Oh, good god, I am tired beyond belief. What a productive, but exhausting, weekend.

Jen and I mixed about 500 lbs. of concrete, moved and laid about 600 bricks, and generally wore ourselves right out. The back patio is complete save the north side planter; we were able to get everything down and cured by Sunday afternoon at 5. The new brick looks and feels really good. It went in a lot cleaner and smoother than the old brick would have, plus it looks better to have the older, more weathered brick on the planters.

We also had a really great time being with each other, from walking the neighborhood for breakfast to getting a dozen crabs Sunday night (yum!) She taught me the St. Mary’s County method of opening crabs and I dropped an eight-foot 2×4 on her knee. So it equaled out perfectly.

At some point in the next few days I’ll hopefully have some pictures of the in-progress work to post online; I’m waiting for my camera to show up in the mail so that I can post more quickly. Until then, I took shots with the 35-millimeter and we’ll wait until they get developed.

It’s an odd feeling to have no fingerprints: after handling the brick for three days straight, two without gloves, the pads of my fingertips were worn down to bare, smooth skin. Now they are wrinkled over with scar tissue, and the tactile feeling is not unlike that of dried Elmer’s glue on your thumb, the cheap false skin we used to make in third grade. It does feel righteous and good to have worn, pitted, rough skin on my hands again.