Decorating with boulders

I've been working hard at sprucing up the place.

It's got a lot to do with that 1980 Allis Chalmers back-hoe, the acquisition of which I've been trying to justify ever since it arrived here.

My first back-hoe project was digging a series of practice holes alongside the creek. I mean, you get a back-hoe, obviously you need a little practice.

I have to admit that original practice project had an ulterior motive. If I did enough "practice holes" alongside the creek, eventually I could just scoop out the berm between the practice holes and the creek and I'd have a pond!

Even a small lake maybe!

Alas, as I've been jacking up the rent I charge my tenant farmer every year, he keeps jacking up the amount of acreage he wants for his cows. This resulted in me having to fill in all those practice holes.

Which was good practice. Besides, we wouldn't want cattle drowning in those practice holes...

But the long and the short of it is I don't have a whole lot of useful things to do with Allis anymore.

Which brings me to landscaping. Back in the spring I took out a huge ugly shrub right by the front porch.

Replaced it with a half-ton boulder out of the back 40.

Lately I've been clearing the logging trails in the marsh across the way. This is a dicey operation, because that side of the road is covered not only by the Niagara Escarpment Commission, but it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well.

Well fuck me.

I'm gonna apply to the United Nations before I can take my Allis across the street?

Obviously not. So I've been over there, rooting around, making one of these "logging roads" into something that ends in the middle of the marsh and has a dock, from which I can access Bass Lake!

Bass Lake is a very pretty vacation-land tourist destination. It's home to a trailer park and a few dozen cottages that when they change hands tend to go for three hundred and up.

So while I'm leveling out the logging roads I keep unearthing giant boulders that were left here by the thaw of the last ice age. The global warming of its time.

Haven't heard that it was "man-made" global warming, but it could have been.

Maybe Iglpoop, the Neanderthal who was an extra in the Quest for fire movie, got careless with the fire...

I know from personal experience how quickly a little controlled grass fire can become something else... so it's utterly possible that Iglpoop set the entire continent on fire.

And then the glaciers melted and ten thousand years later I'm stuck with these random boulders all over my property.

Anyway, I've been doing the best I can with the hand nature dealt me, and today I placed a really nice one ton boulder right in front of the house.

Sure hope the farm manager likes it.