so come out of your cave walking on your hands

Today involved way more manual labor than I am accustomed to, but it was accomplished mostly successfully (although I think I sunburned the scalp under the part in my hair - I usually put sunscreen there, but I forgot, and the part of the day in which I wore a hat apparently wasn't enough to save it). To make a long story short, we have a cave in our yard - it was the storm cellar / root cellar for the old house, and while the old house is destined to collapse, [censored] and I would like to save the cave. I have a lot of fond memories of it - it was a great place to sled from, since you could get some quick speed to hit the driveway with. I also liked just sitting on it back in the day; occasionally we would throw sticks down the chimney, which would hit a metal bucket below (which I may or may not have told [censored] was a witch).

So anyway, the cave is v. picturesque, but the mortar between the bricks is crumbling out and the inner walls are heaving with a century of moving earth. We couldn't do anything about the interior; the dome actually looks good inside, but the entrance could used shored up someday. However, we were able to mortar the entire outside. This involved three bags of mortar, two trips to the lumber yard in town, the use of an old and little-used cement mixer that we happen to have lying around, and a bunch of kneeling on a treacherous slope to slap mortar onto the cave. The end result looks pretty great, if [censored] and I do say so ourselves; the cave won't last forever, but hopefully this prolongs its life.

After the mortaring, we were totally hot and gross - we got super lucky since it was windy and sometimes cloudy, but it was still over 90 degrees, very humid, and completely miserable whenever the sun came out. I took a bit of a break then, but then I helped [censored] with his plans to build a new door for the cave - the old door rotted long ago, and vines were covering the remains, but we want to make a new door to keep animals out. We got about halfway there, although I wasn't as helpful with building as I was with mortaring - with mortaring I was able to spread a lot of mortar (and also get into the cement mixer with my baby hands to scrape it out), but with carpentry I was basically reduced to handing [censored] his pencil and tape measure over and over.

But we made great progress, so that's all lovely. We were rewarded for our efforts with takeout Mexican food from our favorite (aka only) Mexican restaurant in town - Mom and Dad went to pick it up, and Dad knew me well enough to get me a giant margarita to go. So, dinner was great, and then I spent the rest of the evening slowly recovering (and taking a shower, which was even more important).

And now I really need to sleep - goodnight!