Totally digging it

Chris, our pool guy, was telling me some construction war stories when Wade rolled up with his giant backhoe.

Yes!

Chris had already spray-painted the hole borders in the back yard, but there was the small matter of the rebar poking up on the side of the house between Point A and Point B.

That turned out to be no matter at all: Wade used the bucket like a big, heavy hand to bend the rebar out of the way like a kid bending licorice.

Before you knew it, the bucket was scooping up a few layers of urban archaeology, and then scraping limestone (the white layer in the picture at right).

While he was plumbing the hole to see if the deep end was 5 feet down yet (it wasn't), Chris noticed the source of the bottles, pots and other urban detritus -- an old well right under his feet at the edge of the lot.

There's a great, big low-pressure system out over the Gulf, and we'll see if heads up to Naples or turns our backyard into the neighborhood's biggest mud puddle.