Listen, I know this photo doesn’t look like much to you. It looks like a big puddle of mud. And you might ask yourself: is it time to stage an intervention? She’s going on now about a mud puddle. She needs help. Nothing I haven’t heard a billion times…. look:

But, okay, listen it IS a big puddle of mud. I know this.

But more importantly, this big slurp of mud represents the breaking of ground of Project Crapshack. And more accurately, it’s called a swale.

Stay with me here: do you see the muck to the right of the swale? That’s what our entire half-mile-long driveway (such as it is) was like. It wasn’t the bucolic grass-up-the-middle driveway of our dreams. It was a goddamned Muck Canal, and canals are for Roots and Venetians.

You see, there are lots of tiny little springs pissing out from beneath The Big Ledge, which is great, in that we’re not likely to die of thirst up there. But without anybody telling this water where to go, it just rolls right down the road. And so, we dug a ditch (the ditch you see here. Or rather, the SWALE.), gods of water that we are, and minutes later, everything to the downhill side of the swale dried up, miraculously (because we, gods of water, perform miracles with it, get it?)

I’m going to say that again for emphasis: we dug a fucking ditch, man. With shovels and teeth clenched and mud traveling to parts of our bodies that had never ever been compromised.

And the whole point of this entire mad diversion is, of course, that it’s begun. Groundbreaking, literally and metaphorically (and not literally AS metaphorically, like “I was so excited I LITERALLY shit myself. I mean, why do people say that? Do they not know that to be so excited as to lose one’s bowels is probably not something to brag about? But, in fact, is probably a reason to lock oneself indoors for a very long time.)

In any event, ground has been broken, selves have not been shat, and there’s more where this came from.

And just to celebrate the benefits of jailhouse labor, I’m introducing a brand new feature called CHECK OUT MY BIG MUSCLE. You can watch it grow!