Digging and building


This morning I dropped the girls off for a walk around Green Lake with their classmates, then went to dig a ditch beside my house in which to bury a grounding wire.

Seattle soil seems to be a quarter of an inch of mud, and then nothing but rock, but I had both a mattock and an entrenching tool, and after about two hours I’d dug most of a slightly messy, ten inch deep trench.

After we’d been to the pub for lunch, I put the cable in the trench and then filled it back in again, so after three hours I had really nothing to show for it apart from a slight disturbance in the sea of mud that is our garden. Oh well.

In the evening, we drove to the Hyatt in Bellevue for some gingerbread construction. The girls both stuck vast numbers of sweets to gingerbread houses, and then we were treated to some dancing by the cast of a local production of the Nutcracker.

I’m used to watching the Nutcracker performed by the English National, so seeing it performed by non-elite ballerinas felt noticeably different, although I couldn’t specify how, exactly. Or maybe it was having them have to dance in a small square in the middle of a hotel ballroom, rather than in a regular venue. The girls were very happy (although also off their heads on sugar); after a couple of diverting hours we took them for dinner in a mall, and then realised on the way back that there was a parade going on through Bellevue.

And then home, where the children fell asleep mercifully quickly, and I could lament the exhaustion that all those hours of digging brings…


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