Howdy! It’s midsummer already, huh?

The days are long but the years weeks and months are short. Trite but true.

So what happened was… I blinked in May and, when I opened my eyes, July was almost over. Busy as I’ve been, though, I don’t seem to have amassed a backlog of fascinating tales or folders stuffed full of interesting photos to share here.

One thing I did relatively recently was lend a hand to someone near and dear who had embarked on a significant renovation project which had quickly reached a bit of an impasse. My assistance took the form of an afternoon spent using concrete-patch epoxy to seal cracks, mostly just hairline fractures, in a thin layer of concrete overlying the actual concrete-and-rebar floor of a large-by-HK-standards room.

My own past problems with problematic concrete floors had been quickly and permanently resolved with the help of a two-part concrete-patch epoxy product purchased online: Rust-Oleum 301012 EpoxyShield Concrete Patch and Repair. The manufacturer makes a number of claims regarding this stuff, including the following: This two-part, industrial-strength epoxy permanently bonds concrete, won’t shrink or crack and creates an extremely hard surface that is stronger than concrete, Indoor/outdoor, Fast curing, paintable in 8 hours, and Easy mixing, low odor, no solvents. In my experience, all of the preceding statements have held true. It’s really nifty stuff.

Working solo, I patched all of the exposed cracks over the course of several hours. Most of that time was spent kneeling while I transferred globs of freshly-mixed epoxy from flat pieces of cardboard that I was employing like painter’s palettes onto sections of cracks and used putty knives to press the stuff into the gaps and smooth it as nearly flat as possible.

The stultifying heat was the only problem. The room has a highly effective air conditioning system but all of its outlets had been temporarily sealed up to prevent any ingress of dust and debris. Fans are better than nothing and I made use of the big, luggable electric fans left on-site by the renovations contractors, but fans in a stuffy room just push hot air around. Taking care to pause now and then and have something to drink that wasn’t plain water didn’t prevent me from sweating like a cartoon character sweating in an exaggerated-for-humorous-purposes sort of way.

Every article of clothing wound up completely sopping wet and stayed that way for the duration. And each time I changed into a fresh pair of disposable gloves, the equivalent of a demitasse cup’s worth of water fell out of the epoxy-smeared pair I was discarding. Where the glove juice splattered onto the porous cement below it made puddles that soaked in and left a fat cluster of damp spots that were mostly still visible hours later when I’d finished and was packing up. And until I washed them that evening, rimes of salt from evaporated perspiration were readily visible on the lenses of my glasses.

Halfway through the job, when I stopped for lunch, I noticed beads of condensation completely coating the insides of the greenish semi-translucent plastic accordion-flex bits of the gel-padded knee protectors I was wearing and used my phone to snap the photo embedded above. Looking at them was like watching the glass lid on a pot of water that had was just about to boil.

But it was worth it. My efforts paid off. By the next morning, the epoxy was cured and harder than the cement around it and the project was instantly back on track and back on schedule. The rest of the work is currently ongoing.