rock on

Oh, to be a cat. And yawn a lot and stare nonchalantly at the world with not a care--unless you're hungry, of course, and then you think nothing of having to move the earth and the stars in order to get someone to feed you.

Oh, to be a cat. Cats don't have chores. I have chores. I have lots and lots of chores. I make lists of chores, and strike them out one by one while adding others two by two, resulting in a long line of things to do stretching into something very near infinity. I've never found chores so reassuring, but somehow now my chores have "meaning"--meaning I guess that I'm stuck with the results of my chores in a way that was never true with rental property.

And one of my ongoing chores is sinking the rest of the Sajima stones that were once part of the old house's foundation into the earth to make uneven stepping stones through the garden. I have finished embedding five of them, but I chose the smaller ones to start, which was a good thing, since I've found that it's a much more tiresome task than I first imagined.

The contractor finished the garden with a layer of new soil, between a couple centimeters up to about 15 centimeters, over the top of the clay and gravel that made up the former driveway. The old landlady had been conned a while back by a company that just dumped a load of gravel and charged her a fortune, and that's what we have to deal with--unless we want to dig up the entire place and replace it with better earth.

Anyway, I discovered that clay and gravel were not a welcoming medium for a shovel, so I've switched to a pick, and chop away, sparks flying, to make a bed for the stones. I'm guessing that they weigh around 100 pounds, so once I drop them in, it's backbreaking work to haul them out again (if the pit isn't deep enough, for example, which has been the case for every stone so far). This has kept me from doing more than two per weekend, since I find myself quickly looking for other, less taxing chores, like chopping wood, or pulling a stubborn cork from a cheap bottle of wine.