Progress! And Archaeology!!

In a recent post I shared the long, sad story of the pond pit.  Here it lies in its early days, pretending to be a tiger pit or a landfill or something of the like.

Then after a year or two or four I enlisted my brothers, the Talented Tunnelers, and with their outstanding digging skills, we soon had...a bigger pit.  Complete with honeycomb caverns in the sides!  As I recall, we found some mysterious metal object and were trying to trace it to its source.  We never did reach the end of the thing...maybe there's even a car buried under the hill!  You never know in our yard - we've found bottles, pottery shards, bricks, metal pieces, broken china, pens...you name it, it's probably buried somewhere in our yard.  Evidently occupants of some previous decade or century didn't believe in going to the dump.  In fact, that plastic bag in the foreground was full of glass and china shards.

Anyway...the work progressed after another year or two and we finally had something that was starting to look like, well, something.  Don't you think so?

No? Well, how about now?  Yesterday I had a day completely off - which doesn't happen often!  Usually when I have a day off from my normal job, I go clean a friend's house or help another friend with heavy-duty yardwork, etc.  But this day I had all to myself.  So what did I do?  Landscaping!  I managed to cross off most of my to-do list, which is one of the most spectacular feelings ever, especially cuz that doesn't happen often in my world.  :)  A couple days before, Dad and my younger brother and I moved this giant rock - with the help of our trusty van, some rope and lots of levers and wedges - from where it had been sitting in the middle of the yard for several years.  It is now a bench.  Then we went to our handy-dandy rock pile (every home should have one!) and collected a bunch of slabs of granite, hauling them back to the pond pit.  Yesterday I utilized the rocks to finish the stone wall around the pit; now I just need to fill in behind it with dirt and add some flowers. I also moved these two Dwarf Alberta Spruces from other parts of the yard and excavated the stone steps headed down the hill on the right (you can see in previous pictures that they had been reclaimed by the grass).

I also pruned all the plants along the front of our house, raked up the debris, moved a tiny evergreen to a new place in the yard, moved a daylily to the front border, swept another stone path clean and re-piled our remaining rocks.  All in all, it was a spectacular day off...and I slept very well that night!  :)

An Opportunity: Budding archaeologists, alert!  Would you like a site to rent?  Come check out our place and find a treasure trove of goodies to dig up, catalog and preserve for posterity!  Set up your dig almost anywhere in the yard and you're sure to strike gold (so to speak)!  Hone your skills before setting off for your field of choice.  Rental fees are very reasonable.

Well, just kidding about coming to dig in our yard (Mom and Dad would not be happy with me!), but as I mentioned earlier, it's true about finding stuff almost anywhere.  Below are pictures of two of my finds just from digging holes for those small Spruces!

Well, that's it for today... join us next time for: A Decadent Dessert...Despite a Diet!  

There will be peanut butter...