The Avant Garden

So do your best to like it, though my feelings won't be hurt one bit if it leaves you cold. It looks cold:
The Roadside Serpent in Bent Creek would shiver if he could.

This closeup of the first hump and head gives a better idea what the temperature was:
Are those considered icicles?

I had gone to Bent Creek only a week earlier and rebuilt the Roadside Serpent (and a coffee table):

I try to keep the Roadside Serpent standing alla time.Rob came over to the Avant Garden Proper that same day and we rebuilt the DivinoStack, which had succumbed to the elements:
I hope Ron Divino is doing well, wherever he is

We also fixed up the 3-2-1Arches, but didn't photograph them. The Avant Garden Proper was looking good there for awhile, but then a series of winds came blowing down the Swannanoa Valley and things fell like they'd eaten Peter Pan peanut butter with extra salmonella. Dang Nature!

The Unphotographable Herd of Arches is still standing without a casualty, as seen here in a photo, and viewable here on YouTube as The Videographable Herd of Arches:

as in, not enough snow to play in but enough to have stuff on the road that messes up the car and the kids miss school. I still venture out, like the night I did this rock-in-nest thing in the park near my house:

A little too cute for my taste, but ...

I went back down to Georgia to see Grandma (she's going home soon) and went to the "Where Gum Creek goes under Dial Mill Road" rockpile to find that they have had some high water. I was very proud of this guy for standing up to it:
So I named him Toughguy

I like this photo because of the different textures the two "bodies" of water give:

It's at the downstream rockpileWhile down at the Downstream Rockpile, I also did a stack influenced by one of my favorite movies ever: Freaks.

 Actually, it started out to be something different but ended up being sideshowesque, in an Avant Garden sort of way:
We accept her! We accept her!

On Saturday we had a high of 55F, so I put on the waders and fixed up Rob's Arch again. We're calling this one version 17. It has become part of Rob's landscape furniture:
This is in my top five of all Rob's Arches.

 The water was a chilly 42F, but I was well-wooled. Or is it, "I was wooled well."? Either way, it took three tries and about 45 minutes, but I did it. That stone island seems really small when it has 300 pounds of balanced stone in the center.

This is a tough thing to photograph, but here are all three of Rob's trio of dang big stacks:
Make a bid on these three pieces, together or separate! 

 This is a closer-up of my favorite of the three, which has withstood some pretty serious Swannanoa Valley wind:
This one is in a good contemplation space ...

 I'm still sewing and stacking, stacking and sewing. The fact that I work at a newspaper prompted one of my neighbors to comment that I live that "rock, paper, scissors" game. Cute. But I never enjoyed that game when I was young and always lost. That's my life?