July 3

With Phillis and Danielle on the East Coast for the July 4th holiday, I headed out to Anza on Friday the 3rd. Just more backbreaking sanding of the 2X8s and 2X6s. It takes about 4 hours to do 2 sides of the steel so this weekend I completed the sanding on those sizes and started the painting. It gets pretty tough on your wrists after holding the rotary drill for that long. I used an oil-based Rustoleum specially made for highly rusted steel. When you sand off the rust on our steel, the newly bared surface shows no roughness or scaling so it looks pretty good but since we are using this steel for the supports and rails for the roof we decided it would be better to paint it.

The day was like last weekend – very hot and dry – near 100 and single digit humidity. The danger with these conditions is that you dehydrate very quickly and don’t realize it – your shirt never gets damp no matter how much you sweat. Once you get behind on your fluids its very hard to catch up. That’s what I ran into. We had instituted a schedule to prevent that: one pint of ice water or caffeine-free soda every 15 to 20 minutes, work at a slow pace, and keep your head shaded – I’m under a canopy, John wears a big brim hat with a neck cover. This day I worked a bit faster than normal plus I cut my water breaks to every 45 minutes or so without realizing it. By mid-afternoon I knew I was dehydrating so I drank extra and sat down for a half hour. I knew I was done for the day when I tried to work again and promptly banged my shin into the end of one of the steel beams hard enough that I had blood running into my socks. That was it for the day. I stopped the bleeding, washed it off, got in the van and started the AC while I drank another bottle of water. I started back home and grabbed my last bottle of water after only a couple of miles, still on the washboard road. When I finished that I realized I needed more but all I had was about 3 inches of ice and cold water in the cooler. Fortunately I had a coffee cup from the morning drive and started to scoop out the ice and water while I drove. By the time I got home 90 minutes later I felt a lot better but the cooler was empty! During the course of that day – only about 12 hours – I drank nearly 3 gallons (26 pounds) of fluid to stay hydrated – plus I had no need of the facilities until the next morning.

When its that hot out – pay attention! I think it’s a sign of how extreme it is out there in that there are five other observatories under construction and everyone is waiting till fall to do any more work.