CXLVI and counting. Let’s Rock

“ CXLVI? Huh?”

“ Yes, m’lud, it’s the old way of saying these new-fangled numbers that they have been using in Londonium . It’s the way this invading Emperor Julius does numbers – it’s 146, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Huh? 146? What’s the significance?”

“ None, m’lud. It’s a fact: its the number of submerged rocks that we’ve dug out of the lawn so far. And we’re not done yet. It could conceivably be as many as CLXX, or perhaps even CC. Who knows?”

No, I am not talking to any strangers. Just thinking aloud, what it would feel like if I suddenly made a significant “discovery”. You see, the lawn-mower blades take a regular hammering from all the half-buried half-exposed pebbles, stones, rocks and boulders. Its not as if the rocks jump out and try to hammer the mower blades, they simply whack the stones as if they’re blades of grass. And then , wham!

I have devised a cunning plan to cheat the rocks of their weird pleasure : I will remove them all and banish them to the Land of Harmless, which is situated under one of the trees on the northern boundary.

Easier said than done, I have discovered.

Rocks, especially boulders, are much like icebergs. A tiny bit sticks out above the ground, just enough to whack the lawnmower blades. But more rock, anything up to fifty times its size, lays out of sight, buried beneath the surface, just waiting to smirk at me.

Locate and eradicate. That’s my current motto. And its easy enough. Except for boulders numbers LXX11, LXXIX and XC. Yes, yes. 72, 79 and 90. Here is a photo of XC. His dimensions exceed that of our garden wheel-barrow, and his weight is in the ultra-obese category in boulder-speak – even for a river rock.

 
Then, while I was grunting and huffing and puffing in my feeble efforts to get him released from his cosy bed, Brynn came skipping along the grass.

“Hi Grandpa. What a humongous rock you have there! Is this perhaps the meteor which fell out of the sky and killed off all the dinosaurs? It looks like its big enough to kill a dinosaur.”

I agreed with her that the boulder certainly looked heavy enough the give at least one dinosaur a ticket to the next universe. One might wonder how such a large rock came to be here in the first place. I have not been able to lever him out of his grave without doing myself an injury, so I will wait for reinforcements. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with him.

Oh well, enough of this idle chatter. I need to get multiple barrow-loads of sifted sand and cart them to fill each of the void created by the rock removal process, and to top-dress the lawn in those areas.

 
(Above): Some of the rocks which have been removed and relocated on the northern boundary out of sight. And out of reach of the lawn-mower blades once and for all.