What thishere blog is all about:

So I am trucking, as you may know from reading my other blog, in order to make money to pay off the misery of credit card and student loan debt and to make money to build a brick oven which will be the base for my bread baking business. This blog will be a chronicle of the building of that oven and bakery and business. Mostly there will be a lot of pictures of holes in the ground and bricks and concrete and big messes but hopefuly there will be pictures of friends and hard work and, at the end, fire and beautiful breads.
Today was a good day. Today the ground was broken. This had been put off for a long time because it had been so dry and the dirt was like concrete, not appreciating the fact that we wanted to dig it up and cover it with concrete. In the last weeks there have been a few good rains and so today my dad and I marked out the spot for the bakery building and the oven. and I removed the sod from the area where the slab for the oven will be poured. The oven will be a direct fired "Alan Scott" style Roman or Black oven with a 4'x6' hearth. Essentially the way these ovens work is you light a fire in them and let it burn for a long time and then remove all the coals and ash. At this point a great ammount of heat has been stored in the brick and concrete mass of the oven and it is with that retained heat that you can bake bread for many hours. Alan Scott is a guy from California who studied and improved the design of these ovens and builds them for people but also sells plans on his website
http://www.ovencrafters.net
Here are some pictures from todays work. (sod is Heavy. especially when it is full of recent rain and largely clay, as the dirt around here is.

The sod half dug up












the sod is gone!












my dad wanted me to take this sod and build a little berm to keep water from going down the hill in this area. He is peculiar like this.