Saturday, October 16, 2010

More Rock Stars

Somehow I've seemed to have taken a hiatus from writing for a while. It's not that we weren't doing fun things, but somehow 2 seasons of Mad Men had me preoccupied for a couple of weeks. But I'm trying to wean myself off, and am only allowed to watch the third season at a rate of one episode a day. Hence, I'm back to posting.

We've done some pretty cool things since my last post. We toured the Niagara Glen, looking at all of the Carolinian forest we could. It was really cool and über-ambient in a creepy primordial way. The rocks are amazing and look like they have been tossed around by giants and the trees are super old and huge. It was very green when we went though I'm sure that everything has started to change colour now. I didn't get any pictures, because it was raining, but you'll have to take my word that it was beautiful. I'll definitely be going back to repeat the tour with Tim.

We also had another lecture from Julian, and we covered the cultural landscape that was and still is Africville in Nova Scotia. It was a very touching story and although a terrible experience for the people who lived there, it was useful to see the destruction that can be wrought by a lack of sensitivity towards a community's cultural landscape. Unfortunately all we can do now is learn from the devastation that that community felt, but it is a lesson well-learned.

But the real subject of this post is the 3 days of masonry we had this week. That's mason-ry, not mason-a-ry...it drives me insane when people add that 'a' in there. Anyhow, we had a great instructor, Johnny Laundry, (awesome name right!) who taught us the basics of squaring up stones and some rudimentary finishing. You'd think that all of this would be very easy, and the concepts are, in practice though we made a lot of gravel. One wrong hit and your stone could be through. I think unless any of us actually become masons, we should probably stick to rubble stone houses or leave the intricate stuff to the experts.
Here I am going to town on Kristina's mother of a rock.  Eventually that huge chunk came off the back. Do you see the size of that hammer?

These are our finished squared rubble rocks. I think we each completed one, or at the most two  in one day. Johnny could do one in 5 minutes. 

The chain gang. These were already squared St. Matthew sandstone that we were shaping to make a  window arch.
Sometimes the shaping got a little out of hand. And stones would have to be abandoned.
Here is a shot of how we finished the arch stones. The small scoops along the edges of the stone are called boasters batted margins. The middle was then henpecked sparrow-pecked out. Unfortunately I didn't get a finished picture, as there are still a few more stones to be completed.
P.S.: The above corrections were given by Johnny Laundry, who was I'm sure very excited to find out he is famous in my very small blogosphere, but less thrilled that I had apparently not learned the proper masonry terminology.

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