I did it! =] I was near tears when I came inside at dark-thirty last night. I asked myself how could something I enjoy so much make me so miserable and it hit me like a ton of rocks, lol. I was trying to create hubby's vision - not mine. And really, just the thought of tryin to get in his head is beyond scary, lol. Sooo...I was at the pond at 6:30 am, coffee in hand. I ripped out the mess, peeled back the liner & started on MY vision. Two hours later I was contentedly sipping my second cuppa joe admiring my work when hubs appears. Wow, he says, that's awesome! Did you do that??? Didn't know whether do laugh or cry. *chuckle* I spent the rest of the day adding fill dirt & top soil & planting the stuff I potted up to make room for the addition. Got the trench dug for my water line from the lower pond to the skippy which hopefully will go in tomorrow. Now if I can just put the brakes on hub's [armchair quarterback] enthusiasm. He's impatient to get the 3 ponds flowing together. Buttttt...my lower pond is crystal clear & the 2 additions are in full bloom...algae bloom, that is. I had to threaten him with a shovel to stop him from draining them to get rid of the algae, arghhh! Ah well...this too shall pass. I have a brand new waterfall/stream that doesn't look half bad. Nothing can stop me now, lol. I am a ponder! *grin* Couldn't have done it without y'all & your collective expertise...many thanks. I'll post pics of my humble lil watering hole as soon as it's up & running. Now I can get back to planning The Big One. Maybe next year.. blessings all around, digger

i'm not a literary person, but from what I can tell is that the style overall, reminds me of screenplay writing, e.g.: "Gathering up papers and his favorite plaid thermos, he tied them into a kerchief and fastened the satchel to the end of a stout length of devils walking stick. He stooped a final time to clear the doorway of his former lair. Tired, but resolute, he crossed the clearing, pausing briefly against an over pruned Shishigashira to catch his breath." What I mean is that the writing style is very descriptive in terms of both actions and local, and less informative psychologically in terms of the character. Psychological states of the character, I guess, are inferred through these very discriptive, or highly visual/cinematic passages - as in a screenplay. This last passage for instance can be viewed in terms of cinema as a shot. Where sometimes visual clues such as location and character gestures play a larger role in the telling of the story, rather than the actual character dialogue or narration: "Behind him, in the eerie calm of sunset, a single unobserved green leaf made no sound as it slowly drifted to settle neatly on a background of uncharacteristically red moss beneath the maple, signaling a natural, albeit most curious end to a tenured era." ...it's cinematic.

Aw - too bad your folks did that. I remember coming to the dinner table in tears; I'd been reading Grapes of Wrath, I was 11, and it was just way too much for me. My dad took it from me and asked me to wait a bit before I went back for it. It helped calm me a bit and gave us a chance to talk. Then he let me finish it. I don't think they ever censored anything I read. I remember reading a book about Pompei, but I was older. Very unsettling, but even more so as an adult when I got to see the remains at the Naples Archaeology Museum, and of course seeing Pompei itself. Wow.

I was invited to the wedding of friend's sister, along with another friend of ours. The bride was a pretty obnoxious, spoiled brat but we were very good friends with her brother and kind of felt sorry for her because she didn't really have any friends and wanted the biggest wedding she could have. The ceremony itself was fine but when we got to the reception, the MOB set my friend and me to work bartending. We were horribly embarassed (and had no idea how to bartend) but we muddled through it. What made it even more embarassing was when the MOB insisted on paying us at the end of the night. I have no idea where she got the idea that we were there to tend bar but suspect the bride had something to do with it. As an example of how the bride's brain worked (or not) we visited her home a while later. I was helping her with something in the kitchen and noticed a bunch of tiny labels sticking off of a windowsill. When I asked her what they were doing there, she said that her parents had given her some Waterford glassware they had gotten on a trip to Ireland. When she served guests she wanted everyone to know they were Waterford so she would leave the labels on the glasses, then take them off before washing them and then put them back on.