Something's Fishy

One of the side projects this year is having  to repair the pond at the Marriott, which sprung a leak on the waterfall part.  I pretty much have to take it all apart and replace the lining and possibly cement a new waterfall pathway, or at the very least, silicone the hell out of it so there's no loss of water when it's running.  With the water in it frozen right now, there was nothing much I could do yesterday with the repairing part.  It was my plan to fix that first before doing the clean up on the rest of the property this year.  With the idiot wedding planner last week booking an outside wedding for April 2nd in this area, it made it more of a priority to get going on it, but looking at the weather for the next 10 days, it's not supposed to get above 45 degrees, so I doubt that the wedding is going to happen, and neither is repairing the pond at this point.  How the poor fish can endure that cold water is beyond me... but you can see them in the picture in the middle of the pond, hovering together (orange Carp).

I spent yesterday in the creek over the hill, pulling big flat stones out of the water, then having to lug them up the embankment, load them into the truck and haul them to the pond area... then having to carry them about 100 feet because I can't get the truck close enough to where they're going.  These were the rocks that I was going to 'pave' the front of the pond with so that guests and employees who want to look in at the fish don't trample everything that I plant in front of the pond.  Three hours later, I was drenched from stepping/falling into the creek... and I managed to dig out the existing stones from the permafrost mulch around the pond and, giving up on 'paving' because it looked horrible, I just repositioned the stones around the edge, giving it a neat appearance, which will have to be good enough.  It's too cold to be messing with it right now, so I am back out into the parking lot today (where it's sunny and as warm as it can be (18 degrees here now)) for the rest of the week cleaning up beds and islands, getting ready to mulch early what I can to be ahead of the game, rather than behind like last year.  Taking over for the slugs that had the contract the year before gave me plenty of work to do that they didn't... but last year, I did a great Fall clean up, so I'm in good shape.

After yesterday, I came home not feeling well... cold, exhausted and flu-like, so I went to bed at 3:30 and short an hour or two of waking up here and there... I slept until 9:00 this morning.  Even though it's been about 80 days on the new diet and I lost 14 pounds while gaining muscle mass and lowered my body fat percentage to 16.2% from 20+%, it's obvious that I'm going to need to up my calorie intake to be able to do my job without passing out every day.