We are flagpole-ready!

We are flagpole-ready!  Now we just need the flagpole!!  This little project got delayed by the 2.5" of rain we had earlier in the week.  The rain hit while the concrete was curing (that's actually good!) and I had large piles of the excavated soil next to the concrete.  The rain turned the soil into glop that formed itself all around the underlying grass – and then turned into something approaching the hardness of concrete when it dried out.  It took me about eight hours of hard work with a garden rake to break up all that hardened clay and get it up and out of there.  That'll learn me – if I ever do something like this again, I'm putting a piece of plastic under the dirt pile!

You can see some roughly laid sod around the concrete.  I'm not concerned with that, because in the spring I'm going to do something that my brother Scott thought up: plant red, white, and blue clematis around the concrete and train it up a to-be-designed arbor.  That will not only add some nice color to the otherwise plain green grass, it will also hide the concrete – and the lights I'm planning to put there (to illuminate the flag at night)...