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...

I was looking through some of my older pictures and was amazed at the power of the water in these waves!  I wondered if there were any Bible verses that talked about crashing waves; here's a neat passage:

Psalm 93

The LORD reigns, He is clothed with majesty; the LORD has clothed and girded Himself with strength; indeed, the world is firmly established, it will not be moved.  Your throne is established from of old; You are from everlasting.  The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their pounding waves.  More than the sounds of many waters, than the mighty breakers of the sea, the LORD on high is mighty.  Your testimonies are fully confirmed; holiness befits Your house, O LORD, forevermore.

I wonder if the psalmist was standing on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea when he wrote this?

I've made more progress on the stone wall around the pond pit (see previous post), but - alas! alackaday!  horror of horrors!!! - I forgot my camera in the back of my sister's car!  We shall soon be reunited, but I noticed that as soon as I realized the camera was gone, I had a desperate need to take a bunch of pictures.  Anyway, that explains why I had to scrounge through old photos in order to put a picture in this post.

I hope everyone is having an enjoyable beginning of September!  :)

Summer!

Hooray - I got my Mums planted! Here is the before picture - the barrels looked nice earlier in the summer, but the pink spiky things didn't bloom for long and the marigolds had kind of thinned out. I moved the bigger plants to a different part of the garden, regrouped the marigolds and planted a couple Mums.

Here's the "after" picture. Don't you just love the autumn colors? :) I was even good and mulched the barrels...now maybe they won't dry out so fast. I really don't know why I've never done that before...

I also spent a little time recently working on the pond hole. Now, this takes a little explanation - you see, my Dad really wants to have a small pond and waterfall in our backyard. So, probably about 5-6 years ago, we started digging a hole for a pond. Well, we didn't finish the hole or get the necessary equipment, so for a few years, we simply had a random hole in our backyard. It was a convenient spot to dump weeds, brush and whatever else we didn't want to lug a few yards further back to the treeline. It was also a convenient spot to break the legs of unsuspecting people wandering through our yard. See below for said pond hole:

Last summer I wrangled my brother into helping me do some more work on it. (Both of my brothers are excellent diggers - sometime I'll have to describe the Tunnel Incident!) We made some progress, but...well, this is about how it stayed for another year - with the minor cosmetic addition of a thriving colony of crabgrass.

Now we're getting somewhere! We have random piles of granite around our yard - we're in the Granite State, after all - and I spent a recent afternoon picking away at the infamous pond hole! Mind you, this isn't going to be the actual pond; this is simply the backdrop for it. Maybe eventually we'll actually dig a hole in the middle of this area and fill it with water - so that we have a pond to go in our pond hole! :D But at least it's finally starting to look like something...right?

Random question: can anyone tell me what kind of artwork this is? Does this style of painting have a specific name? I might try my hand at this style if I can find more examples to study.

Finally, be sure to check out my Dad's online woodworking shop - even if you've been on it before, make sure you check back because I've been adding new things periodically! Here's one of the pens I just listed a couple weeks ago; I'll be putting up a bunch more treenware soon.

Have a spectacular week!!! :D