The Lake Wall

Put on some classic rock today, grabbed my knee-high Wellington boots and got to work re-building a section of a dry stone wall that collapsed during the winter/spring thaw. It is a retaining wall located on lakefront, and so with the two competing forces of frost heaves from the soil side and ice dams, the bottom of some parts of the 3-foot tall and ~75-foot long wall have been pushed toward the shore... and so what started out as a / shape became a \ shape ( some exaggeration as to that pitch, but it's the general idea). I originally built the wall back in the fall of 2004, and nature has taken its tool. You can see it at a lot of the waterfront houses at the lake, where most people seem to have resorted to haphazard stacking, likely b/c they kept losing the battle to the ice.

I've done a goodly amount of stone wall building, and as far as I know, all the rest of it is still standing. This lake wall is just an ongoing thing. But I learn from the failure --- what worked, what didn't. In this rebuild, I'm using some more massive stone toward the bottom, and I am better at the craft than I was in 2004. I'm also going to use the opportunity to put in some steps, using some even more stones that I've accumulated for that purpose, so people can more easily step down into the lake. Still, I don't know if it's going to hold up. In a docking area close by, the frost heaves and ice last winter each shifted two of the supports for the wooden dock --- the supports being half-'Mafia blocks' that weigh 2,000 pounds (read: a ton) each. Good thing for force majeure clauses. If I get a chance, I'll take a picture to share.

Wasn't such a good day weather-wise for such work outdoors, but I did have the canopy from some large maple trees. June has been an unbelievably rainy month this year; I believe we've now had four days of what could be described as good sunshine. Let's hope that July and August aren't totally dry to make up for the rainfall average.

In other news, as everyone not living under a rock knows by now, the self-proclaimed 'King of Pop' Michael Jackson died yesterday. I was not a fan. And despite the fact that he was acquitted on child molestation charges (alongside numerous out-of-court 'hush money' settlements), there was something seriously wrong with the man. Some people say that he was child-like, that he never grew up, blah blah blah. Regardless, his documented behavior around children was totally inappropriate. I admit to being a bit nonplussed at how many people continued to engage in such adoration, even after repeated allegations. My TV is going to be turned off until the Saint Michael love fest ends. Truth is, the world has one less pervert.