Dreaming of Sleep
Though that may sound like a lot, I don’t think it’s a matter of trying to do to much, because if that were the case, wouldn’t I be lying in bed trying to figure out the logistics of getting everything organized for the next event?
No, if I had enough to do in my life I most certainly wouldn’t have to spend quality sleeping time helping PBS’s reality show Colonial House. Not that there WAS any problem with the show to begin with. Hell, I only watched one or two episodes anyway…not enough to make up my mind one way or another really. I certainly wasn’t engaged enough to watch the whole series, but for some reason there I was in bed last night, not sleeping for hours on end, thing about how to fix this non-existent problem.
You see in this little pilgrim colony, between all the houses and cattle pens, wound a little dirt road. Mostly muddy from overuse and lack of proper run off, for some reason I got it into my mind last night that it needed to be repaired.
Surely there would be a gravel pit somewhere that could be put to use. Gravel would work nicely as it tends to drain well and if you just selected the larger stones the carts might not have too much difficulty getting around.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here…lets break it down all over again, shall we?
Now, first they would have to send out a gravel quarry search party. Optimum would be just going on day searches, though I guess if need be, they could go out overnight. You wouldn’t want to go too far out, as you’re going to have to find a way to carry all that gravel back somehow.
Once a suitable gravel pit was found, there would have to be a way to separate the larger chunks from the smaller pea gravel. I decided that the latter would be to difficult to get cart wheels over and that the bigger size would work best. It seemed obvious then that the best way to do this would be to sift out the smaller rocks using some sort of screen in a box frame. Of course at three in the morning I wasn’t sure if there would be access to screens with the proper large to small gravel sifting capabilities required for this project. It seemed most likely that there wouldn’t be any access to chicken wire or its kin, so the sifter would have to be made up using rope in some sort of adjustable weave pattern. Once the proper hole size was established, it would be relatively simple to separate out and pile up the different sizes.
After a few days of sifting I would think you’d have a sizable pile of stones to choose from but of course, here is where it started to get tricky. If it wasn’t to far a trip, perhaps some sort of backpacks could be fashioned out of old cloth and carried from the quarry over a series of days. The other, and more realistic, option, I decided was to use the ox and cart for an afternoon and simply make one big trip.
For a while I worried about whether or not the ox would be able to pull such a weight over what would assuredly be rough terrain, but I just decided that I wasn’t even sure that they even HAD an ox and that maybe it would be best if I just left that decision to another day when I could look it up and see what their particular situation was.
One thing for sure, it didn’t matter that the show had ended over a year ago. It also didn’t matter that of all the things that the people most likely worried about while being on that show, issues like survival for instance – that somehow separating large and small gravel was most likely not even in the top ten. It didn’t matter that I only saw a couple of episodes and that for all I knew they later paved the whole fucking town in asphalt and put in a Starbucks and a strip mall in the season finale. It didn’t matter that there is a war on or an election coming up or that Sweeties birthday is just a few days away and there’s planning left to do.
No…I lay in bed, starring up at the ceiling outlining the separating of gravel pit chaff, to unnecessarily pave a road that most likely doesn’t even exist anymore. Thank god I can now take that off of my list of things to do.
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