Tuesday, October 27, 2009 - Early Morning Delivery

Despite what I thought yesterday, today was a very busy day. Yes, it rained, of course, another half-inch or so. No work was done, of course, but it turned out to be delivery day instead with the first delivery surprisingly arriving at 6:45 in the morning, right as it started raining. I was startled by a knock on the door and a dump truck in the driveway hauling what the driver said was five tons of sand. I hadn't expected the delivery, but who am I to question things at this point. If somebody is ready to deliver, by God I will take it. Not quite sure it amounted to five tons, but looks can be deceiving. It was, however, enough to make me move my car to ensure it didn’t get blocked in. The driver apologized for showing up so early, but no one had told him it was a residential delivery…which got me to thinking. About three hours earlier. Minnie woke us with some low growls due to some noise outside. There was certainly a large truck outside the house, complete with a rumbling diesel engine and beeping reverse noises. Cara even asked me if I thought it was the delivery of concrete blocks which were scheduled for Monday. Why would anyone deliver that in the middle of the night, I thought. Could have just as easily been an ambulance, or a utility truck, or the street sweeper. But after giving it some thought about 12 hours later when I was a bit more cognizant of the world around me, I certainly feel it was the dump truck driver with the sand wondering if it would be out-of-line to wake the neighborhood with a quick delivery well before sunrise. The concrete blocks did eventually arrive later in the day, and it appears they put them any place they could. Looks like about 240 of them were delivered on pallets and placed into the giant hole in the backyard. I guess the rest of the backyard was too muddy, so they put the other 700 where we normally park our cars in the driveway. Nearly 1,000 blocks seems way too much, but for lining the walls of the excavated area along with building the unplanned retaining wall, maybe it’s right on the mark. We’ll find out whenever they get to the point of putting them in place. Anyway, at some point they removed a very large portion of our fence, including one of the posts, and absolutely destroyed any grass we had left in our yard. So the entire backyard is now one big mud pit. In fact, our driveway was one long stretch of mud as well; a nice calling card they left behind, like 940 concrete blocks wasn’t enough of a clue. So I spent my first hour home from work spraying off the driveway enough to give us room to park our cars and walk into the back of the house without tracking mud all over the place. I am starting to feel a little closed in now that we no longer have most of our yard at our disposal at this point. I can only imagine what will happen over the next several months once they start removing exterior walls and rendering us to two, maybe three fewer rooms in our house for the remainder of the remodel. The true test of patience has begun.