Close Encounters...

...of the Jim kind

Click on image to enlarge - © 2007 jim otterstrom

So, Peggy comes home the other day to find a small mountain just inside her front gate, blocking the walkway to the house.

The first thing that came to her mind was Richard Dreyfuss building a mountain in his living room in the 1977 movie 'Close Encounters Of A Third Kind'.

The next thing that came to mind was her husband, Jim, a close encounter of another kind...

How do I know this?

She told me...

...right before she said, "Now, tell me why there's a mountain in our front yard".

"It's for my new rock garden honey", I said, smiling, "and it's clean native dirt from right across the street, where they're building that new house, and it was free!"

She gave me one of those raised-eyebrow looks, the kind only a husband really understands, while I smiled a bit more sheepishly.

Well, my plan was to begin moving 'The Mountain' to it's permanent location the very next day (by shovel & wheelbarrow), but then I remembered there were native plants which needed to be potted up and moved out of the way, so I spent much of the day doing that.

Then it rained for a whole day, and, of course, no dirt moving could be done during a downpour.

When the rain moved out in the middle of the night, the ground froze, and the next day the shovel responded to the new mountain as if it were solid granite.

And now, today is our food Co-op delivery day so I'll have to receive the order out on the shoulder of the road because the frozen mountain is still blocking the entrance to the yard.

"But I'll get it moved, eventually ("I promise!"), and look at all those lovely rocks in that mountain, just what we need in our rock garden, and they were free!"

Oh, and I didn't tell all you bloggers out there about the theme of the rock garden, did I?

I'm going to call it 'The Garden Of The Lost Civilization', and it's going to be built up around masonry rubble from the 1992 Big Bear Earthquake!

There's a huge repository (a forgotten dump basically) of beautiful broken red-brick and native-stone chimney debris a few miles from here, an historical treasure just lying around for the taking.

As soon as I find someone with a heavy-duty pick-up to help me move that stuff, I'm going to bring a truck-load of those archaeological artifacts home to enhance the new rock garden, after I get this other mountain out of the way, that is.

Anyhow, now you know why I haven't caught up with those other posts I'm behind on (you know, the acorn class & the train trip, and, oh, there's one about my recent birthday too!).

But first, the Co-op delivery, then the moving of the mountain...

...to be continued

~I HOPE~