Like a cat brings you a mouse, or like Columbus brought a group of Indians to Queen Isabella, I presented Ethel with this nice valve manifold the other day:

                     

In the movie Napoleon Dynamite, Napoleon asks Pedro how he's going to ask Summer to the dance. Pedro says "Build her a cake or something."
                  
This tradition of the male presenting the female with a trophy or prize to win her favor goes back a long way.

Ethel has as one of her projects the design and installation of an inground irrigation system for the Chocolate House. Her design has four different zones - three drip and one sprinkler. So she needs four valves; the above manifold should fit the bill. I built this the other day out of PVC - it was ridiculously easy. There were a couple of places, though, where I had to really think about my choices, since once you glue the PVC together, it doesn't unglue; one thing was where I decided to place the values this far apart. I had them closer, and then I realized that if something went wrong with one of the values, that I wouldn't be able to unscrew it - I'd have to cut off the PVC and rebuild from scratch.

Now comes the hard part - we're borrowing a trencher to do the digging. A good bit of the smaller stuff is already in the ground, but when it comes to putting in the trees, we're going to have to rent a jackhammer - the caliche is about six inches down, and it seems to actualy be harder than concrete.

There's one stretch, though, where it will be easy - along the west end of the yard, where they pushed out the fill from where they dozed off the build site. That's where the pool will go (when our ship comes in) and that's where I'm planning on placing a row of trees to shade the west end of the house (not that that end needs shade, but still I can't help but think that someday that sun will actually melt the west wall if I don't put something up out there).

We've talked a lot about which kinds of trees we want to put up, but right now - while I'm typing this - I'd just as soon have ALL of them be various types of citrus. I mean, if we're going to dig a hole and water it, why not make the tree pay for the privilege? Have it pay rent, so to speak?