Here's a pic of how it looks from my office desk today - well, without the phenomenon of light bleed in the upper part of the photo (my phone camera can only do so much):

              

The waterfall is running - but just barely - and this end of the porch is covered in pots for plants, and plants that need potting (but, I'm grateful to say, no pot plants).

Since Ethel has been unwell with this kidney stuff, a lot of work hasn't gotten done - she's not there to direct the big muscle, and she's not there to do the green-thumb stuff like potting the plants. So progress has almost come to a halt.

We went to see the doctor this morning, and the good news is that it's not a kidney stone - which means that she's not likely to get a bunch more kidney stones. The bad news is that it's not a kidney stone, so we don't know what it is, and aren't sure what to do - but they have decided that she's developed an infection, so they've put her on antibiotics, which means that she'll be knocked out for about five more days.

The pool is nice - but sitting on a teak lounger beside a big pile of dirt is an experience that loses something in translation. We've got at least half of a load of dirt still standing, and ten tons of rip-rap that need to be moved before we can have the gravel delivered; the gravel is what will cover the pile of dirt, making it no longer a pile of dirt.

So a good bit of the weekend will probably involve wheelbarrows and shovels and caliche breakers.

Yesterday we started up the solar heater; at the end of the day, the water temp was 76. This morning, after a couple of hours of heating, it was 75. I'm not thinking that that solar heater was anything like the good investment that I was hoping it was : )  (update - I just checked, and now the temp is 78, so maybe things are working out okay.) The Ugly Baby is supposed to come visit this weekend, and get in the swimming pool; I'm not sure that he's going to be happy about water temps that might be in the low 80s.

I've decided that I'm not going to get to 40 miles/week anytime soon - in fact, I've dialed my expectations back to 20 miles/week. And that means several things - the first and most obvious being that I'm not going to be running at Imogene . If I assume I'm at 20 miles/week right now, then, with the 10% rule, it's going to take me 8 weeks to get back up to 40 mpw. And that means that all of the miles that I would have been running during those eight weeks, I'm not running.

It basically means that I'm starting over from almost nothing. And I'm just a little discouraged about that - the only reason I'm not more discouraged is that, having tried to run more than 20 mpw, I feel so awful that I don't want to run, so I don't have any pent-up emotions telling me to get out there and run; all I have is the despairing refrain in the back of my head telling me that I'm getting further and further behind the curve while trying to catch up.

My next body is going to be designed differently - I'm gonna make sure of that.