...then at least you realize that there's nothing that you can do about it :)

Some time back, Silas and I used our manmuscles and a big steel stick to move some boulders from on top of our hill down into the yard, in order to add a few points of interest to the landscaping.

Here are a few of 'em:

                              

I daresay that we were fairly proud of our work. Maybe it wasn't great, but it was ours - we'd done it ourselves, with our own sweat and noggins.

Well, the house next door finally sold - and the guy who bought it owns an excavation company.

A nice young fellow, I reckon, although we haven't spoken much. He's definitely what I would call "Generation X - black clothes covered in Gothic lettering with names of bands like "Pierced Bleeding Nipples", one of those strange beards that just juts down from the chin and is about six inches long - you know. Fashionable. Trendy. With it.  All the things that I'm not :)

His yard, like mine, was just flat desert with low-grade gravel cover, and he obviously wanted to spruce it up a bit.

But he's not like me. He's not a 49 & 364/365ths-year-old leaf-node cube-dwelling software engineer; he's a guy who owns his own construction company

So he brought in his bulldozer and his backhoe and trailer trucks full of dirt, boulders and big honkin' Saguaros and Joshua Trees, and he built THIS berm out in his front yard:

                     

He did this by himself, in just a few hours, with just his little backhoe and a zillion dollars worth of materials.

The above picture is how it looks from the street, out in front; it's not until you see it from behind that you get an idea of just how much earth this guy moved in the process of building this -

                    

Now, I'm telling you, this yard was FLAT. But it ain't flat anymore.

I thought that that big rock at the top reminded me of something; having seen 2001: A Space Oddyssey, I wanted to hunker down, move up to the rock on all fours, touch the rock, and throw a bone in the air. (Ethel said that it reminded her of the tower of Dulac, in the movie Shrek, and she wondered if he was compensating for something? I pointed out that the guy was a young, successful business owner with his own heavy equipment and he could move huge boulders around with a flick of his wrist; he's not compensating for anything :)
 
The real pain about all this is that we won't actually get to SEE this gorgeous bit of landscaping from our house, because the view will be obstructed by the semi-rig:

                       

No, he's not a truck driver; as I already mentioned, he owns an excavating company. No, that trailer is how he transports his racecar.

And the fencing? That's the temporary pen for his two Rottweilers; they have a doggie door in that west wall, to let them into their room; they have the secondary master suite in this house.

Yep. He owns his own construction company, he plays with bulldozers and backhoes and tosses big boulders and caci around, owns his own semi to transport his race car, and keeps massive male Rottweilers in the luxurious style to which they have become accustomed.

Since he moved in, I've been doubling up on my dose of Viagra, but to no avail.

And it's been difficult for me to go back out into the yard and work on my own landscaping; not just because of the humiliation factor (althouth that's definitely there :) but also because of what I call the Machine Gun Syndrome: when machine guns were first introduced into infantry platoons, the first effect was that they noticed that many soldiers stopped using their rifles. The closer that the soldiers were to the guy who had the machine gun, the fewer bullets they fired. They couldn't see any reason to shoot their guns, since the machien gun was obviously doing more damage than they could ever hope to do.

That's how it is now, when I walk out into my yard to dig a hole; I pick up the pick and shovel, look over at Dulac, and suddenly all my gumption just drains out into a little puddle that soaks into the hard, dry ground :)

If anything, this should give me an appreciation of my own inadequacy - my other neighbors are an airplane mechanic and a PhD.

Ethel wonders why I'm having a mid-life crisis : )