Ponds!

I'm quite excited -- I now have 2 ponds in my backyard!!! I have been wanting a pond for a while and at long last my wait is over. Of course the one in my head is very grandiose with a 3 or 4 foot waterfall and all the works but to be practical we scaled down. It wasn't going to be so soon but a couple weeks ago we were talking about getting sod to replace where the boys have spent the winter doing their business. It was beyond saving.

We had looked at ponds before that and tentatively decided to do them later this summer. As we sat at breakfast one Saturday Steve said "you know, I'd rather just put ponds in now than to buy sod we'll remove in a few months." So instead of buying sod that day, we purchased pond stuff!

There are a few more details for Steve to work out as he's had to add electrical boxes and run wires but overall we're about there.

Here's the funny part. Of course you knew there would be a funny part because it's us, right? We've made at least 20 trips to Home Depot and/or Lowe's as well as random trips to other hardware stores. Some of it was us changing our minds but mostly it was problems in finding parts that went together. Can you believe everyone sells pumps but nobody, and I mean nobody, had the right fountain heads. What the?!?!

We went to one store and bought 2 medium pumps and 2 large fountain heads. I thought "large" meant the height and amount of water that came out. Nope. It means "fits a large pump". Oops. We took back the fountain heads to exchange for medium. They didn't carry medium. So I asked "why do you have medium pumps then?" They didn't know but they happily returned our money. So then we looked everywhere for medium fountain heads but couldn't find any so we took back the medium pumps to exchange them for large ones and were going to re-purchase the large fountain heads. They don't have large pumps. I was fairly amused. Why do they have large fountains but no large pumps? Their buyer should be fired.

In the end we bought some copper tubing and Steve made our fountain heads. Pretty dang good job too! It may be hard to tell from the pictures but we'll give it a try. The first picture is with a flash which helps to see the pond; the second is without a flash to see the lights in the pond. I'm sure you're as thrilled as I am.