Not the one I used to go to for money (although I do miss my friends), I miss fully engaging the choice I made to chronicle the life of the pond. How long will that be? Not the thousand or so years that a naturally occurring, spring fed pond can expect, and probably not much past my own life-span. So far, only Bill and I are interested enough in it to perform the daily labor that it requires, and I can't expect that to change. Generally, when the dreamer leaves, the dream dissipates. Not many artificial environments (companies, routines, ponds, etc.) survive their creators/most devoted servants by very long. But enough of that, it's almost as sad as dog years.
Anyway, these last three months (tomorrow) have been fairly uneventful. It has rained considerably up to the start of Winter, and then toward the end of December when it turned cold, it started snowing. Every night Kilo has been barking at something hanging around the pond, and the other morning when we went walking at about 6AM, a large grey bird flew off. It had long legs and a long beak, and my first impression was "crane", but I really don't know. Cashmere has a good enough camera to have taken a recognizable photo, but she doesn't get up that early. A bird expert comes by here fairly often to watch the advance progress of the ring necked doves that have entered SE New Mexico in the past 10 years, and the ruby throated hummingbird that hangs out at my brothers house, but he is fairly condescending and I'd rather not put up with a whole lot of that in my own yard. Last year when he came I mentioned that a kingfisher (looked like a demonic daffy duck) had been hanging around and he was skeptical and used a lot of scornful sounding insider bird-watcher words.
I got rid of the debris pile on the SE side of the pond, but haven't done anything with the plants that I need to clean out of the water. I may end up just leaving them alone, at least for this year. The literature seems to agree that optimum coverage would be about 3/4 of the surface, approximately where it is. I realize that we aren't following a recipe, and Bill's intuition is generally right on target, but it's a time issue and I don't think that waiting on that part will cause any system problems.
The herb garden has remained vital so far this Winter. I don't use the herbs, but I like the way they make that area smell when I cut them, especially the sage.