I am an early wakeup call...

I sure do appreciate and have a heightened respect for the type of work pop used to do and for laborers everywhere. I don't know if I've mentioned this already, but my parents decided to do this little patio "expansion" type thing out in the front yard. (This is all backstory, but since I have the habit if jumping straight to the punchline w/o the meat, I'll lay it all out) It's kind of hard to explain, but basically, we're laying out concrete in this little design thing that Brandy(Jos' bro-in-law) created for mom. The concrete is gonna take up most of the space in our pretty barren front yard, so we don't have to put grass....or that much grass that pop will have to maintain. In fact, we might be laying stone around the concrete and just make it one of those all stone type front yards. Anyway, as it is, we started to lay out the frame and stuff early Saturday morning. We drew it out on the dirt, dug about 4" deep throughout the entire area and created "walls" with bendable plywood. We supported the walls with wooden stakes all throughout and floated rebar throughout the space. Rebar is basically used for concrete reinforcement, so that it won't crack if a lot of weight is sitting on top of it. Now had the depth of the hole been about a foot deep, then the rebar wouldn't be necessary. However, w/ projects like this it is important to have. Btw - the concrete they lay out for runways at the ariport are over 4 feet thick...that's a lot of frickin concrete! After the frame wsa completed, we had to fill the foundation of the hole with pea gravel...which helps the concrete settle somewhat and just helps w/ water runoff. 500 lbs of pea gravel was just enough to cover it all up. Now, it was time for the concrete. We had previously ordered 20 45lb bags of concrete and had it delivered to the house; that's a little more than 900 lbs, after you add the water to it. It ended up only filling LESS than 1/4 of the entire thing! That took a lot of time to do...and obviously we would be needing more concrete. So we ordered concrete from an industrial concrete delivery company, which came today...

THIS is where my story actually begins. The truck arrives at 6AM. My parents were convinced that it would only take 12 minutes to unload 3 CUBIC YARDS of concrete(Basically you get 4 minutes to unload per cubic hard of concrete before they start charging a standing time of $2/min). Apparently, they had the idea that the tubes from the truck could reach the project area...unfortunately, they were mistaken. It was too far in the street to reach, plus, the fence and the tree in front of the house were blocking any possiblity of laying the tubes straight to it's final destination. One would think that the truck could've just driven onto the driveway and worked from there...nope. Those trucks are so heavy that they'll completely crack your entire driveway...unless your driveway is an airport runway. So the only option was to wheelbarrow lil loads of concrete from the truck, drop it into the patio and even it out w/ shovels. It took pop, my uncle Manding, the concrete deliverey dude(he was really nice and helped us out...A LOT) and myself a little over an hour to finish pouring all the conrete. It truly was pretty backbreaking work man. Shoveling all that concrete...I would have to say that we must've poured about 1500-2000 lbs...ish is quite heavy. I definitely got in all the workout I need for a while. It took about another 30 or so minutes to smooth it all out and to clean everything up. All in all, we paid an extra $150 on top of the concrete, but the project is finally done!!! So here I am at work...a little late..but alive and feeling a little accomplished. I should've taken before/after pics, but oh well...I'll post some when it's all done. I tip my hat off to all conrete layerouters out there...