Thursday morning they built these reinforcement structures of rebar and laid plastic across the compacted fill. "Better built than the house," I said.

By the end of the day it looked rather more complicated and a whole lot neater. You could see the structure of the whole thing, and the way they'd built the forms for the curbs that will be under the walls, and the shape the barn will be, and the way it's supported (notice the bare ground where the raspberry snarl was) and the potting shed -- which still needs the curb forms. That's how it was left Thursday night, and nobody showed up on Friday. Waiting out the hurricane? Who knows . . .