Too Much Sun, Too Little Time...But Still Good

I've had church work day on the calendar for a couple months now, and sign up has been going on for the past three weeks.. Three people had to cancel, but three showed up who did not sign up, so that worked out OK. I had 14 guys and one lady come today. I was up a little before 7am and headed to Wal-Mart to pick up some bottled water which came in very handy in the heat today. My first helper showed up at 8am and I put him on the riding lawn mower. He mowed for three straight hours.

At 9am, the rest of the crew showed up. We hauled some brush to the dump, did some weed eating, trimmed the hedges, painted a warning stripe and stenciled "Watch Your Step" in front of step people often trip over, cleaned some hard-to-get-to windows and dug up grass that we had killed along the sides of the parking lot. When we prepared to get our parking lot re-striped, I found out just how much the grass had grown into our parking lot. We reclaimed almost 3 feet (width) to our drive in and out of the parking lot. I think this scraping and digging was the hardest work of the day. One of the guys commented that he thought this kind of work is what people in hell must have to do!

We we worked until 11:30am and then began cleaning up because it was HOT and the guys were getting pretty worn out. The one lady who showed up to help ran a weed eater for almost 2 hours! After that, she went to get us some pizza and even stopped by her house to fix us some fresh fruit.

Everybody helped clean up and I think we were done, lunch and all, by 1pm. I then came home and moved around the dirt that got dumped here. We have BAD sink holes in our back yard, so I had the guys dump the dirt and dead grass we dug up into my back yard. It does not look too good right now, but after a couple rains and about six weeks it will look OK. I have two pick up loads full of dirt and it still did not fill all the holes completely.

All in all, we finished about half of what needed to get done. I will have to call and see if I can get somebody with some sort of equipment out to finish scraping off the parking lot before we get it striped at the end of the month. I've also got some hedges that will have to be trimmed, but I guess the rest will wait until it cools off some in the Fall. I think I'm going to have to plan at least 2 work days a year. Although today's Work Day consisted of too much sun and too little time, it was still good. If 15 people worked for 2.5 hours, I figure that is 45 man hours. Think how much time I would be out in the sun if I had to all that myself! I will be writing a number of Thank You notes on Monday!