I was sitting by the window and working away on something that I deemed interesting enough at the time and I happened to glance up and lo and behold, there was a heron in full view standing on the edge of the 5000 gallon pond. I carefully reached for my camera and snapped off a couple of shots before opening the back door and scaring it away. Damn, those birds are big. You don’t realize it until they are in flight and they have their wings spread open. They have a six feet wingspan on a full grown bird and they look like a modern day Pterodactyl. I hope that I scared him enough to stay away although that pond is too deep for it to wade in. I suppose that it could fish from the bank. Most of the fish are way to big for it to lift out of the water but if they try, they usually damage the fish enough to kill it or it dies later with their attempts to get it out.

I spent some of the afternoon digging a hole and planting the cypress tree that used to stand in the 6000 gallon pond. I wrote about it before and you can catch those blogs at these links here and here. I had uprighted it a couple of time previously and this time, I determined that it was way too big for the pot and had either to replant it in a bigger pot or get it out of the pond and plant it in the garden. I chose the latter option as it was really difficult to move it around in the water by myself. The tree now has a permanent place in the bottom corner of my garden and will probably outlast me.

While in the pond and dragging the tree out, I took care of a couple of other chores one of which was to re hook up the frog fountain statue in the center of the pond that had come disconnected and then clean out as much debris and leaves that I could. After finishing and by now, well and truly in the swing of things, I transfered my attention back to the 5000 gallon pond off the deck and rehooked the Urn bubbler backup that a jumping fish had inadvertently knocked over. I had to rebuild the blocks that the Urn stands on as they had collapsed when the fish knocked the Urn off of them. I also fished around and dug out a couple of extra concrete blocks and several pots that had gotten submerged when one of the shelves gave way. This created another project of cleaning out as much debris and leaves as I could. Finally, with all of the chores taken care of, I collapsed into my hot tub to try to ease the aching joints and muscles as in the good old British jargon, I was “knackered”. I sure do know it nowadays if I have any amount of heavy duty work to perform. Not like when I was young when I could work forever and never get tired. Damn I hate growing old. On the other hand, it is a privilege not shared by everyone so, at the same time, I am really grateful.

Written 4/15/2020