Sorry, long day

Actually it was a long week.
I didn't do a Dec 7 post but there are plenty of good ones out there, quite a few on my blogroll.

We're still in New Braunfels spinning our wheels on something that we should be finished with by now. It was supposed to be a simple job- Pull the old cement (light) pole bases out, find the old condiut, stub out replacement conduit, pour new base pull wire and set the poles- for 29 riverside park lights.

• Out first item of pulling the old pole bases showed us that the conduit was run into the bottom (about 5' deep)
• The work is on a slope of various degrees of steepness. On one of the holes, I had to use the backhoe on something like a 30 degree incline. After pulling the base and finding the old conduit, the gravel was so loose that I almost slid the backhoe into the Comal river.
• Every time I start to follow the old conduit, I'm breaking some kind of waterline ( I hope they're all abandoned), running into big rocks that pull my backhoe into the forms, or the ground is so dry that the dirt just fills the (new hole I drilled) back in.
• We thought we FINALLY (after two weeks) got 15 done enough that we could pour the base,,,,,,,until the inspector came out.
  
• We have to take everything back to Selma every night, so our machines aren't completly cover with graffiti and our material isn't stolen. (Nice people you have there, N.B.)

The new pole bases are specked at 7' from the top of the Sona-tube to the bottom of the hole.
the 6'9" we had (that would have passed on any other job) weren't acceptable to our intrepid bureaucrat. Now we have to redo almost all we've done.

I *know* the company is taking a bath on this one. It's been FUBARed from day one, and we've given them over 10 hours in unpaid overtime.