Rock: 2, Jason & Melissa: 0

The saga of the rock continues. For anyone keeping a running tally the score goes something like this:

Rock: 2 Jason and Melissa and any plan they come up with: 0

You have no idea, none, how sick I am of this stupid rock. For those of you wondering what on earth I am talking about you should

Finally the backhoe guy waves the white flag at the rock and surrenders. We had already tried to go around the rock with the ditch witch this weekend in the area to the right in the picture above. They ended up having to trench a little detour to the left in the horse pasture. No rock there. It took a few minutes to dig the detour trench, the water pipe was put in, the trench was covered back up, and the water line was ready to go.
Then backhoe guy had to leave as he had another job to get to. He had anticipated only being at our farm for a short while. Just get the rock out, easy as pie, done. Hahahahahahaha. A few hours later he has to go and we’re stuck with pieces of this boulder blocking the area where the gravel guys were supposed to start extending our driveway. I guess that has been delayed until backhoe guy can come back and drag/push our boulders off to the woods or something.
There is a lot I would like to say here but I won’t. I could mention that we really didn’t have to go to all of this trouble since we had already gotten down far enough with the Ditch Witch to bury our water line before we hit the rock but I won’t. I could mention that we could have just tried to trench around it on both sides, not just one, with the Ditch Witch but I won’t mention that either. I could mention that not only have we paid for the ditch witch and several hours with the backhoe, but now we’re going to have to pay someone to bring in a load of soil to fill in the crater left by the removal of the boulder-sized pieces of this rock, all over someone’s fixation with water lines being 2 feet in the ground. But I won’t mention that either.
In other news related to this freaking water line it is finally in and ready to go. Of course given how other things associated with this line have gone this didn’t go just as smoothly as it could have either. Jason was working away in the ditch getting filthy and gross while doing all of the plumbing to tap the new water line into the old one. Then there was a small problem.

This is not the face of a happy Jason; we’ve seen this face a lot lately

If the boulder wiped the smile off of Jason’s face this made it disappear completely for awhile. It has been a trying week. I am happy to say that all is working properly now.

I don’t even know what this was all about. I think it was just Jason taking his frustration out on something. I would hear sawing and then “bleep!” Then “Melissa find the hammer – now!!” So then we had sawing, “bleep,” hammering, “bleep, bleep!” Like people rubber necking to look at a wreck on the interstate the horses start to gather at both gates to watch the crazy people. They could have cared less about the backhoe and rock pounding, but gosh they love to watch us when we get worked up over something. Apollo says “Look Ivan, they’re starting to wave their hands around and yell again.”

As you can see this section of pipe was sawed and hammered into pieces. I don’t know why or what the purpose was. I just stopped asking questions at that point and watched along with the horses.

We now have another 1200 feet of water line. It works properly. We have some lovely new landscaping pieces to work with. My mom suggested maybe a landscaping company would want our boulder chunks as apparently sometimes these are used in landscaping design. I said “Mom, the problem is they wouldn’t own a piece of equipment large enough to move them. I think we are stuck with these things for life.” Hopefully backhoe guy will return tomorrow to move our new landscaping features out of our driveway.

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Rocky and Clayton Chili taking a nap Rampal and Johnny Mina watching Jo and Jason . . .