Even in the time it took to move the laptop from its position over by the outdoor speakers to beside my chair in the labyrinth, the light has vanished. It is dark. The fire is warm. How many more nights will I have to sit out here comfortably by the fire?

Anyway, here’s my thought for the day: it’s not finished, it’s not finished.

The astonishingly geometric arcs of the top half of the labyrinth stop short in a field of mud. I have to use a wire brush on my boots every time I want to go into the house. I got the other 3,000 pounds of stone moved this afternoon in record time, but it sits there in a cenotaph, unfinished.

There are only two weeks remaining before an audience sits down in a park to watch Coriolanus. It is not finished.

I keep seeing graphic images of music in my head. None of it is even started, much less finished.

The fire in front of me glows but does not flame. It is not finished.

The Ruby Red vodka tonic next to me shifts its ice in the dark. It is not finished.

My life, though wonderful in many regards, even enviable, is not finished.

The Innovation in its finished state:

Here’s a long shot:

Cat is not integral to The Innovation.

Anyway, I laid out the rest of the top half of the path:

I stopped on that outer outline; I’ve decided to build up the ground there so that the whole thing is more level. Ginny of course is appalled that nothing lines up and that it’s not as smooth as a parterre.

And finally, I used what remained of the stones to begin laying out the northeast quadrant:

You can see where I’ve scratched out a successive approximation of the rest of the course in the dirt. You can also see a couple of double-decker stones; that’s where I’m going to have to cut stones in order to make them fit into the curve. Still no solution for that.

And here is more Cat:

So, having used up all my stones, I will now wait patiently until the next pallet is delivered on Friday. Yes, class, this is what a ton and a half of stone looks like.

So I went and rented this:

Self-powered, huge, mama-jama rototiller. And it still couldn’t cut through the dry, hard-packed soil. I had to park it for a couple of hours while I watered the yard. That worked. I still was having problems getting it to dig in, instead of running away from me, until I figured out there was this little extendible bar between the rotoblades that I needed to lower so that it would actually drag through the soil and slow the machine down and get the blades to catch.

Then it was tutti all the way, as Prof. Peter Schickele says. By supper time, I had tilled the whole circle and raked it flat. It’s still a bit dicey on the far edge, where it dips down the slope, because when you rake tilled soil, all the vegetable matter ends up at the end of your raking, so that whole outside path on the northern side is for the moment a mite spongy.

Anyway, here’s what it looks like:

Those who saw it in person may be able to tell how much more of a plane the surface is now. My main goal was to even out the bone-jarring dip in the southwestern quadrant (to the left in the photo above). That has been accomplished. I’ll decide whether to build up that northern arc to be level with the rest of the yard as I go along.

Next: the excitement of using my new cutting tool thingie to begin cutting the stones for the center circle. Actually, the next exciting thing is to get that huge tiller loaded back into my van. A big thank you to Marc and Galen for providing the extra muscle necessary for that.