This post is for Randy

Randy Mains is a good friend of ours, at least we think so, and a very accomplished guy. He flies helicopters and teaches pilots in the oil fields in Abu Dhabi, has written a couple of books one of which, Dear Mom I’m Alive, is in movie development under the title “Letters from Black Widow 25”. Randy enjoys jokes and stories at about the grade 4 boy level (he and Mark get along fine!) and is lucky enough to be married to Kaye who is a legend in her own right. Randy teases Jim and me a lot about our constant ‘projects’( he has had the benefit of Jim’s help on a couple of his own) but his real favourite is about Jim renovating and/or moving our garden pond. The pond has just been renovated, again, hence the title of the post.

Befores

We’ve had a leak for months in the short stream that connects the larger fish pond with a small ‘head of the river’ pool. Jim has long hankered for a cascade from a fissure in our rock outcropping but that’s a job for professionals and probably will cost a few dollars. So he’s been procrastinating, which is always a sign that he doesn’t have a vision for the project. When he gets the idea nailed down he’s very gung-ho. I finally suggested that he just fix the leak and do some minor tweaking so the stream was at least operating. Fixing the stream meant removing a lot of rock, taking up the old liner, laying a new one and resettling the rocks. Btw, all the rocks in any of our garden photos have come from our own dirt, which I hesitate to call soil. Some of them are pretty darned big and Jim has dug them out during various garden excavations. We have literally tons of rock.

We all have our vision of work; Melynda got roped into helping too.

Back to the pond -“while we’re at it” crept in to the equation as it invariably does! It’s been a bit of an issue that we don’t really get much benefit from the pond because we are forever on the main deck which is some distance away. Also the pond was closed in by a vine covered obelisk, some big grasses, and various other plantings all of which was really nice but obscured the water feature to the point that it wasn’t. So, says I, why don’t we open up the near side by moving a few things. And (still my big mouth flapping) if we (that would be the royal we not the plural!) move the upper pool down a level and straighten out the stream a bit you could then add the rock fissure thingy next year or when we win the lottery. Well, suddenly rocks and dirt were flying like one of Randy’s helicopters. Yikes! Have I mentioned my rather dysfunctional shoulder? After 6 days of pretty hard labour the shoulder doesn’t seem to be any better or any worse which is absolutely astounding. Another “have I mentioned” item, we haven’t had rain for 35 days now and the dirt is QUITE hard while the sun is QUITE hot. The best thing about all this activity is that the birds have a little beach to swim from and they are very happy.

Afters

The not having rain part is great for us and we are loving it only because we aren’t affected by the many forest fires. For the last few days it has been pretty hazy which we are told is caused by particulates from various fires in the province. The photo of the sun was taken about 8:00am.

And we are feeling like very bad parents as we have lost the hard drives on two of our computers in the last month: one desk top, one laptop, different brands, different stores, both only 2 years old. Luckily we recently updated our netbook and have an antique (6 years makes it an antique, right?) laptop as well, so we are functional if not overjoyed. Plus we have external hard drives doing weekly scheduled back-ups so haven’t really lost any data (that’s a nudge for any of you who haven’t got one), not that we have anything very important to lose.

So many places to sit and no-one ever sitting!