Ho Ho Hoe

We received a phone message last evening from our newly found electrician. Therefore we knew that someone was to arrive early in the morning to dig a trench from the house to the boat house. The purpose was so that electricity could be hooked up at the water's edge. We anticipated someone arriving with a small hand-held trench digger. But at 8:00 a.m., a large truck with a rather large backhoe/front-end loader on a rather large flatbed trailer arrived with two men... When they discovered they would not be able to get the machine down into our yard, they called a third person who spoke to a fourth who lives down the street to see if they could enter from his property and traverse yet another person's lawn ... Of course they could - after all, everyone here knows one other. Then two others arrived with heavy cable for the 200 amp service. After all, the boat house, which is really a large shed with large windows overlooking the water, is to serve as a waterside private pub.

The backhoe operator, who lives just down the road from us, dug a trench two feet wide and three feet deep from the house to the shed. In the process, he avoided all of our recent shrubbery plantings - We were amazed at how the operator manipulated that machine with ease, grace and precision. Once the trench was completed, the cable was laid and the soil was replaced, raked and patted down. Large rocks were disposed of on the shore and, afterwards, the place appeared, to our amazement, relatively unscathed. Afterwards, the operator dug up a large nuisance tree stump for us. Not only all of this, but then they took away all of our large and unsightly brush from the trees that I had pruned a couple of weeks ago. And one of the fellows replaced three outdoor lamps that had not functioned properly.

At one time there were seven of us standing around, which only goes to prove that "many hands make light work". In this case several lights that is.