Big Red

Yesterday I assembled my Christmas present, a shiny red cement mixer from Northern Tool. It was actually fairly easy to assemble. Except for one corner of the motor housing that had been dinged up by some sort of forklift accident, everything was straight and the holes all lined up. Getting the rubber gasket between the upper and lower drum halves was amusing - if you can imagine a flat rubber snake with the patience of a two-year-old, you've got the basic idea.

So what does one do with a cement mixer? One mixes concrete. Which raises this question: if it mixes concrete, why is it called a cement mixer? Why are trucks that carry concrete called cement trucks?

Concrete is pretty amazing stuff, if you ask me. You just add water to this stuff and it turns into a greenish goo that in the long run cures hard as a rock?? That's pretty fabulous. There are things that are even more fabulous - hot dogs, for one - but still, that's pretty fabulous. Back in my youth my dad and I poured an awful lot of concrete for driveways and walkways. We were mixing it in an ancient cement mixer, so we tended to form up slabs that could be mixed and poured and finished in about a day. We used a huge pile of gravel ("ABC" round these parts) and cats also used it as a giant open-air litter box.

It was possible to determine the order in which we poured the slabs by counting the little irregular voids in the surface of the concrete where cat poops rotted and came out. The first slabs were smooth and clean, but then the number of cat poop craters began to increase. The last slab looked like Swiss cheese or perhaps a scale model of the moon. Some of those voids got pretty big - I remember not wanting to meet the enormous feral cats that produced some of those poops.

Fun facts about concrete! The first actual concrete was invented by the Romans, and was used to build all sorts of interesting things. So far as I know, the Pantheon in Rome remains the world's largest, and oldest, unreinforced concrete dome. Modern Portland cement of the form we use today was a product of the Industrial Revolution, invented in the mid-1800s by some British fellow. (I used to think that Portland cement came from Portland, and I worried that at the rate people were building concrete buildings and superhighways, that one day Portland would be nothing but a huge crater from all that mining, as though the Borg had come.)

Here's another fun fact about concrete: mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow is one of the most unpleasant tasks known to man. I'd rather dig splinters out of my fingers. I'd rather try to give Baxter T. Cat a pill. I'd rather sand the raised panel lines off a 1970s-era Monogram airplane model and rescribe them (and if you know me very well at all, you know that I regard rescribing panel lines as exceedingly unrewarding).

Hence Big Red. Now that I have it, what do I propose to do with it? Building a Pantheon might be a little ambitious, but maybe a nice sunken garden...