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Concrete Herring! or What Color is Your Herring?

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This weeks farming update from Ben

My schedule has been a little crazy lately. Next week will be better.  🙂

I hear there are places in the country where the weather on the evening news doesn’t take ten minutes. I don’t need the full ten minutes, I just want to know the 12-48 hour forecast, and the 7 or 10 day forecast, Which I know is just a guideline. Especially this time of year, when the forecast has some pretty drastic changes coming.

No, the corn still isn’t out and I don’t want to talk about it. The grain elevators are closed on the weekends now, because 99.8% of the harvest is complete. So I don’t expect anything this weekend unless they finish everything at their place and they just come in and fill up the trucks on Sunday. 

I wrote a long story about the thermostat in my shop and I threw all that away and tried to make this a shorter story. A red herring was involved and suffice it to say human error played a part. Because of course it did.  

I use a wifi thermostat so I can monitor it from the house. It worked last year. This year, it worked while I’m out there, but it didn’t work when I came to the house. 

One day it died completely so I bought a new one.  Installing that and I blew a fuse up in the heater itself. Another trip to town for an ‘E’ fuse. An E fuse? Never heard of an E fuse. Oh, it’s a ‘3’ not an ‘E’. Thank goodness I figured that out on my own and didn’t say that to the guy at the auto parts store. Then of course there was a new app and all of that rigamarole. And that night in the house and it wouldn’t connect again. 

The day we poured the concrete, including the slab outside the front door, I used a side door, and a different light switch. Turns out, the outlet I have the heater plugged in to is tied into the 3 way switch for the lights. And I hooked that up myself, this wasn’t the electricians fault. Other than they didn’t know I wanted an outlet for the heater, which is why I did it myself. But how come it worked last year?? Because the heater was plugged into a wall outlet and because the electricians weren’t here until March, and I didn’t get the heater outlet installed until April.  So now, when I come into the shop and turn the lights on, the thermostat works. When I leave and turn off the lights, the thermostat turns off. Well, don’t I feel like a dunce. How could I tell the thermostat was off once I left the shop?? I thought the problem was the wifi. Nope, that was the red herring. The problem was the thermostat wasn’t even ON.

I have it plugged into a regular outlet again and I can tell you, by the app, it’s 46 degree’s out there at 56% humidity. 

We did get the concrete done on Tuesday. Yay! Check that off the list! A big job, and I had the easy job in the tractor hauling the cement from the truck outside, to the pad inside. 

(Two reasons; the truck wouldn’t fit inside the shed, and I didn’t want him backing onto the existing concrete slab). When they poured the inside slab a couple years ago, they used a little “buggy” to haul the concrete. This was the same thing, only different.) The truck driver was great! Randy. 65 yrs old, been driving a concrete truck for 38 years. We joked before he got there, would he know we were amateurs? I told him right up front, feel to offer advice. He just picked up the bull float and got right in there helping. 

Took about 2 hours to get it all dumped and leveled. I was a little bit short of product and left a bit of a gap on one end of the walkway pad. I expect to finish that with 10 bags of concrete mix I picked up.  

About 6:00 PM I was able to start smoothing off the concrete with the hand trowels. (I Learned the difference between magnesium floats and steel floats. You use magnesium when you’re first leveling, and steel to do the final finish.) 

It was about 8PM when I was trying to finish the big slab and smooth around the drain. The concrete was getting too firm by that point and it was a little too late to be working it. All in all, it’s not bad for the first time for a bunch of newbies. It will look better when it gets some dirt on it to cover the imperfections.

I spread out tarps and covered the outside ones with straw. 

A few days later I pulled off the tarp and moved the dumpster over there. This right here was the original point of all this. 

I wonder how much snow will blow in here?
My brother using the bull float on the first piece.
Working on the big slab inside the shed.

Our son helped, my brother helped, Padawan’s girlfriend helped, (Padawan was at work) and Kelly helped. They all admitted this was harder work than they imagined.  And we all learned a lot. Next summer’s plan is to do another slab inside. My brother isn’t sure he’ll help again next summer. Son says he will find more younger helpers.

I’m just glad it’s done. I had a beer that night. I’ve been waiting to finish the concrete to have that beer. 

We thought for sure we’d have a dog footprints in it somewhere. Or Luna was gonna drop a ball into it. We locked them in the shop at one point.

Inside slab done. Won’t drive on it for a week yet, and will get it backfilled shortly.
You haven’t seen the chickens lately. Here’s the chickens eating some left overs.

I have a new appreciation for the people doing concrete work and making it look easy.

HAVE YOU STOPPED MISLEADING PEOPLE?

32 thoughts on “Concrete Herring! or What Color is Your Herring?”

  2. so the area where the six bags used ti finish the job will be a different color from the stuff off the truck? sorry about that. i have a thing about concrete that doesnt match. a company that raises your sunken sidewalk or garage apron should be able to ballpark the color so it doesnt stand out bt being white when the rest is gray or vice versa. like the dentist matching your tooth color. it apoears im the only one who cares…
    i only deceive people by telling them what i believe or want to believe . i find out later im wrong again. my herring is neon orange

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    1. Yes tim, you’re the only one concerned about the color difference. 🙂
      You know it does get lighter colored as it dries. It starts a dark gray out of the truck, and gets lighter. And once I get enough dirt and oil on it, it will all match close enough.

      Yesterday I cut the grooves in the concrete. Note to self: do this sooner next time. Man, that was hard work. There’s a reason they do it ASAP before the concrete has cured.
      I’ll take a picture in a few days and show you if the color matches.

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      1. i am always obsessed that the concrete business doesnt bother to match it if it was paint or stucco it would not be tolerated. concrete obviously has a formula that determines the color and it should be possible. my best friend growing was a stucco guy and his dad was a stucco guy who learned the trade in the 40’s and 50’s. when a job called for a match to the salmon colored stucco he tried different measures of the pink color additive to no avail until he remembered the color powder was always measured in copenhagen snoose cans . that made it match perfectly

        concrete is white or gray or brown depending on the ingredients . maybe i should figure out how to make art using different colors of conceter in the same project. abstract expressionist concrete work

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    1. As someone living in similar circumstances, all I can say is sometimes things need to be easier. Instead of fighting Lou’s desire to use power tools that might injure him, I hid them. The power saw is in my cedar chest awaiting a new home. The honesty and the fight just is not worth the risk of injury. He forgot about them once he could not see them.

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    2. When my father was struggling with Alzheimer’s, he still had the wherewithal to drive to his bridge club, which he really loved and seemed to keep him calm. But late one afternoon after hed gone to Bridge club my mom got a call from a motel in Rolla, Missouri, which is about two hours from my folks house saying that my dad had pulled in thinking it was a gas station and had given the hotel clerk his wallet to take care of the gas. Apparently he wanted to drive to Arizona to see his good friend John. Unfortunately, John had passed away a couple of years earlier, and my father had forgotten that. After that, we took my dad‘s car keys to the hardware store and had them make a copy that was very, very similar, but not quite. So you could put it into the ignition but it wouldn’t turn. After that, three or four times, my dad went out to go someplace in the car and came back in saying “something‘s wrong with the car – we need to get it looked at” and then within a few minutes would forget that he had been going someplace. After this happened three or four times he never went out to the car again. Thank goodness.

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      1. And this led to another big case of my misleading someone. Because my dad‘s car was in Rolla, the plan had been for my mom to drive out and for my dad to “follow her home“ in his car. I thought this was a terrible idea. If he thought the motel was a gas station and he’s willing to hand over his wallet, what if he gets in an accident and kills himself or someone else. I told my sister that she or my brother-in-law David needed to go out with my mom so that someone else could drive my dad‘s car back. There was much resistance. I was in Minnesota at this time. I called my sister and I said how would you feel if he drives and he say goes the wrong way on a ramp and kills himself or kills someone else? And she said that’s not gonna happen. I said well here’s the deal. If you guys don’t go out there and have someone else drive his car back I said I’m going to call the Missouri State Highway Patrol and turn in his license plate number so that he will be stopped and lose his license. This was a completely bogus claim. I didn’t know my dad‘s license and I doubt the Missouri State Highway Patrol would’ve given a wit if I had called them. But it worked on my sister so she went out and drove my dad‘s car back.

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  5. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    All these years I have been posing as a psychotherapist, now retired, with responsibilities and strong opinions. But no. I am really a spy working for the CONTROL agency. I specialize in sniffing out criminals, but I cannot tell you what kind of criminals. But here are hints: They tend to be orange, with strange bruising, fuzzy hair, poor impulse control, and portly bodies. Once I find one of these criminals I expose them anonymously, posing as a Baboon Crime Fighter.

    So now you know the real story. I am so sorry I have misrepresented myself all these years.

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  6. I had a really goofy 14 year old male client who liked to tease me and who I liked to tease. I convinced him once that the photocopy machine had little people inside it to push the paper out. He believed me at first since I was a “Doctor” and then realized I was teasing him.

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  7. I told students different stories about how I got the name Clyde. My son and daughter played along with it when I had them in class. When I told them the truth, it was too simple for them to believe after all my big lies.

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  8. I just checked my social security account to see what my new monthly benefit will be in January. Due to a huge increase in my Medicare deduction, my monthly benefit check will actually be $269 LESS in 2026 than it is this year. I am not misleading you.

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      2. Just in my SS account online. I had to go into my ‘Messages’ to see the document. It breaks out the 2.8% increase, then each Medicare and tax deduction. After further investigation, it is due to an unusual increase in my income for 2024. (Timber sale, then sale of our woods.)

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  10. A few years ago, when I had the idea that I’d written all the songs that were in me, I turned my hand to a series of “mysteries for young teens”, entitled, “Ramada Grandi, Michigan City’s Youngest Detective” I eventually went back to songs, but they haven’t improved.

    In the mystery series, there was an old coot who constantly gave wrong leads. His name was Red Herringa, kind of Dutch, don’t you agree?

    As for songs, my Advent blog has just started: From the King to the Kings. It’s at WordPress. Runs from Today to January 5, a song every day. http://www.adventinsong.wordpress.com Check it out, and if you can bear it, subscribe.

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