I had a lovely surprise today. I heard scrabbling noises around my house, and when I went out to see what was going on, I found a worker preparing the cracks in the foundation so he could fill them in. He’ll have to let the filler harden, and then he’ll come back and paint the foundation with a sealer. The sealer is black, which I’m not sure I’ll like. If not, I can paint over it with a lighter color. Or I could wait until I got used to it.
But that’s an issue for another day. Today, I am delighted to see progress being made.
It’s funny how so often, one job depends upon another, sort of like a reverse of the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built.” The workers have rock to put around the house, but they can’t do that until the they put down the weed barrier, and they can’t put down the weed barrier until they build up the dirt around the house, and they can’t build up the dirt around the house until they seal the foundation, and they can’t seal the foundation until they fill in the cracks, and they can’t fill in the cracks until they dig out the dirt that’s around the foundation.
Luckily, I’m not the one having to do all this, and the person who is doing it doesn’t seem to mind the work.
Even luckier, the weather should hold for a few days until the filler has cured. It’s one of those projects that can’t be done in cold weather because the concrete filler would disintegrate, and all that work would go for naught.
[An interesting aside; interesting to me, anyway. Seeing the word “naught” made me wonder how it was related to the word naughty, since the two words don’t have much in common, and it turns out that “naughty” does come from “naught.” Apparently, in the fourteenth century, naughty referred to a person lacking in wealth, and over the years, came to mean someone lacking in morals. Does that mean back then that the poor were considered bad, perhaps poor because they were bad, as people so often surmise even today?]
But, neither naught or naughty have anything to do with the matter at hand, which is . . . workers (at least one, anyway) are here working!
***
What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?
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Bertram's Blog 
March 8, 2021 at 4:14 pm
I know what you mean about one house repair leading to another. When I moved into my husband’s house with him, I wanted to paint the window trim. We had to chop down a tree so we could remove the eaves troughs so we could repair the plaster so we could repaint the house, replace the eaves troughs and paint the window trim. It took us a couple of years. 😉
March 8, 2021 at 4:17 pm
Exactly! Normally, you’d think a job like that could be done in a short time, but two years seems about par for the course.
March 8, 2021 at 4:51 pm
To peint Eiffel Tower need an average of once every seven years. Need three years to complete. Four years after need to start again.
March 8, 2021 at 5:42 pm
Interesting. I never knew that.