One problem that I run into while building is measuring things as I want them to be.

If I need a long course of a wall to line up, it's easy to close one eye, squint the other, and make a range of possibilities work. There I am, head down, looking along the back line of a wall block, rotating my head this way and that way, one eye closed until—hey presto—it looks like it's aligned to the longer line of the wall. It's magic. I didn't even have to adjust the block, I just had to will its current setting into alignment—or, rather, I had to will the alignment to the current setting of the block.

Obviously this is insane and wrong.

The block is how it is, and the larger alignment of the wall is how it is, and if the block and the wall are aligned then the block is correct, and if not, they're not. The block (or the wall, but the wall is so big I'm not going to adjust it, so it is de facto correct) objectively needs to be adjusted if there is a difference.

But. If it's hot. If it's been a long day. If I've been working on the wall for weeks or months. If my back is sore. Well, then subjectively that block is aligned. Then, ironically, all that work before that block is somewhat wasted, even as it's used as a rationale for making the shortcut.

The only correct answer is to pause, close your eyes, open your eyes, see things as they are, and act accordingly.

Unrelated, but made me think of the futility of objectivity, which isn't even always necessary:

So much for Objective Journalism. Don't bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

—Hunter S. Thompson. "January". Fear and Loathing: on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973).

Previous: Throwing dirt

There's one more point to make.

Making a work area look nice—whatever "nice" might mean—isn't just an abstraction. Something shouldn't just look good to look good if it's an intermediate stage between not-constructed and constructed. There isn't much use in that.

And it's not all about making the scene better for someone else to look at—or not have a mess to look at, really.

Sometimes it's nice to clean things up to have a clear look yourself at the thing you're making so you can enjoy the journey from not-constructed to constructed. Parts of the yard are still full of rocks and blocks and bricks and dirt—but there's one spot now in the middle that isn't. It's flat—measured, packed, flat—as it should be, and now there are grass seeds put out to start turning it green. There's still work to do. But at least some of the work-in-progress looks like completed work, and it gives a little motivation to keep going on the rest.

There's something to be said about keeping a work area clean—mise en place, more or less. Wash dishes as you cook, put tools away when you're done using them, etc. It makes final cleanup easier, it makes the work go faster because things are prepared and organized, it makes the final product better because there aren't things in the way while you're working, and it looks nicer.

Those first three things—easier, faster, better—are self-evident. The fourth one is basically the aesthetics of work—not aesthetics of the act of working or of the final product, but aesthetics of the state of the work at any given time.

There is still a big pile of dirt in my backyard. First there was a huge pile of clay dirt from digging the trench for the retaining wall and digging down the high side of the yard to the desired level. Then I pushed that out and made a new pile in the middle of that area from topsoil that I ordered. Then I really flattened the clay pile into what will roughly be the new shape of the flat part of the backyard—but it still doesn't look good because the topsoil pile is sitting there in the middle making what should look like Victory Field look like Mt. Trashmore instead.

There's nothing that can be done about it, really. I have blocks and rocks and bricks and dirt stacked in various places behind the house, biding their time. "Just-in-time" delivery of these things is a fine concept, but the reality is that every truck delivery from the material yard costs $125, so I've got materials for four projects back there to save some money. Also I have no concept of what "in time" means for these projects, because I'm stealing time—tempted to call it "free time", but it's not even cheap—to work on them, an hour or two after work, a weekend day or two. (This is also my trick for not shattering my back, I think: not working very much for any long stretch of time.) Although the final result will be what I'm most proud of, all of this staging that I'm doing—managing where this or that goes, what order to do things in, etc.—is what I'm secretly feeling good about. It's a complicated problem to solve. I'm not winging in, despite how it looks.

Still, it's bad form to let the backyard construction site look like trash all the time. It's a curse to be able to see, inside my head, how all of the pieces will move and the game will play out when it's not obvious to observers who see only the visible situation. Sometimes it's worth taking some time to reorganize things. "Things" here are pallets of 45 30-kg (70-lb) blocks or truckloads of rock and dirt, so you really have to believe that it's worth the trouble to convince yourself to do it. It's a matter of taste. And sometimes it's a matter of comparing how much time it takes to move those things versus how much time it takes to explain to your significant other that the yard actually looks better than it did before, OK, there's just a pile of dirt there that will be moved soon, come on.

Sometimes you just have to throw dirt for a while—from this pile to that pile, from this pile to that pile—in order to keep the right people satisfied that the job is getting done. It's locally inefficient, sure, but if you have to repeatedly spend time explaining the current state of things, then it might be globally efficient. Form should follow function as a general rule, and like all rules you should really consider what the rule means so that you know when it's time to break it.

Previous: Watching the grass grow

There' something more to it than I said yesterday. I tried to pass it off as something respectable—as some kind of feedback problem that I'm managing, some kind of work that I'm doing, some kind of activity that I am accomplishing.

Look closely: action verbs. For grass.

Yeah... probably not entirely accurate. It's grass.

The thing I meant to say is that I go to a window—upstairs, downstairs, doesn't matter—several times a day to check out... the grass. I'll step outside the garage back door to have a look at... the grass. I'm not doing anything. But I am taking credit for the biological processes taking place in the backyard. (Maybe you've worked with people like this.)

There is an aspect of feedback correction, but it's very low frequency. It's hard to take credit for it, especially when the most difficult thing I have to do is walk around the yard and spin seeds out of this little seed throwing machine. It's an action—there is an act—but it's low effort.

What am I trying to get at here? (An honest question to myself.)

It's a funny thing to take credit for something that you're not really doing. I have these impulses frequently—maybe you do, too, I don't know. When your favorite sports team wins, or your university where you haven't been in ages gets some kind of credit for doing well, or your colleague gets an award, or an aspect of your work project has a breakthrough, and so on and so on—it's hard to take credit for doing those things, but still there's something inside that feels... something. It can't be accomplishment, but it feels like accomplishment. It's tickling the same brain receptors.

Grass in specific, but gardening in general: you can affect where the seeds go, you can affect the shape of the area you plant, you can affect the soil somewhat, you can add water, you can shade the sun—but you can't make a seed grow. There's effort and luck and environment, and then there's all the many variables inside the seed that you can't know (other than in some probabilistic sense). You can envision the outcome—and you should, sometimes that's the best part, before reality disappoints—but you can't know the outcome until the outcome comes out. Until then, I watch and watch and watch—not doing but waiting, patiently and impatiently, for what happens next.

I do it. I admit it. It's just as boring as the saying implies, but since I'm doing it intentionally, it's not that bad—subjectively, in my own head, at least.

In the backyard there is an area in the southwest corner that never really has any grass when we moved in. It was shaded by the pine tree to the north, the hackberry and mulberry trees to the south, and a bunch of honeysuckle on the west boundary of our backyard. Also it's on a slope, so it was eroding every so slightly each time it rained.

Listen: I'm trying to justify why I wrote a post about grass.

Last fall we got rid of the mulberry tree, which wasn't healthy, and also all the honeysuckle that was arguably on our property, and all the low branches on the pine tree. Suddenly there was sun in the dark corner of the yard—but also a lot of exposed dirt.

This year I made the dirt worse by rolling the wheelbarrow repeatedly through the area while moving wall materials to the backyard. But once that was done, and when any residual trench-digging dirt (clay) piles were moved out of the way, it was time to reclaim the dirt slope.

(Please clap.)

So that's been one of my side projects this year: tossing grass seed on the dirt, turning on the sprinkler, seeing where the grass grows (some areas are still susceptible to fast moving water when it rains, and some of the dirt is exposed packed clay), then adjusting my approach (blocking the erosive flows with bricks until the grass grows, scratching or breaking the clay before throwing more grass seed). Then watch. Then adjust. Watch. Adjust. Over and over until it's right, whatever that means.

Mostly I just want something to stop the erosion, and something to hold some water in and shade it from evaporating away. Grass works for that—we are, after all, living in a suburb, where grass is the national animal. It also looks nice—soft and green. But it seems to work best if you keep an eye on it—not just to watch it, which I do 1000 times a day, keeping up with patches of new grass which have recently joined the party, the but to keep that watch-adjust feedback loop working.

It was clever to talk about designing for interruptibility, but the truth, as ever, is more bothersome.

I'm rounding the bend of the deck with the wall now. Getting the curve right is hard enough, and the wall drainage is on the curve as well, adding slightly more difficulty. The drainage also means that when it rains, even if I cover the part of the construction I'm working on directly, some water still comes in from the side—not much, just enough to make the work grind to a halt.

The base rock is 3/4-inch limestone with a bunch of fine bits of dust and tiny rock, smashed down again and again until it's basically a solid layer. It's solid, but there's an interesting feature to deal with: it has enough pores to hold some water when it rains, but not enough to evaporate efficiently. And when the pores are full of water, the water-rock aggregate behaves like putty when pressure, like a sledgehammer flex smashing down the rock, is applied. Smash it here—, but it blurps up there. You can't compress it, you can't level it properly. You're stuck.

There are two ways to fix it. One, wait a week and let it dry out on its own terms. Two, dig out all the water-saturated rock, let the hole dry for a day or two, then fill the hole and keep going. Either way, it's annoying—you really are stuck until nature does its part.

That's where I found myself today. It rained Saturday. Sunday I discovered the mistake saturation situation and dug it out, then today went crazy filling the hole, smashing and leveling the rock, beating and leveling and aligning the blocks —just trying to get one block past the drain pipe so that when it stops raining in a few days, I can get back to a plastic-covered, not water-saturated rock to work again.