA FUCKER. So we powerwashed the outside to get it back to what it was in the first place (or at least mostly, some parts are still black and it just wont’ come out) but we have to do the interior by hand because everything inside is done — the walls are drywalled and painted and the hardwood floors are in. So we had to scrub the rock with towels and buckets of water, which was basically the worst job ever. Well actually we discussed this and it wasn’t but it was top five which is certainly worth mentioning.

Anyway, so we mostly finished that and then I had to grout the tile in the house which was okay except it gave me a blister… sorta. See, from my work last summer my hands are tough. Really tough. I never get blisters from anything anymore. Problem is, because my calluses are so thick, that when I DID get a blister, the whole damn callus separated from my skin. Basically my hand looks like death. Also, between the black scrubbing and the black-dyed grout, the blister got a bunch of black dye inside it and so I have this big black deathly-looking wound on my hand and it’s pretty nasty. Happydance!

And uh yeah, that brings me to here I guess! I have other stuff to talk about but I’m not in the mood. I’m listening to Billy Idol and I’m just rockin’ out too much to talk about negative stuff. Ciao bella!