Existentialist buildings

This contains the following sentence:

"In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterised by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world." 

It may be stretching things a bit - but the sentiments expressed in this quote do go someway towards summarising our bewilderment in the face of trying to build a lean-to for the goats.  Nothing is ever as simple as the often complicated 'how to' articles articulate.

It was thus that after a not inconsiderable number of minutes debate on how to forward this project, some days ago, we decided "Oh buggerit, lets just fill these holes with concrete".

Regular readers will know that we checked the weather forecast to be sure that if the conditions were not ideal for the laying of concrete, they would at least be acceptable.  The coldest snap for twenty years then ensued - not good for new concrete.

There was then, yesterday, the first of what I suspect will be many 'moments of truths'.  The unveiling of the concrete.  Amazingly, it has set hard as rock.  The Gods are with us.

We then hastily progressed towards our next moment of truth.  Have the holes been sunk and filled in the right place?  Many of you will suspect that there is something amiss about the order of events here, but suffice to say the order is a result of the disorder of the inconsiderable number of minutes debate on how to proceed.  It is a fact that Jussi and I find it easier to identify faults in the others' plans than to see the merits, which results in a sort of lowest-common-denominator-progress , in this case "fill holes with concrete".

But so far it looks as though the absurdist gods are benign, with a twitch of tweeking.  (Absurdism may be atheistic - but I can't be bothered to find out and, anyway, I don't really care.  This isn't a philosophy class).

We are now building a corner form into which the concrete will be poured, for the lowest corner.  The main aim of this is to conserve concrete, because moment of truth three revealed that the foundation trenches have been dug in slightly the wrong place (a consequence of the twitch of tweeking), and have now had to be widened.

The building of this form is inhibited by extreme meanness. Early settlers in the Americas built excellent homes from the plentiful supply of good timber they found around them.  But if they bent a nail they would painstakingly extract it, straighten it, and try again.  Thus do we hunt down not just redundant nails from building projects past, but scrag ends of wood (and string and bags and and and) also.

Nutella is on special offer at Lidl at the moment.  Ailsa is loving it.

There endeth the philosophy lesson.