Back to the cement mixer, this time with the added embellishment of a wheelbarrow. Shameless in as much as it’s been another day of hard slog, with some good old-fashioned sweat thrown in. Resetting the granite kerb stones and levelling the bottom of the trench today, then mortaring the granite together, along with a few other mortar jobs left over from last time we mixed a load.

You see this is good justification for BUYING the concrete mixer – I’d never have been able to justify hiring one for a single load of mixing but because it’s just here, I can fire it up in an instant. I am still thrilled with my beast of burden. Now my cost per day is down to about £33 per day’s work – see what I mean about cost – soon it’ll be paying me!

Tomorrow I lay half of the new patio extension – it’s too big to do in a single day’s mixing and pouring, even I recognise that. I am notorious for thinking I can do four times as much work in a day than a twenty-year-old on steroids can complete. Sometimes I just have to accede that I’m not superhuman nor even a human twenty-year-old. So, when I wandered outside after finishing labouring for the day and saw the sun on my concrete mixer, I decided “what the hell…” I submit – I’m not wonderwoman and I don’t look good in lycra so there’s no reason not to shoot what is my second shot of a cement mixer in three days. Shamelessly!

NOTE: posted the morning after the night before due to an evening spent comatose on the sofa groaning about my aches.