rock hunting

No photos today. We spent about an hour in the back yard collecting rocks. Really!

I (Toni) had a long conversation yesterday with my friend Judith B. about rain chains/cups. As I am sure you all remember, we are putting two up, to go through holes in our deck, out the drain pipe and into what will hopefully become a dry creek bed (sometimes wet.)

The issue both Judith and we have is whether or not these rain cups can handle the heavy rain we often have here in Ohio and sometimes have in California. I've got my fingers crossed a bit, because we can't afford the biggest ones ($450 for rain cups! Try again).

We had a brainstorm last night. If we put rocks/stones around the drain pipe under the deck, some of the overflow (if any) might be diverted and flow more gently onto the dirt. And our backyard is FULL of stones.

I think some of them might have been there since the Ice Age. No kidding. This part of Ohio was the edge of the big glacier. We even have a suburb of Dayton called Moraine. Lots of debris, including stones, were washed down from the north and sort of settled here. So, some of the stones are like river stones, round, almost polished.

Since it is going to be in the 90's today, Len and I went out first thing this morning and dug up and collected stones. We lasted about 30 minutes. Our 60+ legs couldn't handle much more.

We'll see if this works. We LOVE the way the raincups look. If any of you are interested, we got them at www.rainchains.com.