Rain, rain.

I got to La Paz on Wednesday this week and it rained all day, hard. Thursday started out nice, then it started to rain harder and it rained all night. The driveway got washed out, some new ravines appeared and there was a whole bunch of water coming off the southern hillside. I did manage to get started on the meter socket mounting place but I left Friday afternoon when it looked like more rain. I thought this was the dry season - by my estimation we got 3 to 4 inches of rain in two days.

Using welded wire instead of rebar - no load.



Using tie wire every 16 inches to hold it all together.

A couple of notes on items you probably noticed. When you lay blocks you always lay them with the wide end up, to give a wider area for the mortar. In Ecuador they make the blocks with a solid bottom; if you want the web holes, you have to knock them out. I've tried different ways of doing this but the easiest way is to use a regular claw hammer to knock out the hole and the claw part to square it off. It takes less than a minute and I'll take the solid bottom over open cells any day. The other thing is - what is the rebar doing ? I just like to tie stuff into a slab. I only want to do it once. Did I ever mention I was old and hard headed ?