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last of the borrow pile
Saturday, May 30 2009
The clouds were gone and the air was clear and the sun was out and today's focus would be on the landscape immediately west of the greenhouse. I'd been piling soil against the west wall, but I wanted to restrict the scope of this pile with a retaining wall reaching westward (uphill) from the greenhouse's southwest corner. Over the years I've learned that retaining walls (and other structures of natural stone) are best when they're made from the largest possible stones. I'd pretty much tapped out the local supply of large loose rocks near the greenhouse, but there was another concentration of large rocks south of the septic field about a hundred feet away. I managed to harvest several brutes from that area using a handtruck.
After I'd built a reasonably-satisfactory wall, I busted my hump carrying buckets of soil from my remaining borrow/loan pile until it evaporated completely. Then I no longer had any soil left from the excavation. This was a key milestone of the project, particularly when you figure that this pile had existed since the greenhouse project began back in August. The sites of all the former borrow/loan piles are all barren, as are the mounds of fill piled around the greenhouse itself. I've planted some ferns and what not in the new topography near the greenhouse, but I don't know how well they'll do considering the lousy quality of the soil. I'd tried to save what topsoil I'd found to put on top, but there had been precious little topsoil, and what little I'd found had been buried beneath a thick layer of pebble-studded clay, part of the landscape rejiggering that had accompanied the construction of the nearby septic field back in the Grunge Age.
This evening Gretchen and I watched the most flawed movie we've ever seen starring Seth Rogen: Zach and Miri Make a Porno. It was directed by Kevin Smith, whom Gretchen hates. I could immediately see why in the clip of Kevin Smith doing standup comedy during the trailers. The humor was all of the backwards baseball cap douchebag variety. Such humor is incredibly popular, but then so is the Theory of Creationism. That said, the funny parts of Zach were actually pretty funny. Any dialogue coming out of Seth Rogen's mouth is immediately a classic, and Craig Robinson (the guy who plays one of the warehouse stiffs in The Office) is reliably good too. But the movie made the mistake of trying to be a love story too, and this aspect of it was dreadful. The lines, the swelling soundtrack music, it was all there, and it wouldn't have taken many changes for it to have all been a self-conscious parody of a love story, but no, it was trying to be serious. Craig Robinson should have refused to do that scene where he delivers the lines to Seth Rogen's character about how "the [porn] movie has no ending."
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