When working toward a clear and defined goal, there is little that can be called success short of attaining completion.

That having been said, I was still pleased with the progress I made on my porch during my two days off work.

With rain kicking in on Friday and Saturday, I was unable to attach a roof, rails and the main set of steps.

Even so, I have my 16'x8' platform in place, so I can now walk out the door and avoid falling several feet to the ground. However, I still can walk just a few more steps to fall even further off the side of the un-railed porch. That's what I call progress.

I also left off the main set of stairs, just to make going up and down a little more interesting.

On Thursday, I started back where I had left off with the posts out of square and only two in concrete. I had to re-dig the post holes on the end, moving the outside by about three inches to one side before it was all squared up. Following that, I added about nine 80 pound bags of concrete mix to the holes, giving me 720 pounds of foundation support. I finished the job by packing up a mound of dirt to ensure that the water runs away from the posts.

One thing I've noticed about concrete is the fact that the first bag always weighs less than the ensuing bags, with each successive getting heavier and heavier.

I felt like I could have carried two bags at a time early on, but of course I wasn't fool enough to try. By the time the last bag found its way to the hole on the far side of the porch, it was all I could do to carry it. It reminded me of a variation of the ‘Atlas stone' in the "World's Strongest Man" competition from television; picking up the bags from the back of the truck and then walking down the hill and about 20 feet across the uneven terrain to the destination. Of course, to those guys, an 80 pound bag of concrete mix would be like carrying around a lunch pail. Sadly, none of them were around to help me build the porch.

Setting the 14-foot porch posts reminds me of the caber toss in the Highland Games, except for the fact that tossing the post is what you are trying to prevent in this case. Why couldn't porch building could be a sport of one sort or another in its own right? Perhaps I'll petition the Olympic committee to add it to the summer games. It's at least as difficult as surfing or snow boarding, neither of which I know anything about.

With the new physique of Americans becoming more rotund and less athletic, perhaps we will have to invent more sports we can win at.

In the last Olympics, we got our clocks cleaned in basketball, a sport invented in our country way back when men could run back and forth without dying of heart attacks. In this case our team was in ample physical conditon, but the players couldn't play as a team. Good-old boys with pot bellies know how to work together, but they are never invited to take part in those activities. It's only fair that we should have a few sports, besides golf and bowling, where a man of less than perfect conditioning can be competitive. I can see it now, "The Redneck Games." We could have the hubcap toss, tobacco spit, chicken chase, animal shoot (it doesn't matter what kind of animal it is, so long as we can shoot it and eat it), tobacco spit and the fire wood chop. Feel free to come up with your own, there's plenty of room for improvement.

Porch building might not fit the repetoir if the price of lumber keeps going up. Soon it could become a sport only for the rich, like polo or caviar eating.

I built the band boards out of 2x12s, the joists from 2x8s and the floor from 2x6s (which were cheaper than the 5/4 decking boards most folks use for some odd reason). Just one 2x12 is about $30, while the floor boards topped $5 each. I had been buying up the lumber to build with for several months. I wouldn't have been able to afford it all at once. I plan to build the stairs next, followed by the roof and hand rails. Maybe I'll get it all knocked out later this week.

I'm back to driving my old Ford this week after the starter went out on my newer Chevy. It might be a simple thing to switch out, but the cost of a new starter is more than $200. Oh well, just another opportunity to dig into the long-depleted piggy bank. I had been saving up a few dollars to help finish paying for the deck, but the cost of materials is going up almost as fast as I can save the money.

It goes back to the law of money and time. Most men who have money have no time, while those who have time have no money. The rest of us just try to survive as close to the middle of this give and take world as our meager means will allow.

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