Random piece of advice

Never mix 160 pounds of quick drying concrete with your bare hands. Yeah. Live and learn.

Because I can never just leave it at that---and really, did you think I would, darling invisible friend?---this is what happened.

As I have said, roommate is doing the three-day walk for breast cancer and to raise money, she is holding one of her mammoth yard sales. This works out really nicely for a lot of people.

1) People who have crap--ahem, items they're ready to cull, but have an insufficient number for an individual sale have donated their...stuff, thus freeing themselves from the burden of having it in their homes.
2) People who have had yard sales have donated the detritus of unsold items, thus saving themselves the horror of the post-sale clean up process.
3) Other people [please, Jesus, many other people] will find treasures and usefulness at gosh darn rock bottom prices, thus enriching their lives without straining their wallets.

And this one actually means something:

4) The Susan G Komen Foundation will get a minimum of $2300 from the roommate to use in saving the lives of women [and men] the world over.

So. Good cause, right? Many people benefiting, right? Uh huh. I agree. I'd like to have my basement back, but...there we are. Hopefully, by Sunday, the mountain of [deep breath] stuff will be sold and living happily in new positions of use.

Or just clogging someone else's basement. Anyone else's basement.

Anyway, with the volume of clothing donated, the roommate devised the clever plan of displaying the clothes on hanger, danging from rope strung between boards held upright in buckets of...

Concrete.

She bought the buckets. She bought the boards. She bought the rope. And she bought the two 80-pound bags of quick drying concrete. I carried those bags from the car to the front porch of the house where they have languished these many months. Every now and then, roommate would say:

"We still need to do those buckets."

Yeah. So we did.

Not to say roommate wasn't enormously helpful. She was. But when the concrete clumped like cheap cake mix, what else could I do? I got into the bucket and mixed. By hand. Bare hands.

Well, I know that now. Stop yelling. And where were you yesterday, if you knew this????

So between the lime in mixture and the texture of the stuff, I have bloody stumps for fingertips. Yes. Yes. I feel so darn pretty!

Gah!!!!

The fingertips join the legions of casualties in my little war: two shovels, the loppers, an ax, and of course, my boob all have their company now. The capper on this whole thing? After all was done, roommate said to me, "You didn't have to do all of that."

Sigh.