Pool Party?

        I dreamed I was visiting Mom and Dad when I heard chipping and grinding noises coming from the neighbor’s back yard. I went around the side of the house and jumped down into their yard from the retaining wall. The neighbors were on their pool deck, grinding hollows in the stone decorations around their pool. D was grinding away with a roto-tool and R was staining the lips of the bowl shapes a dark red. I couldn’t figure out why they were doing what they were doing, but they were making rapid progress with power tools.

“We tried just using rocks, like our Indian ancestors would have used, but it was taking too long,” D explained. She pulled her hair back and went after another stone with the roto-tool, sending rock dust everywhere. I noticed that they had covered the pool with a clear sheet of plastic that was now full of rocky dust.

R showed me a drawing of what they wanted to do with the bases of the stone towers, essentially, carve them into a sphere.

        R handed me a drill with a large hole-saw. D asked R and me how that was supposed to work. I took out a pencil and quickly sketched out how the circular cut would be repeated from many angles to give an almost spherical shape. We would then use the drill to smooth the shape out from all directions. It wouldn’t truly be a sphere because we were going to leave a bit of the stone at the top and bottom to connect to the other stones in the stack. D still didn’t get how it was going to work, so R and I drilled a sample into a piece of scrap 4x4 they had left over from their deck construction. I was amazed at how quickly the carving went.

        I have no idea how I got sucked into helping with this project.

Ad astra per technica,

FF