I spent the past week building a temporary shelter for the animals (temporary because I’d like to bu
I spent the past week building a temporary shelter for the animals (temporary because I’d like to build something nicer some day, with wood and tile, in their winter pasture when I’m done fencing it, but for this winter some metal poles and a tarp will do). It took longer than expected because of how horribly rocky the spot I chose was. I didn’t really have a choice because the non-rocky parts of the pasture are either too slopey, or uphill and not sheltered from the wind, or completely downhill where all the water gathers when it rains. So I had to resign myself to drilling through rock, and borrowed the mason’s iron rod and giant sledgehammer, which feels as heavy as me and is nearly as tall. The guy swirls it around like it’s a badminton racquet but to me it feels less like a hammer and more like someone attached a small barrel full of lead to a tree trunk.I had a friend over to help me, but she’s even smaller than me so she mostly helped by making me feel stronger by comparison. It took us 3 days to dig the 18 holes for the shelter’s fixings; they have to be buried 60cm in the ground, and we progressed millimetre by millimetre by driving the iron rod through solid rock—until we broke it.I still can’t believe the thick iron bar broke (and so did all the rocks, eventually!) while the 100% wood sledgehammer was completely fine. Wood is a mystery.We thought drilling holes through rocks was the worst, then agreed that the worst was actually the next step, carrying the 18 heavy metal poles (one at a time) all the way from the barn (about 1km, but the slope is steep)—and we didn’t realise until we were done that a) I don’t have a cordless drill so we had to carry them all the way back uphill to my house to assemble them, then carry them down again; b) even if I went to buy a cordless drill, they needed to be assembled on a completely flat surface so the arches don’t form a weird angle, and flat surfaces are nowhere to be found in the pasture. We had an exhausting day doing almost nothing but carrying poles and arches back and forth.We had help to set up the arches, though.The next step was also the worst (setting up a giant tarp over a tall structure when you’re small is difficult, but even moreso when the ground is too uneven for your stepladder to be stable so you feel like you’re constantly about to crash) and then the next one sucked too—all the screws were really long, and I can’t have 10cm of metal poking out at regular intervals inside the shelter because my very dumb bouncy baby llama would definitely impale herself on them, so we spent a whole afternoon sawing the ends of screws with hand saws (because no cordless electric saw). And there were many screws.Another hardship was being expected to do all the maths because I went to a scientific prépa and my friend, who studied literature, kept turning to me and asking trustingly “What length of rope do we need to go around an arch that’s 205cm tall at its apex?” or “If one side is 165cm and the other is 210cm, what length is the diagonal? Come on, that’s Pythagoras’ theorem, even I know that” (then YOU DO IT). She clearly expected immediate answers, and I kept disappointing her by sitting down and grabbing a twig to draw figures on the ground, feeling pressured and anguished. If only someone had told me in maths class that ten years down the line I would need the formula for the arc length of a parabolic segment to keep my llamas warm. -- source link
#crawling along