They Should Pay Me

So when I'm beading something or knitting something, people talk about "working" on it, but really work is that thing that you have to be paid to do, but beading, knitting, spinning, dyeing - that's stuff I do for free.

This home improvements stuff though, it's even worse than work. Worse than aerobics (it makes me even more out of breath, even sweatier).

I stayed home from work for a number of boring reasons, and also to get some work done on the floor. It all started at 6:27 with a phonecall notifying me of the imminent delivery of Stuff With Which To Do Work (but I didn't even get to it today).

Understand, I live on a rather small street.

 This huge truck was like half the length of the block. When I saw it my heart sunk, because there was no ways they'd be able to deliver my heavy things to the back of the house, just next to the door of the room of the floor that in a very short time I will not want to mention because it's giving me fits, but just hang on a second.

 He had a little (and when I say "little", that's only relative to the hugeness of the truck) forklift which barely made it up my driveway (one massive tire had to go all over the neighbour's plants which honestly she doesn't pay much attention to anyway) but the very nice man was able to deliver the very heavy things (and mine was by far the smallest pile on the Very Large Truck) to within a few feet of the door.

 Oh that I had made enough progress to un-plastic the stack.

It's the tar on the floor, see. It doesn't look all that bad in this picture, but it is.

The flash disguises the badness, but there, on the upper right? That thick blackness? That's the tar that has to come off.

This part of the floor is pretty good, considering. I'm happy to call it enough where fifty percent of the concrete is bare.

Sadly, I have a ways to go and all I want to do is drink water and sleep.

There's this short, sturdy blade on a very unwieldy and heavy stick which I'm supposed to use to scrape the tar off the concrete. It's slightly tacky when you walk on it, but it's nothing like nailpolish which hasn't yet set which you can scrape off without too much trouble, or even nailpolish that is completely dry that you can chip off if it's a bit old.

Nothing like that at all.

The tar is hard enough and dense enough and I'm not strong enough (except for brief frenzied moments, impossible to sustain) to get a purchase with the blade tool to scrape it. Occasionally I happen upon areas that are a bit drier and slightly brittle, or perhaps the concrete was smoother so it's not adhering all that strongly, but it looks to me as if much of my effort has served merely to burnish the tar that is firmly stuck to the concrete floor.

And I haven't even gotten to renting the tile saw.

On the plus side, I think I may not have to do much to smooth out the floor. There are a couple of puddle-making areas which I should be able to fill, but overall it may not require too much evening out. 

One can only hope.

What made the day even fuller, busier, harder was a hard deadline: submissions had to be postmarked by today, and the post office closed at six - I made it with perhaps eight minutes to spare, and that was including finishing a necklace:

As well as the instructions which had to be mailed with the sample, and also making this whole new sample:

And then horrors! Fallout from my New Year's computer disaster in which it turned out that Time Machine does not in fact back up everything.

The editable version of the instructions were lost, though I had a PDF and no, I do not have any magic utility whereby I can decompile a PDF file back to Appleworks (I know, I know, I should move beyond a product which hasn't been supported in years, and I guess when the the latest OS makes it unusable I'll have to, but for now it's familiar and I'm efficient) - all I had was copy (which luckily worked) and paste and the original step-by-step photos, so in addition to the scraping and sweating and finishing a sample and making a new sample, I also had to make new instructions (because the old ones had not sensibly kept up with the improvements I made to the design; I know, shocking), and all this in less than twelve hours.

And you wonder why all I want to do is sleep?

And there's more of the awful stuff and scary new stuff (I have never tiled a floor in my life. Once in art we made small mosaic things, but the teacher did the grouting) which I absolutely have to get done because I swore up and down that I would. 

Besides, the room is currently hideous and unusable.