Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about sundry things, but mostly about one thing. You may remember me from such posts as “Heavy Sighs”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s annoyingly hot, and it’s going to be annoyingly hot for some time now, which we both find annoying since they were talking about an “unusually wet monsoon season” even though Colorado doesn’t have a monsoonal flora like southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, west Texas, and states in northern Mexico do. We’ll still going along with the monsoon business but would rather have rain, like the word “monsoon” suggests, than a bunch of heat.

Even the resident bunny in the front garden would agree.
That’s one reason why the guy I live with got rid of the “stupid berm”. Bunnies like to lie there when it’s hot.

This cactus flower, on an echinocereus hybrid, is a metaphor for what’s about to happen.
Here’s another, less red one:
So you may be wondering about the title of today’s post.
The guy I live with decided to move some large, heavy, flat stones.  He said if you can’t get anything to grow in an area, just put a flat stone over it.
You won’t see such sophisticated gardening advice elsewhere, I bet.

I was a little concerned, because the guy I live with is pretty old, and he does, if you’ve been reading this blog closely, which is the only way to read it I think, have a tendency to injure himself.
It began with a previously-placed stone being moved “to a better place”
The guy I live with tried to impress me by telling me that the blade of this grub hoe is made from “Hitachi rail steel”, but I wasn’t really sure. You can see it’s easily holding up this very heavy stone.
I hung out in the shade by the back fence, not thinking about rail steel at all. I don’t even know what it is, and when the guy I live with started talking about things called “railroad tracks” my mind really wandered.
It wandered so much that I went back into the kitchen, where it’s cooler.

The guy I live with had looked all over the place for his pry bar, a large thing that’s really heavy and was in the garage when the guy I live with and his wife moved into this house forty years ago, but he finally found it, and did some prying. I hasten to add that in this case “prying” is a transitive verb.
Eventually another very heavy, flat stone was pried out of the ground (it was in a place where you couldn’t see it anyway, so moving it would be no loss to the grand design here), carefully placed on the dolly, and carefully moved to the back garden.
I came to look, too late to help.
My timing was of course perfect.

The soil here, according to the guy I live with, is “weird dust”, left over from the compost pile that’s been gone for over thirty years.
Since it’s dust, water doesn’t infiltrate it very readily at all, but it’s easy to dig in. Plants that need watering don’t grow well in this soil.

I spent a moment admiring the finished work, though I understood that the work wasn’t completely finished; there are more heavy flat stones to move.
That’s all I have for today. You can see that I have an expert knack for not being in the right place at the right time, where moving heavy objects is involved.

Until next time, then.