I would like to apologize for the inconsistency in blogging and I can’t promise that it will pick back up but I still want to let you know what is going on in my world. I have been working for three weeks now on a concrete crew. We pour the walls that create the foundation. To tell you the truth I didn’t even know that there were walls such as what I am now devoted to building but whatever. My job has been surprisingly diverse though which I never would have guessed. You know how at a new job everything is pretty strange until you do everything once, well the process here is pretty long so we have just now about gone through the whole process and I am becoming more aware of what is going on. I thought I would let you all know some of the very interesting jobs that I have been doing. The first one is being up in the sky. Now I don’t know how well you know me personally but even if you know one of my brothers well you know that we were not blessed with gracefulness or light footedness. This is tough when you are balancing. I had to take a weed sprayer and spray oil inside of the walls that we built, where the concrete would go. To do this I had to climb and walk on top of sixteen foot walls and then spray oil where I was about to walk. The next day we poured concrete into the walls. I was at the base of the walls when this was going on and the noise I heard was much like that of the ocean, just behind the walls in front of me. It was actually kind of cool, thinking about the incredible force that was just behind those walls. The final part of my job is earth. Now this could go for digging and all the other crummy jobs, but I can’t help but think of today when I got dumped on with wet cement that we were pouring from about eight feet above me. It hurt as cement is pretty much just rocks and stuff, not to mention that I was a mess and thats when it hit me… and next time I’ll try to avoid the falling cement.
Don’t take this the wrong way
So I’ve just been working away here in MT, but lest anyone think that it is spring here, oh you have no idea. In fact today is the first day I have taken my hoody off during work. Actually it has snowed about half of the days I have worked in the last two weeks. Yeah there is nothing springy about that. And I have found that while my job does include some specific jobs related to actual concrete, it is more like doing those nasty chores on saturdays, except you get paid. Sorry mom looks like your gonna have to outbid my other job for my services in the back yard. You see the other day I got stuck digging with only a hammer. I was supposed to dig three inches down, but given the fact that it wasn’t just hard dirt, no it was solid rock, that wasn’t as easy as you would think. But to top it off, I had to do all this under two levels of rebar. So I was breaking rock with the hammer and then scooping it out with my hands. For some reason we were short on tools, thus the primitive means, but I did that for a couple hours and I mean I guess there are worse jobs. But the head guy on the crew was working with another guy on something and they were looking for some spray paint, however being that we were short on tools we didn’t have any. So my boss approached well as politely as he has thus far and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you strike me as kind of a vandal, do you have any spray paint in your car” and thats when it hit me… I do look like a vandal, can’t you see it?
The real world
Well as I’m sure you have noticed I have been very sporadic in my blogging in the past couple of weeks. Well I can pretty much explain that, it’s a little thing known as the real world. I am now home and working a full time job and well it’s not all that its cracked up to be (and it’s not cracked up to be much). I am working on a concrete crew which is something that I have never done so not only is it fairly hard work, I am having to learn everything as I go. The only thing that I really have going for me right now is that it is still really cold here in MT and so at least its not hot, but give it a little while and I’ll be complaining about the heat, because despite popular belief it does get hot in MT, its just not humid. So I go to work at 7 in the morning and am back in the early afternoon, however I don’t get the rest of the night as free time though, because I am taking an online class this summer. It’s a philosophy class which I really am enjoying but its a lot of work and makes for a busy life. In fact I have been so busy that last friday night I went to sleep at 7:30. Thats early! At school the only time I would go to sleep that early is if I was going to take a nap so I could stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning. So my life has changed drastically in the last week and thats when it hit me… when I get out of school my life is always going to be like this. 
This is a pic I found online on a guys post that I thought was pretty sweet; he also had some other cool pics that you should check out. His blog is at blog.ajg.net/.
A wild ride
Last week at this time I was embarking on a journey home, little did I know what the 1500+ miles that I was about to cover had in store for me. I had two final tests on thursday and then I packed up the car and drove to Kansas City. When I was about 15 miles outside of KC it began to absolutely just pour rain. I mean it was a torrential downpour. I was going to spend the night at Doug Reed’s house and so I called for directions. I got a little lost, you know country boy in the big city, you can’t blame me for that can you. The crazy thing is that by the time I got to their house, tornado sirens were going off and the place where I had been when I called for directions had already been hit with a tornado. Yeah pretty crazy. So I left the next day pretty early and was hoping to get into MT, hopefully all the way home, but at least into MT. I drove all day through the rain though which at first wasn’t bad but then it got pretty annoying. So if you know the route from KC to MT, you drive all the way up the west side of MO and Iowa and then you turn left and drive across South Dakota (yeah fun). Well it was still raining when I turned left, but then the wind picked up. And I mean it started out just kinda like windy but in not long at all it turned into gale force winds. My windshield wipers wouldn’t work because the wind was blowing so hard. I thought the wind was going to blow them off in fact so I turned them off, mind you it was still raining. But to my amazement the wind was blowing so hard that it was peeling the rain right off of the windshield so I didn’t need the wipers. Well the eventually I found myself driving through a blizzard on ice covered roads. Finally I reached Wall (home of The Wall Drug) which was also where the interstate was closed as there were 8 foot drifts of snow under the overpasses. I got the third to last hotel room in the town and had to just chill there the rest of the day. It had snowed four feet in Rapid CIty. I’ll have you know that in MO the tulips had already bloomed but I drove right back into winter. The next day I finished the drive home in fairly uneventful fashion. I really couldn’t believe how much bad whether I had hit on the way home and thats when it hit me… I am glad that I don’t have to drive home for Christmas break, cuz that could really get ugly.
