Yucky "Pucky"

As I enter these words into the Frog Blog I'm wearing blue nitrite gloves. Under the gloves are my hands lathered in petroleum jelly... That's Vaseline to most folks. Why, you may ask, am I doing this? I've been working on Humpty Dumpty Falls and have yucky "pucky" all over my hands. I read somewhere that if you lather your hands in petroleum jelly and put on the gloves for about an hour when you take them off you will be able to wipe the black "pucky" off. We will see in about 15 minutes.

One would think that if I have gloves to wear now why wasn't I wearing them when I was puck'n. I started out wearing gloves. I then found out that these gloves can't handle the rigors of sharp quartz stone. I also found out that once the gloves get a small tear in them it will run and the gloves basically fall off your hand. I also realized that if you leave your box of gloves in the garage and need to replace a glove it's really tough to do unless your going to quit what your doing and crawl out of the pond and walk to the garage and then back to the pond and so on and so forth....

Of course I found all this out on Monday! That's when I gave my first attempt to create Humpty Dumpty Falls. With "pucky" all over my hands and the stuff floating in the pond I stepped back to gaze upon my creation. It sucked! It sucked big time. I didn't like it at all. It had to go.

I put off taking the falls apart on Monday mostly because I was mad at it. I worked hard and it didn't look good, that made me mad. I should have been mad at myself because I created it but I like me too much to stay mad at myself so I stayed mad at the falls.

This morning I went out and tore it apart. I cleaned all the foam (pucky turns into foam) off the quartz and pond structure with a wire brush. Back to being creative at Humpty Dumpty Falls. I fiddled with it. I tried it this way and that way. I put it together and took it apart. What ever I did I wasn't happy with it. About 10:30 I realized I was getting riled again. I stopped.

I called my pond guy. My pond guru. He who knows all about ponds and water falls!!! I told him he needed to cancel all his appointments and get right over for an emergency meeting concerning Humpty Dumpty Falls. Well, not really but I did ask him to come over and take a look and point me in the right direction. He got here about 1:30 this afternoon. He looked. He said he thought I was a little too close to the job and was nit pick'n. Just put this rock here and a few like this and all will be well once the water starts flowing. He made it look so easy. He left. I got out another can of "pucky" and went to work once again. It took about 25 minutes of rock'n and puck'n and I was out of there.

It's drying now. I'm going to leave it alone until morning and then if it hasn't fallen down I'll try to finish it up so I can move on to other pond projects.

I'll let you know how it goes...