And now, the news...

It seems that I have more damage from my early life in construction. My T9 vertebra has collapsed and T1-7 are headed the same way. That explains the terrible backaches I have been experiencing when I stand for more than 2 or 3 minutes. I already have 4 Lumbar vertebra fused as well as 3 Cervical vertebra. So why not some Thoracic ones? No thank you! I'm all through with surgeries.

Logic says that I should regret my days in construction, but I don't, in fact I love them. Building things satisfied my soul! I resisted efforts made to entice me into an office job and then, 25+ years after starting, I gave up and became an estimator. I had been a foreman, superintendent and a project manager; jobs that didn't require a lot of physical stress. But I never let the title stop me from working with my hands...and back. I'm sure that I have expressed these thoughts before, but I'm old, and I'm entitled to repeat myself.

But right now I am trying hard to find a memory of a project that I haven't written about before. Now that is hard work! We did a department store job in Fresno, back in the late 60s. Is that one to write about? We did a small shoe store in Santa Barbara during that era. All through the 60s and 70s, I was doing any good paying piecework job, houses or apartments. This was my weekend work. Then there were the smaller hourly pay jobs that rarely lasted more than a week or two. One was remodeling some condos, just off Wilshire Blvd. They were quite luxurious but they had never sold in the year (more or less) since they had been built. They were being remodeled to attract some customers. I remember that the GC had piled all of the furnishings down in the basement and said they were free for the taking. I took a couple of large 4 door kitchen cabinets and put them in my garage in Newbury Park. Others had taken stacked washer/dryer units, doors, dishwashers and even marble tiles from the entry vestibules. Now my memory says that I installed those big and very heavy cabinets by myself. That sounds like me. So my back problems were definitely caused by my choices...