January and Octagons

We've taken down the Christmas trees at our house and at my folks' house.  Our tree this year was one of the smallest ones we've had, and once we took all of the paper doves, ornaments, and lights off of it, I carried it outside.  I enjoyed the tree, but while it was up it underscored how frat-house-cluttered our living room is.  I suppose whenever we decorate for a holiday, we cross over a saturation point.  

My folks' tree is a monster artificial tree that practically requires a blowtorch to take apart, and winches to cinch back into its boxes.  But we did it.  This may be the year I come up with some kind of origami collapsable tree contraption that my dad can manage (I'm seeing a rack-and-pinion mechanism that expands like a car jack, only tree-shaped).

The snow from December has melted and we're back to our regular upper-thirties rain and overcast (with occasional sun).  Since the hummingbirds were peering down the hole in the fountain's stone pillar looking for water, I braved the frigid water and reinstalled the pump.  Within an hour-and-a-half, they'd come back to splash in the fountain's flow, which made me surprisingly happy.

On the art front, I've been playing with octagonal symmetry.  The results tend to look like quilt patterns.  Whereas pentagons and Penrose tiles have to deal with the golden mean and the odd gap where things don't quite line up, octagons have to deal with issues around the square root of two.  What's interesting is that triangles repeating around an octagon almost will make a perfect five-point star (one can almost, but not quite, make eight pentagons fit around an octagon).  I stuck to squares, right-triangles, and isosceles triangles mostly.  It occurs to me that I didn't try using alternating half-circles set on a square's corners--but that might end up looking like jigsaw puzzle pieces.  Hmm.

The latest dream involved going on an archeological visit to an ancient stone tower, built by vaguely South Americans in some unspecified past.  The tower was more like a giant mesa, eroded volcanic plug, or stone pueblo.  I got caught in a shaft that was being used as an elevator and got mashed a little by the plastic gondola as it descended.  

When I got to the top of the tower, there were a bunch of other tourists there.  A strong wind picked up, and the tower began listing to one side.  We were directed to walk down hitherto unnoticed stairs before the whole thing could blow over.  

I can only conclude that the symbolism of the tarot card, "The Tower," has been added to my typical elevator anxiety dream, which, I'm  just now realizing, had the beginnings of the "lost in a constricting maze" elements in it.  Sigh.

Ides of Autumn

We've had a few days of cloudy weather, followed by a couple of nights where the temperature got down to the high 20's, and suddenly the days feel like Autumn.  Now that the sun is back, I really notice how much shadow covers the yard.  

Since it was going to be sub-freezing, I drained the fountain and took out the pump.  This made me melancholy, because now the the hummingbirds won't visit.  The first cold morning I put out a plate of water on top of the fountain's basalt column.  One of the morning hummingbirds zipped over the fountain, hovered around it, and I swear it looked over its shoulder through the glass patio door at me as if to say, "Unacceptable," and zipped over the house and away.  This is the sort of thing that makes me want to have a ritualistic re-filling of the fountain, which will probably have to wait until the March 20 Equinox.  

The second cold morning, all the zinnias durned brown; so did most of the grape leaves, which subsequently fell off of the vine and scattered along the foundation of the backyard-fort-turned-arbor.   

I suppose this will make the yard look seasonally festive this Saturday night.  In lieu of decorating the front, we've been decorating the back for a kind of private display.  I wish friends could come over in person, but with COVID-19, it's out of the question.  I suppose we'll have fun by ourselves -- Mark and The Child have decided that they'll put out Trick-or-Treat bags on a table and leave that out for anyone who wants to walk by the house.  And I still plan to RollerBlade in the full moon light.

Cute Wildlife

Friday afternoon, I was writing outside.  The weather during the first part of the week had been cold and rainy.  As I usually say during boundless stretches of grey:  "we can always use the rain, but if the sun doesn't come out soon I'm going to curl up under my electric throw until the light returns."

Now that Spring is here, we should get more days where there's a terrific mix of sunshine, cloudbursts, and rainbows.

Last Friday was bright and warm, and a good day for writing at Café John (the outside patio table with an umbrella).  The new fountain was on and bubbling, and providing a soothing sonic backdrop.   I had my slippers off and was warming my feet on the deck,  working on the order of scenes in a 7000 word short story (do I go back and forth between the three time periods, or do I just tell the whole thing chronologically?  The first part feels YA, should I just accept it, or should I try cutting out the early parts of the story as backstory that's driving to the last scenes...?)



A flash of yellow caught my eye, and I saw a goldfinch on top of the fountain.  This was surprising because I thought the flowing water would make it difficult for a small bird to find purchase on the stone's polished surface.  The bird splashed around a bit, then flew off to the blooming cherry tree and came back with a friend.  They proceeded to take a bath.   The whole scene was what I would have called "Terminally Cute" in my Reed College days, and what Mark and I usually call "Oogie-Boo!"






To clarify, they weren't being Snow White Disney Birds Cute, nor were they being Flower Fairies Twee.





I grabbed my camera, set the ISO to 1600, and snapped a few shots from just inside the sliding patio door.  Reviewing the photos later, I discovered that the camera can resolve drops of water flying through the air.










There were no mystic signs of ornithomancy later.  Or sudden appearances of elegant ball gowns, either.








I'm sure once the cats overcome their fear of the new dog and venture once again into the backyard, they'll be quite pleased to discover the new water-powered cat-feeder.

Finishing The Water Feature

 Saturday, Mark and I managed to move the stone into place.  Origianlly, I was going to try to tie the stone to a long beam of wood and use either end as a lever to walk the stone into place.

When we tried to lift it, it became clear that the stone weighed too much for two men in their mid-fifties to move by themselves.

Mark quite reasonably pointed out that the stone was already on the wagon (the sides of which were being destroyed by all the levers I was using to try to wiggle it into place, and that we already had it on a long plank that we could use as a slide and let gravity do most of the work for us.

So, we pulled the wagon over the lawn (which left divots in the grass) and got the wagon and the stone ready for sliding.  With some careful maneuvering, and levering, we managed to get the stone in place on the center column of the fountain's basin.

 Nobody had fingers or toes or tails or paws crushed.  (Yes, I did have to relocate Smokey, who had to sniff where the stone was going to come to rest.)

Once it was upright, moving the stone was fairly easy.  I rotated it with the smooth, polished side facing south, on the theory that it would reflect sunlight.  I'm not entirely sure that it will, as we have not been around at the same time as bright, direct sunlight in the yard.

Then came the difficult task of snaking the water pump's hose up the hole drilled into the stone.  I'm going to guess the water in the basin wasn't too much warmer than 45F.  I could probably stand to have my hand in the water for about ten seconds before muttering half-enunciated oaths, whipping my hand out of the water, trying to dry it off, shake it, and simultaneously shove it under my armpit to try to warm it up, all the while cavorting around in a little tight circle.

Eventually, I fed most of the hose into the stone, and was ready to turn the pump on.  Water flowed over the stone, and Mark played a version "Time To Say Good-bye" he had queued up.  I fiddled around some with the setting on the ball valve regulating the flow through the stone in order to find the sweet spot where not too much water flows out and then splashes out of the basin.

"Go get some colored rocks," said Mark, who did not want to come with me.  So I went to the landscaping place and started looking for rocks to cover up the plastic cover over the basin.   After some casting about, I found the bin of turquoise colored "pebbles," and began... sorting them onto a cart.   It did occur to me as I was selecting rocks based on on more-polygonal/less-spherical, more darker-blue-or-green/less-pastel that possibly I was being anal-retentive about rock choice.  Eventually, I got some black accent pebbles (which were more pebble-like and less very-large-ice-cube-like).

I sort of had a problem in that I wasn't sure exactly how much rock to get:  too little and the tacky, industrial black plastic would show; too much, and I'd have to figure out a use for the extra.  Also--as Mark pointed out later, if I got too much I ran an increased risk of overloading the basin's cover and having everything collapse on top of the water pump.  I wound up getting some fractured granite scales as well, on the theory that the sharp shapes would be an artistic contrast to the rounded pebbles.

 About ninety minutes later... I was heading back home with a car full of rocks.

Because I wanted the rocks to look nice, and because I didn't want them to get too much dirt and mud into the basin's water, I washed the rocks when I got home.   The water out of the garden hose was only marginally warmer than the water in the fountain's basin, and after a few minutes of rubbing the stones free of dirt with a cloth, I settled for soaking them for a few minutes, then spraying them off.

At some point during all of this, it started sprinkling, and I got some tea.

I placed the rocks around the stone with a growing sense of having gotten carried away at the landscaping place.  Mark came out an mentioned the weight of the stones, and also expressed some surprise that I had gotten more than one color of rocks.  He thought I was going to do some sort of yin-yang pattern.  I had a vague notion of quartering the turquoise stones somehow, or edging them with the granite scales, but the effect in practice wasn't as cool as I thought it would be.

I ended up concentrating the black rocks beneath the polished face of the stone, as if they were the dark continuation of a waterfall streaming off of it.   I think the effect sort of works.

Looking at the finished product, I concluded that the fountain looks "elemental," and "zen," ... which means that I'll probably be fiddling with the stones for a while until I can get a look that's more cultivated.   Very likely, I'll remove a few stones so the feature looks less cluttered or like a landscaping truck dumped a bunch of pretty rocks out of a truck and more like the stones were placed on purpose.

The sound of the water falling through the rocks, however, is perfect.  The next step is wiring the house with some outside outlets so Mark will feel less anxious about electrical mishaps.

New Fountain

Over the years, I've attempted to have some kind of water feature in our back yard.  I like them because the stillness of the liquid when the fountain is off provides an anchor to the landscaping, and also the sound of falling water helps to mask things like the rituals (or whatever it is) that the eight-year-old girls are doing two houses over.

For a while we had a little solar-powered fountain, which was nice in a bird-bath kind of way, and which the cats appreciated during the hot summer months, but which was more of a novelty than an actual water feature (also, it required a lot of fiddling with to keep the solar panel pointed at the sun).

When the large plastic, semispherical planter we'd been using for a fountain basin fatigued and cracked, we did without a fountain last summer, and the cats drank from a metal, shallow, shell-shaped basin (which was fine until I started to wonder if any lead solder or something decorative was leeching into their water supply).

This year I finally got enough gumption (and savings) together to get a more industrial-strength fountain.  I'd been skulking around a local landscaping shop, scoping out things like basalt columns and fountain basins for a few weeks.

Saturday, I dragged Mark to the shop to help choose a rock and fountain.  My fantasy would be to plunk ten-foot tall basalt columns at the cardinal points of the yard and install a baptismal-font sized column in the west with a brook-sized current of water springing out of it.  But, as just one ten-foot tall basalt column A) costs something on the order of $2000.00 and B) weighs easily two tons, and as I have not mastered Merlin's spells for moving the menhirs of Stonehenge, it seemed rather impractical.  Even a foot high basalt "bird bath" weighs around 300 pounds, so I ended up with something lighter (at an estimated 200 lbs) -- half a basalt column, cut at slightly inclined angle and polished.  It has a hole through its long axis for water to well out through.  I'm expecting the polished face will reflect the sun and be useful for telling the solar time.

The shop sold plastic reservoirs that are sturdy enough to hold about 500 pounds, a water pump, some tubing, and various piping features.  It all weighed in beneath our car's carrying capacity, and soon Mark and I had all of the stuff home (well, okay, we still need to get some fist-sized decorative stones to put around the column, but that's for later).

We had watched the guys at the shop load the column into the car and privately wondered how many years of lifting 200 pound rocks would result in a slipped spinal disc or something.  In our driveway, after a few abortive attempts at rock wiggling, we looked at the column, sitting on its side in the back of the car.  It didn't look impressive, and driving around town with a essentially a stone battering ram wasn't high on my list of things to do.

After about ten minutes of wiggling, fiddling around with various planks and levers of wood, we managed to maneuver the stone into a position where it would perch on the car's tailgate.  Then we carefully managed to slide it down a plank and into a waiting wagon (yes, we braced the wagon's wheels so it wouldn't roll forward).

Mark announced that he wasn't going to move the stone any farther without some proper equipment... which is probably wise, considering that various lumbar and scapula parts of my body reminded me Sunday (the day after) that they're over half a century old.  Unfortunately, I don't know a troupe of burly men who want to do a historical reenactment of moving Stonehenge stones.

The next step was fountain basin placement.  The original site I'd had in mind, right off of the deck's steps, was too cramped.  I thought about placing the basin due west of the lawn circle, but that plan was vetoed because it would harm plants and probably become a magnet for arbor vitae tree needles.  So it ended up next to the bonsai shelter.

Sunday.  Since our entire yard tilts along a southeast to northwest axis, I had to dig out a little bit of the ground to get a level site for the fountain.  Mark wanted me to put down pavers, too, on the theory that they would help to keep things level when the ground shifts because there's a 200 pound basalt column and (8 inches X 17inches ^2 X pi = 7263 ^3 inches ) 262 pounds of water on top of it.

One trip to the paver store later, I was digging a hole, and then pounding the bottom flat with a concrete paver and singing the Ewok Cooking Song, "Lukan Dukan Lu-la ..." And digging some more.  And pounding more.  And then laying pavers down and seeing if they were level.  Then picking them back up.  And pounding the ground (which has a high clay content).  And pinching my fingertips.  And singing some more.  And leveling.  And pounding.  And ripping a cuticle off of my thumb.  And trying to find more places to put the extra dirt.

At some point my rendition of the Ewok Cooking Song was interrupted by Mark, who said that he and the child were going on a walk.

Eventually, I managed to get the hole as deep enough, and as level enough, and wide enough to put the basin in.

Of course, I had to fill it with water, plunk the water pump in and plug it in.  No one got electrocuted or anything -- and when I turned it on, The Child said, "It looks like The Bellagio."  Mark started humming, "Con Te Partiro (Time to Say Goodbye)."

The installation was not finished, but it was getting dark, Mark wanted to go look at freshwater mammals at Delta Ponds, and my hands were hurting.  So we paused.  The next steps are getting the proper rock-moving tools, hiring an electrician to install an outside electrical outlet (to allay Mark's fears of some electrical catastrophe), and adding some decorative rocks to the top so the basin doesn't look like a giant's lost watering can spout came loose and fell into our back yard.