PROGRESS

     Trimmed the oleander which was hanging over the railing.  It had been a beautiful cascade of white hanging into the lake  but the blooms have all passed and it will grow back...hopefully after project completion. Also trimmed back the wax myrtle which also was hanging into the lake. This will not make the  water snakes happy as they were able to crawl up into its branches.  I do not mind them as thay are pretty and harmless however having one drop down on you from above is startling to say the least! It will be best for all if I remove that temptation from them as I do plan to sit out on the new dock someday.
      I will digress to offer some interesting facts here.  The oleander leaves are  poisonous if swallowed. I had heard that the  sap would burn your skin and that  if you burned it the smoke was also poisonous, but I was mistaken on both those counts.  The Native American Indians used the leaves of the wax myrtle as soap and they do foam up if you wet them and rub them vigorously between your palms. The brown watersnake is a prettily mottled copper, black and beige and is quite skitterish. The largest I have seen was about 24 inches.  It is non poisonouse and eats small fish and frogs.
       We have not yet made the trip to Home Depot for any lumber yet but did get to the pharmacy today to  pick up our prescriptions. We want  to stay  healthy for the work ahead!  It's all in the planning!
       We did however brainstorm an idea for the squaring up deal.  The closest dock, about 16 feet away is to what we want to run parallel.  If we take a couple of  nails, 32 feet of string and a L-Square and run the string from the farthest corner of the proposed dock (where we shall have already imbedded the first post) and run it to the old dock at a 90 degree angle and nail the string in place,  we are thinking this will give us the line for setting the other two posts along the seawall which will be set equidistant for the width we want.
       Did I mention that the old dock needs replacing too?  We want to use the good lumber from the deck of the old dock which is less than 5 years old and very expensive 2" X 12"  pressure treated wood as structural support for the new dock as well as the rebuild of the old dock which needs all new support posts (the existing posts are over 20 years old and not looking too good.)  This complicates things as it means dismantling one to erect the other simultaneously, and about 6 to 8  weeks to get the project above water before the temperature of the waterrs falls. Now the old dock has railing all around, attached of course on top of the decking and this needs to come down before we can dismantle the decking for the structural support of the new dock.  The railing is less than two years old so it will go back up once the old dock is refurbished.  This railing serves several purposes: the most important two are keeping the dogs OUT of the lake and keeping the river otters IN the lake!