I have to work tomorrow. Which sucks, because Monday is usually my day off, and which sucks more because I had a headache Friday and called in sick, which means I already used up the comp time working tomorrow would have earned me.
On the up side, we crammed a lot into my one day off this week. Ron wanted a rain barrel and wasn’t keen on spending $80 to buy one, so we went to the lumberyard and picked up a big trash can and a few fittings.
We took the dogs to the park, which was about as busy as I’ve ever seen it — not surprising, considering this is probably the last 85-degree weekend we’re likely to see before winter sets in. Song and Riggy had a good time bouncing around with a pack that included two Labs, an old English sheepdog, a Scotch collie, a Pekingese, a Labradoodle and several other enthusiastic characters. They wore themselves out thoroughly. (Riggy is snoring loudly as we speak.)
After a stop at McDonald’s for their usual cheeseburgers, we brought the dogs home and headed to Carbondale to pick up some odds and ends I needed from the Neighborhood Co-op, and then I spent the balance of the evening turning a trash can into a rain barrel and making that ice-cream-bucket biofilter I’ve been talking about all week. (We haven’t finished all the ice cream, but I scooped what was left of it into an old cheesecake filling tub so I could start my project.)
I haven’t tested the filter yet, but if it works, I’ll basically have $50 worth of filtration for about $8 worth of materials. Assuming they work as well as I’m hoping, I’ll post instructions for both projects in the not-too-distant future.
By the way, that pond remains one of my favorite projects. It requires a little effort to maintain, but it’s provided a constant water source for my bees and plenty of habitat for toads. I heard one jump into the water today as I stepped out the back door to check on the quail.
In other garden news, the lemon balm next to the pond is ginormous, and the arugula I planted in the fire pit this spring reseeded itself nicely, so we had a nice salad the other day, and I’m planning to make another this week. The Darwin Garden is alive and well. Yaaaaaaay!
Emily
Red Fork Hippie 
Next time you’re coming to Carbondale, give us a heads-up and maybe we can buy your lunch at Quatro’s. We were in St. Louis yesterday and it would not have worked, but there’s always next time.
I thought about seeing if you were up for Quatro’s, but we’d already stuffed ourselves at Broussard’s earlier in the day and were trying to get up there and back to the bottoms before dark to avoid deer.