Here's mud in your eye

It's spring here at the moment, that means spring cleaning.

Last weekend we decided to clean the pond in the backyard. With all the goldfish poo in there it was starting to get a bit yuck and the algae and plants were starting to choke it. We thought we'd clean it out, get rid of the goldfish and put back the tadpoles Donna had rescued from it a couple of weeks earlier.

The easiest way to clean it was to empty it out and then use a broom, so I put on my diving boots and gloves, grabbed a couple of buckets and jumped (stepped very carefully) in.

As the vege garden doesn't have much in it at the moment we put most of the water and fish poo on that, I'd fill the bucket and Donna would empty it.

Once we got as much water out as we could and the fish had all been transferred to another bucket we started to pull out some of the plants. With all the sediment and decayed matter that had built up over the past couple of years in there the plants had quite a bit of mud for their roots to hang onto. As you can imagine, the wet mud made it quite heavy and meant we had to pull it apart into smaller clumps to get it out of the pond.

Donna was beside the pond pulling while I was in there lifting.

At one stage when we had about half of it out I slipped. I did a quick reverse impression of Michael Jackson's moonwalk, put one hand on a huge rock at the side of the pond, and managed to stop myself falling into what little water was left in the bottom and squashing the five marsh frogs that were in there.

Then I heard Donna say, "Thankyou Steven!"

Donna only ever calls me Steven, rather than Steve, for two reasons; when she wants to annoy me, or when I've done something wrong.

When I slipped I'd been holding a small amount of mud and roots in one hand. I think the fact it had broken off might have been what made me slip in the first place.

When I looked up at Donna she was splattered from head to toe with mud, all over her white shorts and white shirt. She'd been standing right in the firing line and caught all of it.

Needless to say, I almost fell over again from laughing.