Not 35

I spent the entire Juneteenth weekend at hard labor, taking advantage of unseasonably mild mid-June weather. The temperatures were in the mid-80’s but with little to no humidity, which made being outside pleasant, even if I was swinging Dad’s mattock into our rock-hard topsoil. We inherited a bunch of poorly-poured concrete sidewalks with this house, which I’ve slowly been removing over time, and this weekend I broke up and hauled out a section sitting right in front of the basement stairwell, itself a poured concrete structure set into the side of the house. During heavy rainstorms, water would over the top of the saturated grass and down the slab, which had settled backwards towards the house, up and over the edge of the stairwell and down into the basement. This was a primary cause of flooding during both of the 100-year storm events we shared with Ellicott City, requiring Jen and I to man the bilge pumps and shop-vac to bail out the house. After knocking the slab into sections (it…