Pumping Iron... I mean, Basalt

I have been on a new project bandwagon. The people who lived in this house before us had a professional landscaping plan drawn up, but never put it in. They gave the plan to us when we moved in and ever since I have been itching to transform our adequate but average front yard into a fabulous front yard.

A couple of weeks ago I started working on the front yard. I thought I would do just one piece of the yard/landscaping plan at a time. After slowly pacing myself over the course of a few months I would finish the yard. But if you know me well, you know that is not how my personality or brain works: I get started and I shift into project mode. Something takes over and I just have this urgent need to forge to the finish.

This week I went to our local landscape yard, picked out six smallish-looking black basalt boulders and one "birdbath rock" (according to the requirements of our landscape plan) and arranged to have them delivered to our house. After they weighed the rocks and gave me my receipt, I found out that the rocks that I bought (which looked small compared to the others in the yard) totaled 3500 pounds- an average of 500 pounds each. Ummm... this created a small problem as to exactly how I would keep these from being a permanent fixture on our driveway. While I'd already done a bunch on my own (including transplanting a bush, planting countless new plants and laying out dirt for new planting beds), I guess I'd reached a point where I needed Dave's help... again.

Today I rented a rock dolly from the landscape place and with the help of Dave's bulging muscles (which are probably going to be sore for several days) we (or more precisely, he- with my help in a couple of key things like holding the dolly in place while he shoved a several-hundred-pound rock onto it) moved all seven of the rocks and placed them in our yard according to the landscape plan. And this on a day when Dave also wrote a weekly report for work (a several hour process) and I performed with my choir at a short dinner performance an hour away. What can I say? We rock. (Ouch, that was a REALLY bad pun, but I couldn't resist it. Sorry.) =]