Dumb dominos, working weekend

On Friday after work we headed to our friends house for dinner. After we ate they brought out dominos. They said they would teach us how to play as the only thing I ever used dominos for was to build things that I would knock down shortly afterward. The game is simple enough but has some suprising strategy involved. I sucked at the game. Everyone else would immediately start planning out their “run”, matching like pieces. I just didn’t feel like doing that and instead made my decisions only when my turn came around. The object is to have the LEAST amount of points. Ali, with her analytical mind stomped everyone and I had a record setting poor performance, scoring more than double the points of the 3rd place player. I really sucked.

On Saturday and Sunday I spent the majority of the days helping my neighbor erect a 30′ by 40′ steel building. It looks like an airplane hangar. It is made of corrugated steel panels held together by bolts and nuts, lots and lots of them. The panels are put together to make arches and then each arch is hoisted into place and then bolted to the other panels. It was windy most of the weekend, causing problems, especially early on. When only 1 or 2 arches were up, they swayed in the wind in a manner that made me skeptical of this buildings capability to withstand 140 mph winds as advertised. However after we got a few more panels up the structure stiffened up and felt quite solid. He had a total of 8 or 9 people helping and we needed all of them. To attach the bolts was a two person operation. One on the inside of the building holding the nut while the other was outside tightening. My duties were outside the building mostly, turning in bolt after bolt.

My neighbor envisioned the job being done in a day. There were 20 arches that had to go up. However by 5 o’clock Saturday only 11 were up. That was as far as he went. I felt bad for him because he rented all this crap for the job and I knew how I was about projects. I would want to get it DONE. So even though most of his help that he had for Saturday was unavailable for Sunday, I told him I would come over again on Sunday to help. On Sunday we only had 4 people total so it was impossible to hoist the arches into place in one peice so he attempted to build the arch piece by piece which was extremely time consuming and frustrating. He conceded that it was going to get done this weekend. So we used the time to put all the remaining pieces together on the ground so when he did have enough help we could go back to lifting entire arches into place.

My neigbors son had his dog there on Saturday, a loveable female pit bull named “Vicious”, no lie. The weather, besides the wind was tolerable. being in the upper 70’s for most of the day. All my time on top of the steel, reflective building microwaved my face. I looked like I fell asleep at the beach for 8 hours. My fingers were raw from handling endless pieces of small hardware for 2 days. However it felt good to lend a hand, to bust your ass for no other reason than you know you would appreciate it if someone did the same for you. My neigbors 72 year old dad was there both days. He has a pace maker and a stint that was put in within the past year and he was out there busting ass as hard as anyone. It was something else. When I asked my neighbor about him he just said “He loves to work” I can only hope I am able to do the same if I make it to see my 72nd year. if I would be unable to work in some capacity to help make myself feel useful, my desire to stick around this planet would be next to nil.