It's been a glorious weekend here. As I write this, it's about 7:30 pm and maybe 60 degrees. I'm sitting in my room with both windows open, folk music on the radio and birds chirping in the yard. It is hard, hard, hard to beat Michigan in the spring, I must say.

This weekend has been the weekend to get the pond underway. After much deliberation, we decided to get a pump to get the water out. (For a little pond, it holds an awful lot of water.) Here's a picture taken when about 2/3rds of the water had already drained:







That hole in the middle goes down about 2 feet further; at its deepest, the pond is about 3 - 3 1/2 feet deep.

It took some little time to get the water out, and we also had to figure out what to do with it. At first we tried bucket brigades to the garden and the compost and the shrubs around the yard, but it was kind of a lost cause after a while. Emil ended up hooking up the hose and draining it in the front yard (which is where it wants to go in the first place).

Then came the liner. And a break, while we waited for the pond to fill:





After we were sure we had enough liner, Emil made the channel from the sump pump drain pipe to the pond:















And best of all, it works!





And of course, it took Otto about five minutes to figure out something was up. (I swear, nothing escapes that cat.)







I'm sure he's waiting for the fish.