Spackle

The first coat of spackle is on! This is a seriously no-fun stage of work. It's not that it's so labor intensive, but it is very tedious. Every screw hole (of which there are many) and every seam between sheetrock sheets must be filled in to create a smooth and continuous wall. Once the paint is on, you don't want bumps and lumps and stripes showing through. The holes are easy, but the seams aren't. Ben's had practice though, so he's pretty good at it now. Once the first coat is on you must wait for it to dry. It shrinks in the process and sucks into the seams and holes, making an indent. So you do it again and yet again, until it's built slightly up. Then you sand it all down to make it perfectly flat, creating a massive cloud of dust that settles into and onto every single thing in the vicinity. And since you have to wait for it to dry, we can only do one coat per weekend, which slows things down.

Here's Ben with his spackle knife.

And me with mine. I did the screw holes.

I also planted two blueberry bushes. There's one under my hand.

It was hot and sticky, so ben took a dive into the pond and swam with our 10,000 pet bullfrog tadpoles. We may need to start a company selling gourmet organic frog's legs when they reach maturity. I've heard they can become a bit of a menace. And apparently they taste terrible as tadpoles so nothing eats them except for the blue crane. We've seen one visit- it's a beautiful bird- but very shy. He doesn't stick around if we're anywhere near, and he doesn't seem to be thinning out our stock much either.

We're hoping one day the pond will reach a place of balance where no one creature reigns supreme.