mix mortar on the driveway

On Halloween night I drew some new pictures.

I've been feeling anxious about a lot of things, and one of them is how am I supposed to make a living just being a substitute teacher? So, since people think I should make money using my talent, I started drawing again. It is easy for people to say that, but less easy for me to do that. Next tonight I was making a clockwork owl but I got distracted.

J. brought me a headband this morning and a bar of shampoo soap that made my hair smell delicious but feel a little like carpet, but that could be since it dried all wavy and I hate brushing it at his house since he has these little wirey vented brushes for masculine hairdos and I can just hear all my hairs snapping half off. Then I also put on his cologne which is girly enough for me so I think I smell amazing. I needed a shower because this morning when I got up, there was a giant puddle of water on the garage roof and I swept it all off because I didn't want the new cement paint to bubble up if the water seeped underneath before it could cure. Last week he just kept adding more coats, like 5 gallons worth, onto the garage roof in his back yard. It is beautiful but I'm pretty sure the paint can said do not get it wet soon after painting.

Today when I picked up boys they told me over half their classmates were out with the flu. So, one of them is feeling really gross and shrieky and whiney and the other is afraid to sleep in the same room and get whatever his brother has. Which, frankly I'm not sure. He ate a goodly helping of Mac N Cheese because that was the only thing I fixed that sounded good to him. I am sure he had some kind of fruit snack. If he doesn't puke I'll be surprised though, because that one just pukes for any old reason. It is almost guaranteed to happen on my bed because instead of just using the bucket I keep by his bed (because seriously, he just pukes, no good reason!) he will lurch out of his bed, bypass the handy dandy bathroom in the hallway (Because That Would Be Too Easy) and stumble to my room to inform me he feels eerrrrpppp... Orange... as will my sheets.

Curiously there are no Substitute Teacher assignments available.

I tried to make mortar in my ongoing quest to learn how to do all types of home repair. I did this yesterday. In the morning we sat together on the freezing sidewalk and caulked cracks in the cinder-block garage wall with caulk-gun mortar. My buttocks were actually stinging cold. It seemed to me that making a bunch of mortar and applying it with a putty knife thingy would be less expensive for the larger areas where the mortar has fallen out broken from between the blocks.

J. went to his speech class and then to a prostate cancer survivors support group last night. He came back and said they were all older than him. The Dr./Speaker didn't show up. One Snowbird was headed to Texas so that guy and another guy went for a beer. J. thinks next month he'll bring a cooler and they can all sit around in the Cancer Center Lobby and enjoy a cold one. Which reminds me, we went to see 50/50 last week because we were too late to see MoneyBall. 50/50 was really emotional for me, the hospital scene at the end choked me up. J. said it was supposed to be funny. My favorite part was when he was talking to the ex-girlfriend about how he hated her so much. Loved it.

While he was gone I finished wood fillering-in the rotted spot on the back garage door and sanding and re-painting those spots with the white primer. I stood around in the backyard and watched a squirrel up in the walnut tree eating something that took him forever to chew up. I tried to sweet-talk the neighbor's dogs, but they just bark at me. They forget to bark if I stay out there long enough but then later they act all surprised again and bark even more. I wondered why the neighbors would spend a zillion dollars on one of those gigantic rubbermaid tool hut thingies and then half-ass it together so it falls all apart and gets all dirty. Then later the neighbor came home and told me she felt like a dummy spending howevermany dollars on the tool hut thing but didn't have a $2 box cutter to slice up the gigantic cardboard boxes the thing was wrapped in. I asked if she would like to borrow one, but she felt like she had one in her toolbox. Then nothing else happened. She didn't cut up the boxes for the garbage even though it was garbage night, and she didn't put the obscenely expensive tool hut back together again.

I sat on the cold floor of the garage, looked at the bag of mortar. Gritty stuff to mix with water for tuckpoint repair of old broken mortar between cinderblocks or bricks. 60 lbs.of it to mix with one gallon of water. And I started thinking about how to make a smaller batch. So, I texted my friend and my sister with the ratio. Big bag of mix. Gallon of water. 60 lbs to one gallon is like a half lb. to one ounce. Except, it really doesn't work that way and that's what I learned yesterday.

How I learned it was, after J. got back from the Cancer Center, he and I raked up the leaves to put in the garbage cans. Then we went to our friend Red's gigantic super-deluxe garage because they are building a Surprise Attack Duck Blind on a Boat. This thing is made of metal frames and a spring loaded catch system, powered by bunji-cord (I can't spell bunji-cord so it looks right but my spell check expects me to change it to Bunni-cord. Because a Bunni-cord actually exists?) Anyway once it is finished it will be swathed in a tent of camo fabric. When you pull the handle on the frame, the two catches come out, and the cords pull the frame and fabric back to reveal the hunters, who then shoot the unsuspecting ducks. Mostly I watched and ate olives. I wanted to do stuff but I refrained. I know I would have been faster at taping the foam tubing on the frames, but no, I held myself back. We would be done way faster if I just did it myself, but then they would have missed out on all that male bonding time and I wouldn't have gotten to watch all those episodes of Outdoor TV and learn about how to mix cement.

It goes like this. You pour out a large amount in the driveway. (Well that's the first place I went wrong.) Secondly you add the water, and stir it. Red has never before heard of anyone measuring during this process. You must use a flat ended shovel. (I was just using some measuring cups and a putty knife.) Once it is soupy and a little wet, you throw in a little of the cement you held back for that reason, and stir it up, and it gets its act together and becomes workable cement. Same goes for mortar. I made sure. I cleared that up. I'm making mortar. Can't I do it in small batches? No. Cement, mortar, different textures, same thing.
When I went out this morning and poked the places I patched up with my mortar, the stuff just fell out like sand. Fine. I think I can still do a smallish batch, but now I better understand the proportion.