Earlier last week my bro hit me with a bit of an invite,
"I'm gonna spread Ma and Pa's gravel out for them Saturday morning, wanna ride along?"
It wasn't really anything I had to think about, of course I did!
You see, my parents had three dump truck loads of gravel delivered to be spread out for their new parking pad, which is a great thing indeed as Dad's mobility is a bit on the challenged side post major stroke. So, having a nice level area to ingress and egress from the car was going to be super excellent.
I should have known though, that it was going to be an adventure.
Ma and Pa have this little bulldozer that my bro has labeled The Sh!tty Kitty. The Kitty, while a loyal machine, has some quirks and is a bit of a mental challenge to run thanks to some random hydraulic issues.
Bro though, he's a pro. He's a heavy equipment operator, so I knew he would have the gravel smoother than Lake Placid before too long.
I just didn't know I was going to be an unpaid day laborer.
(Okay, I did, it's just more fun for the storytelling to pretend that I didn't).
After a half hour family bovine fecal matter warm up session, Bro went out and fired up the cat. I will neither confirm nor deny that starting fluid was used, I don't want to slander the Kitty's reputation.
While the dozer was warming up, we procured the job supervisor's safety gear and helped him out to the porch. He may have had a physical setback, but Rambling Ron still excels at telling people what to do. I am pretty sure I not so quietly quit my unpaid day laborer job at least sixty-two times.
Supervisor ensconced, we got to work. While the bro did the initial gravel moving (after turning the air at my parent's a delightful shade of curse word blue due to some not functioning hydraulics and restoring his calm along with adding a copious amount of hydraulic fluid to the Kitty), I helped my mom move some brush and lit it on fire in their fire pit.
Once Bro got the gravel a bit lined out, Ma and I got the rakes and shovel out. All along the front of the porch I removed turf by hand that bro couldn't reach with the dozer blade. There's nothing I despise more than grass growing up through nice gravel.
It was then that I got fired for at least the tenth time for not having a proper grade on my raking. I laughed in the face of my supervisor and made a complaint to the HR manager:
She seemed pretty sympathetic to my cause.
In about two hours time we had the whole pad and future woodshed area all beautifully graveled. My brother is an artist with a blade, truly. He had the entire pad back bladed and slightly graded so that it was both flat and drained away from the house.
Mom and I had the edges of the cabin and porch equally nicely graveled, and both of my parents were all smiles with the results. Bro, Ma, and I put a final finish raking on the whole thing and we all stood back to admire our handiwork.
It had also drizzled the whole time, so all of us were drenched and my hair resembled a 1980's puppet. It was pretty fun.
A short time later, as I bit into the bacon wrapped meatloaf burger my parents had so graciously bought me for lunch, I pondered how awesome the project was. It's always a good thing to chip in a bit of labor on a project that helps make someone's life a bit better. I often wonder how much better the overall vibe of the world would be if people just concerned themselves with that kind of thing.
But of course that's just the musings of a twenty-two times fired unpaid day laborer, so what do I know...
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's incapable of putting a good grade on anything but probably capable of firing someone iPhone.