Life's A Beach

It's 4:10 am and the sandman is done his work for the night. I'm listening to salsa music...if you can't sleep you can always dance, truly the best form of exercise there is.

Did a bit of work on my beach yesterday. This has been an ongoing project since 1999. I hauled a tonne or more of rocks and lots of driftwood up from the real beach and surrounded my deck with them. It can be high maintenance keeping it weed free and broken rocks have to be removed. The steps coming down to the beach are stone, covered in rubble rock. The cats love the beach; they roll and stretch, scratching their backs on the rocks and there is a patch of catnip under the deck. That adds to the maintenance too....catnip must be kept under control. I need to completely overhaul the back section but need the use of a truck to go down to the real beach with to haul up some more rubble rock. It's best done in early spring before the grass starts to grow but I've missed that deadline.

Some of the large driftwood is double duty. It acts as something to tie my sails to. When I was in Australia I bought shade cloth and had a sailmaker fashion two triangles with heavy-duty rings at the corners. I suspend them over the deck by tying them to the driftwood and some hooks on the house. It makes a huge difference as the deck has a southwestern exposure and gets really hot in the afternoons. I've had the hammock on the deck already but it will be a few more weeks before I put the sails up. We have to lose that northwest flow of air that we've been getting to warm things up.

This post has taken some time as Clark is sleeping on my left arm (yes, through the salsa) so I am typing one handed.