Added to the mix is our attempt to stain the furniture we had bought earlier. It turned out to be so windy that the spray painter I was using wound up with drops and streaks, so they didn't wind up looking so great.

Eliz is preparing to cut the peices for the concrete forms we will need for the posts. We opted to build our own as it is a wee bit less expensive and being square will be easier to get in the right spot when we finally get to that point. Behind Eliz and Donovan you can see the pressure treated wood we bought weeks earlier stacked to dry out.

Now Eliz cutting the plywood for the actual forms...

Here is Eliz actually assemblying the form sections. We built a jig for her and she was able to blast through them pretty quickly.

Here is Donovan being a good sport and helping out his Lolo (Manu Caloy) when he took over cutting the 2x4s for the forms.

Finally, some digging. What an adventure! We got the backhoe delivered on Friday and I played around with it a bit and was all set for Saturday, but Saturday we got over two inches of rain. Then, late Sunday when I thought it had dried out enough to start working again I started doing some digging for the pool (immediately found one big rock pictured below) when Eliz noticed a hydraulic leak under the machine. On Monday they swapped out the backhoe (though had to cannibalise some parts first), though the better part of the day was lost. So, when I start to dig again, lo and behold there is a _different_ hydraulic leak on one of the main hydraulic cylinders! Tuesday they swapped out that cylinder (probably from the one they took back Monday), though they did it in the rain. Because of the rain I didn't start using the machine again until that afternoon and when I finally got back to digging I noticed a yellow light on the dash, but it is in some incomprehensible icon that looks like a drop of oil, so I turn it off, thus endeth day 4 (the rental rep found out it was something I could ignore). The chances of pouring concrete this week got to zero; it rain several more days and I need at least a half day of dry time before I can start to dig without creating a big mess. Oh, did I mention that the ground water seeped into the hole? Fortunately that ebbed away.

Here is the first rock I quickly uncovered when I started to dig. Not quite as bad as the worst case senario I was worried about, but I did manage to find at least four large rocks that will need blasting, or rather chemically assisted rock removal.

Here Donovan gives a bit of scale to the rock.

Here are a few shots of Donovan operating the backhoe. He was actually doing a pretty good job and followed directions well, I was quite impressed.

Perhaps being a bit too ambitious we decided we would also put in a garden. A relatively small one by country standards, 25x35. We decided to put it right where we had had so much trouble cleaning out a bunch of sheet metal which we decided had to be a roof of a shed or something. Well, it seems that shed or whatever had plumbing as well as I dug up several copper pipes in addition to lots and lots of bits of metal roof and, of course, plenty of bits of wire and quite a few rocks. Not showin is the 6 ft fence we put around it in an effort to keep out the deer and rabbits.