White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Wow, I'm a bit tired today.   Had a bit of work to plow through yesterday at work, but I still consider it a vacation.  Mostly I spent my time waiting for queries against the poorly indexed tables to return a few simple nuggets of data.  Bleh.  Still, much easier than chasing the "Unstoppable Forces of Nature" about while trying to maintain the household!  After the awesome Mrs MDMHVONPA got home, I turned the Dinner Duty over to her and went outside to attack the job of putting up the retaining wall.  I need to get this done before the next rain.  The sides of the 'pit' are made of clay, but quite a bit of water is flowing into the pit and carrying the detritus from the patio with it.  Not good.  I did manage to get 40 of the blocks in place in the 2+ hours I was out there.  The bottom row is the hard part.  It has to be level and in line.  The line part can be frustrating because the string I use as a guide is not very cooperative.  That, and I can only really carry 2 blocks at a time from the driveway to the pit.  The sand seems quite capable of retaining water to boot so I end up with a lot of wet sand on my level.  All things considered though, things are going quite well.  Hopefully, I can use up all the blocks before this weekend.  We shall see how it goes.  I dread the final act where the wall will have to come together at the back side.  I know I will be off by an inch if I am not careful.  Sounds like I'll have to set up more string lines to keep that disaster from occurring.

We had a 7am staff meeting today at the Home Office.  I hate these things.  I would much prefer if they just sent out a memo.  No one is interested in speaking mostly because they are disgruntled that they had to get up so much earlier and then put in 8 hours on top of the 2 hour meeting.  Gak.