WHAT would the Beady-Eyed Orange Beast [BEOB] do for thanking and giving if they recount and prove his TRiUMPh was rigged when he’s already said it would be…but only if the loser actually had?  It’s reasonable to assume that his armed and deliberately undisciplined disciples will take it from there, with results even uglier than was evident in the  early days of the TRiUMPh.  Damned if ya do, damned if ya don’t…sore winners, sorer losers. Ouch, Umph, Umph.

Meanwhile Monday’s a frosty morning

with surveillance.

Tuesday brought a surprise [well semi-surprise] visit from Mark, the Mechanic, all white-bearded and twinkly-eyed for winter, who hooked up the 6″ pipe to the koi well, buried it and was gone in less than  two hours [see below]; in the grey low afternoon after Linda showed up; rain in the night rendered the day following coldly mudded but fair…

[all’s fair in mud and [old] dogs…]

with idiosyncratic afternoon interiors.

Ending…

Next day, day of Thanksgiving; we walk out into a frozen morning

of steaming newly-filling ponds,

psycho-delicate multicolored ice crystals festooning the local busheries

[hard to pick out here, but extraordinary]

and as the sun warmed the Magdeburg Sphere

back to the house to breakfast in, out being too cold even on the East Porch, thankful for shelter, for muesli, for the water and the day, yay, wherein I did a bit of backhoe backdragging on the east side of the lower pond before a magnificent feast of crab and cava with all the trimmings…

…maybe a bit too much cava as the Morning After, colder still, dawned in diminishment for we both, though both the koi and studio ponds had filled without any such thing.

A cold day with some last smoothing of the fill [not shown], creeping ever closer to the final grading of the lower pond [shown below, problematic].

Now if only the lower dries enough for Willey to finish, ah

we’d be thankful for that…

November; winter, hiver, shiver.

M