Southern California Wizard

New doings around the Windy Mesa.  We had a large frog plug up one of the spouts of the water barrel garden fountain a while back and we lost a lot of water.  After I removed the frog and refilled the barrels all was well.  At least I thought so.  A week later we had hundreds of tadpoles swimming around all the barrels.  We thought about how are the little guys going to survive?  As you know, they grow up to be frogs and they won't survive in water, they'll drown if there is not a landing zone for them to crawl out once their lungs develop.  I put in concrete blocks and other rocks, thinking well, the strong (and few) would survive.  Once Kathy heard that, she lamented that she wanted to give them the best chance possible.  They only way that could happen I said is if we had the pond that we were planning to do sometime next year or so.  That's all she needed to hear.  Out came the shovel and she started to dig the pond that weekend.

Well, here it is a week later and we now have a small pond for the pollywogs and fish, something we were planning for, just not now.  Oh well, best laid plans and all that.  You can find the pictures of our progress in the photo album.  we learned a lot about building a pond.  Things like what to do and more importantly not to do.  This is our practise pond, in anticipation of creating our large pond later, but you never know.  We could have turtles appear and force us to dig that sooner than we expect also.

Well, we had our open house party, finally.  It was supposed to be a beautiful spring day.  Birds chirping, bees buzzing and with the pool heated, hopefully people swimming.  Since we had an open invitation for all, all day, lunch was served and a full dinner at night.  It was all planned and everything was great.  One thing we couldn't plan on, however, was the weather.  It snowed!  Yep, it started around noon and by the end of the day, we had 2-3 inches on the ground. We had a great time anyway.  The kids got to have snowball fights, make snow wo/men, and snow angels.  We moved the party inside, so it was a little cozy, with 30+ people in the house, but it worked out just fine. In a few days the weather turned warm again and Sheridan and her friend got to get into the water and had fun in the pool. We're gonna try again this summer for true BBQ and pool party this time around July/August when I think we can count on warmer weather, hope it doesn't rain!