Tag: pond

Of Pyramids and Pitchforks

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , ,

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.”

A Man, a Plan, Camera Girl’s Pond Project

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , , ,

The things a man will do for his wife!  This is going to be a very long week.  Monday and Tuesday will be completely consumed in the service of Dunwich.  By late Tuesday night I will be moaning and groaning and repeating that law of nature “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”  And in Dunwich the punishment is always cruel and extremely unusual.

Be that as it may I had promised Camera Girl that I would build her a goldfish pond and so I have been working at it since it arrived off the third-party delivery truck that Home Depot contracted for the job.  Between Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I got to work with pitch fork, shovel, wrecking bar, rake and wheelbarrow.    I measured off the perimeter, removed the turf and started to dig.  And because this is New England (at least the parts of Dunwich which are tethered to our space-time) the ratio of rock to soil is something like 3/1.  This makes the whole procedure slow and exceedingly painful.  The good news was that the temperature was in the fifties and sixties which made the earth moving tolerable but it was still strenuous enough to prove to me that digging ditches is strictly for prison chain gangs and other equally motivated people.  It brought to mind those scenes in Cool Hand Luke.  When Camera Girl brought me out some refreshments I said in a southern accent, “Taking it off, boss!”  I don’t think she got the reference.

But finally, yesterday as the sun was getting low in the western sky, it looked like the whole hole was deep enough.  So, I lowered the liner into the hole and voila!  In fact, it’s slightly too deep and also it will need a slight adjustment to make it perfectly level.  But the fine tuning will have to wait until Wednesday.  After that I’ll start the back filling that’s needed under the parts of the liner that are raised into steps for the placement of water plants and any goofy ornaments that women feel are needed to amuse the fish and frogs.  That will probably take a day or two.  And then we’ll fill the thing up and buy some water lilies and those other little sea-weedy plants that pond supply stores hand out and then onto the fish store to get goldfish or carp or whatever hardy species are available.  Camera Girl doesn’t want koi which is probably a good idea since they’re expensive and the Great Blue Herons around here like those better.

Truth be told I’m interested in seeing if in addition to the numerous and varied frog and toad species around the yard we manage to attract other cold-blooded critters.  Since I’ve seen them in the yard, I’m guessing garter and water snakes will show up.  And the painted turtles don’t have far to go from the real pond.  But what I’m not sure about is whether any salamanders will migrate over to this new water habitat.  There are several species in the area and I’ve always wanted to attract them to the yard.

Before we moved to Dunwich, I had built a smaller pond for Camera Girl in the yard where we lived.  It always made her happy to sit and watch the various wild animals and insects that gather around water.  I’ll have this up and running before summer and she’ll be able to enjoy it the way she used to.  Ah, the things we do for love.