Yabba Dabba Doo

I've spent the last week or so working in my backyard. Well let me rephrase that a little. I've spent the last week working in the rock quarry known as my back yard. Technically it is called a desert landscape conversion area. Living in Las Vegas, having a lush green carpet for a lawn is an expensive and really wasteful proposition. So instead of making choices between fescue, rye, or whatever other kind of grass is available, those of us enlightened folks in Las Vegas choose between champaign, sandstone, redrock, or aztec. Those are the predominant types of rocks available for us to use in landscaping our yards. But first you must prepare your quarry, oops, I mean yard. You need to make sure the place is level and grass or weed free. You cover all of your existing dirt with a weed barrier so those pesky weed leftovers are not poking through your gravel when you are done. And you need to install drip irrigation to all of your desert friendly plants. [That's cactus type stuff for the uninitiated] When that's done, you bring in the rock. Which is kind of funny. Because here in Vegas your land grows rock! This is an amazing place. No matter how hard I used to work on my lawn, it kept spitting up more rocks. I don't get it. Yesterday we spread the gravel. We did it by hand because renting one of those things that Fred and Barney used was pretty spendy. Also, we went with the champaign colored rock because it seemed fitting in Vegas to have that color and, as a practical matter, it was few bucks less a ton. Yep, you read that right. We buy it by the ton. And this little 1400 square foot section took 12 tons. 24,000 pounds. Oh, and did I mention my wife wanted a few boulders? We got four of those, at 250 pounds a piece. Enough rock to make Fred's boss Mr. Slate of the Bedrock Quarry a very rich man. So now all I have left is to put in a few more plants, finish my drip lines, call the water company, and wait for my check. Because since I will no longer draining Lake Mead to try and keep a nice lush green carpet alive, they're gonna send me a nice fat check for being a crazy environmentalist. Yabba Dabba Doo!