Hey Maeve and Deirdre: How great to see you both. Actaully I've given some thought to getting someone to take the sand. Of course it has some value... just like the wonderful cast iron stove we've been trying to get rid of. My friend Frankie, from the Gospel Messengers wants the stove, but we've been waiting for him to get a truck and four men up here to move it. Maybe before Christmas. The problem with the sand is that the swimming pool was in the back of the house on a side that is not accessible to much more than a wheelbarrow. The previous owners built a deck on the back of the house, just three feet from a barberry hedge. There's just enough space to get through with a wheelbarrow, but nothing bigger. There are two sets of steps on the other wside of the house, so it's even less accessible. About the only way to get the sand out is a wheelbarrow at a time, or perhaps by helicopter. I have a wheelbarrow. Renting a helicopter is too expensive. But anyway, to finish my story...

I decided that it was too much pressure to try to lug a ton of sand by wheelbarrow in a day or two, by myself, so I opted to lug the sand to the dump. I bought the heaviest weight Hefty trash bags they make and started loading themj up with as much sand as they could carry (and I could lift.) I took the first load of seven bags to the dump a couple of days ago. Of course, there is a charge for dumping the sand and I had to have my car weighed, Before and After I dumped the sand to see how much the seven bags weighed. When I asked him how much I owed, he said 48 cents. That's based on a charge of $6 per ton. I had to alugh when he told me. As you might guess, this whole adventure has the makings of a chapter for my next book... an environmentally correct Alice's Restaurant story. There are two scriptural passages that come to mind:

"Verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you." It apparently works for mountains, but not swimming pools.

"Even so faith, it it hath not works, is dead."

The message? Get to work. And the title of the chapter is The Impossible just takes longer.

But it only costs 7 cents a bag.