Wow. What a hole.

Last weekend the Yang to my Yin announced that he planned to rent the digger so we could start our water garden/pond. Exciting news! Well, today we got it at the crack of dawn and proceeded to pull out the stump from an old flowering crab to try the thing out. After more than an hour of digging and cursing the stump finally gave way and let itself be extracted.


That's Gracie the Wonder Lab next to it. She's about 80 lbs, so it's a good size stump.

Now for the fun stuff. Let's dig a really big hole. We did out duty and phoned JULIE and were reasonably sure that the area we chose was free and clear to dig. Famous last words. Let's just say that the first 15 minutes are critical to a project. The first 15 minutes unearthed a high voltage power line that JULIE did not mark. Oookkkaaayyy. Now what. ComEd said it wasn't their problem. JULIE said they weren't responsible since it was not installed by ComED. Mr. Electrician man showed up a few hours later and after a quote of about $2000 +/- we knew we were in trouble.

I guess God was looking out for us in a strange way. The line was no more than 1 foot in thr ground. It was plenty easy for me to have hit with a plain old shovel let along a piece of equipment. The former owner of this house worked for ComEd and apparently installed a hot line to our barn himself - off the grid. it is plenty legal in that it runs through the meter, but it's just not to spec how it was installed or buried. Live and learn. Nobody was hurt, but it was damned close.

Our pond looks like this right now. With a few slight modifications to route around the soon-to-be-spliced hot wires, it will look marvelous. I can already imagine sipping frozen marg's watching Tuck and Ming Ming swimming with the little shubunkins in their new pond. I have a vivid imagination...

A few days of hand digging will make this pit look like what's in my head - at least I hope so.

On a more happy note, my Irises are blooming for the first time since I moved here.
I'll have to research what variety they are. They're really pretty I think. Won't they look nice by the new pond?