Like the Pharaoh Cheops I know the pain and exultation inherent in an enormous engineering project. Yes, he built the Great Pyramid of Giza. But I built the Great Pond of Camera Girl. So, let’s just look at the stats:
| Project Name | Great Pyramid of Giza | Great Pond of Camera Girl | ||
| Length of project | 27 years (total) | 27 hours (active time) | ||
| Scope | 2.6 million 2.5-ton blocks | 270 gallons of dirt | ||
| Volume of project | 92 million cubic feet | 36 cubic feet | ||
| Size of Crew | 40,000 | 1 | ||
| Total manhours | 1,752,000,000 | 27 | ||
| Significance of project | Final resting place of pharaoh | Husband making wife happy | ||
| Projected lifetime of structure | millennia | until roots from cherry tree puncture liner | ||
| Tools | copper tools, ropes, levers, sledges | shovel, pitchfork, rake, wrecking bar, wheelbarrow, 4″ level (plastic), good old American grit and determination |
Based on scope I guess I’ll have to hand it to Cheops. 27 years is a pretty good effort. Of course, if we count the fact that I’ve been throwing out the garbage and repairing stuff around the house for almost 50 years all of a sudden Cheops is coming up kind of short. Isn’t he!
But I don’t want to overreach. People have been travelling to Egypt for millennia to gawk at the pyramids and so far, Camera Girl is the only one who has praised my great engineering project. And even though she has been quite generous with the superlatives I must admit that 92 million cubic feet of limestone blocks isn’t anything to sneeze at. I mean I dropped one of the rocks I dug out on my foot and that damn thing hurt but a five-thousand-pound rock is a little bit more of a big deal if it ends up on your foot. So, okay. Cheops wins. He’s big man on campus.
But let’s look at this from a different perspective. What did Mrs. Cheops have to say about the whole thing? Based on my research after watching “Land of the Pharaohs (1955)” she must have been buried alive with Cheops.
Now maybe she was down with this. Who knows? But my knowledge of Camera Girl leads me to believe that this would not be to her liking. Now as a charter member of the He-Man Woman Haters Club you might think I would be an advocate for this kind of wife entombing. But you’d be wrong. By any objective measure she is very high in the ranks of women and hardly ever uses her feminine wiles and never takes advantage of the modern anti-male legal or social mechanisms to make my life miserable. By my reckoning she is a good egg and fully worthy of this amazing civil engineering marvel.
Next, we’ll fill it with water and put in a bunch of water lilies and other plants and then buy some goldfish and sit around in the afternoon and watch these aquatic vertebrates do their thing. And then one day the local Great Blue Heron will discover this little water hole and eat all of the fish in one meal. But as Camera Girl always says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”