Watch the Sandpile

One of my first jobs was working with my father at a company that supplied stone, concrete and asphalt for construction sites.  I worked in the labs breaking everything down to make sure the ingredients were correct. Imagine taking a cake and breaking it down to see if the right amounts of sugar, flour and butter were put in. It was kind of like that.

Back then, one of the things I enjoyed doing was walking around and looking at the enormous excavations and also the size of the sand piles. As a kid, nothing would have been more fun than to run up those sand piles. So I decided to give it a try one day and almost killed myself. Not that I was out of shape, I was only 20, but the amount of sand that came down as I tried to climb made it impossible to gain traction.

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