The Story of Mr. Bingles

 Once or twice a year, I go to California on a linen shopping trip. My sister-friend Colleen, above, and I always shop at a wonderful antique store (can't remember the name of it since we just walk in without looking at the sign LOL).

 These gorgeous curtain panels ($198.00/each) are made of white, off white or taupe linen. They're stunning!

 The same dealer uses linen and canvas to upholster old benches, make pillows, etc.

 This amazing white linen tablecloth is beyond words beautiful in person. Unfortunately, it's way out of my budget ($200.00). However, inspiration is priceless, and this definitely inspired me to create my own linen items.

 Anyway, back to Mr. Bingles.  While looking and digging for treasures, I found an adorable vintage cement cat tucked away under a dresser. He's a Siamese cat and even has blue eyes. He was marked at $88.00 in the antique store, but I was able to talk them down to $50.00.  Sounds like a pretty good deal...

 However, I was visiting CA, but live in TX. He weighs 16 pounds and I had to ship him home.

 Here's Colleen calming him down before putting him in the $23.00 box and peanuts for shipping. Plus I had to pay postage at $22.00. It cost me $45.00 to ship him!! LOL
But I HAD to have him to watch my pond.

Isn't he too cute! Mr. Bingles, you're worth all $95.00 to me.

Tranquil Pond

I mentioned in my last post that we just put in a pond. This is something we've always wanted to do, but never had the space for in California. I wish we could have had a professional install it, but that was WAY out of the budge (by thousands of dollars!) So we decided to try it ourselves.

Here are Floyd (my hubby) and Cody (one of my doggies) outlining the shape, size and location of the pond. The ground here in my part of Texas is mostly rocks and rock slabs. So we decided to build the pond up rather than digging down.

We built a rock "retaining" wall up using stones we found, bought and dug up from the ground. Filled in the sides with purchased dirt, and laid the liner.

After we laid the liner, skimmer and water fall, we got a truck load of more rocks! It's amazing to me that with all the rocks around us, we had to buy more.

The preparation for the pond took many week-ends, but we built the liner, rocks and put in the water in one weekend. After about a week, we added plants and fish.

Finally finished! It was waaaaay hard to do. It was so labor intensive that I was only happy that we were done. I wasn't happy with the pond at all! However, that quickly changed now that the memory of the hard work is getting farther and farther away.

I've only had the pond for a short time, but we've already had so many stories revolving around it. I sit at the edge almost every day after my morning walk and do nothing except for feed the fish, watch the birds and spend quiet time with God.

Lots of easy to care for plants line the edges between the pond and the retaining wall.
Planted inside the pond and along the water's edge are calla lilies, miniature cat-tails and water lilies.

This is the back view of the rock wall on the path side. It's dry stacked and amazingly stable and strong with the dirt holding everything in place.

I almost forgot to include a photo of my fishies! We bought 14 little gold fish and two little koi thinking that most of them would not survive the "new" water. Not only did they all live, but they're growing fast! The two white ones are the koi that are named Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb.

I hope you enjoyed my pond-building adventure. There's still so much to tell you about our little bird, frog and snake friends who come around for a visit. But that will wait until later.

Blessings!

Patricia :o)