Good news!

It rained like crazy. According to the weather chart (I don't have a rain gauge), we got about 2.5 inches.

The pond is nearly full now. The creek flowed like crazy and filled it up in the middle of the night. Unfortunately so did the root cellar. There's about a 4" of water down there. And exactly what I was afraid of happening down there, happened. One end of the main beam where it was resting on cinder blocks shifted slightly. The cinder block had a lot of weight on it, apparently, and when the ground got soaked it sank down. So now we're going to have to pull that dirt off the top of there and redesign this somehow. I'm thinking maybe cinderblocks and some posts set in concrete would work. I didn't account for the squishiness of the mud when it got that wet. Ah well.

The garden is looking pretty good but something tore up my watermelon plants. I had a bunch of baby melons out there and now they're all disconnected from the vines. I don't know what could have done that but I guess it's time to start considering the fencing around there with a lot more seriousness. I've been holding off on that fencing because I didn't really know how much I wanted to expand the garden area. Now that my water problems are solved for the year (to the tune of about 1.45 MILLION gallons of water) I simply have to decide what is going to grow where.

Things are good here as we go into the weekend! I've got a custom order to work on over the weekend that will do me pretty well and a shipment of these smallish-type bowie knives that came in. They're nice working knives and I'm excited to see what I can do with them.