In our neighborhood we have flood irrigation; it used to be an agricultural district, but there are still water rights associated with the land, and now the water is used for urban purposes (growing America's most abundant crop: grass.) I've been slowly improving things to try to get enough water to flood the whole yard in the 45 minutes allotted; I made the dam taller across the ditch, added dirt to the berms in various places etc. But there is a pool in the way, which the water has to go around, and often it went in instead, making a mess; so I finally decided we needed a sort of curb or retaining wall.

Iryna and a very good friend and I have been building one over the last few weeks. I got all carried away and decided it needed some conduit for low-voltage lights later on (I want to use LED's to bottom-light some glass sculptures, or something like that) and the space between the wall and pool needs to be a flowerbed, consequently we'll need a little gate so we can use some of the irrigation water to water it. And it must be made from stone, so as to take as long to build as possible.

So that's it so far, and we just got our first irrigation since then. The gate leaks a bit (which was to be expected) but so does one of the embedded electrical boxes - it lets water into the conduit and then it comes out a box on the other side. Anyway the purpose of that box is for wires to control some future sprinkler valves for the planters so I just need to build another little wall around that area to keep the water out. And the wall isn't quite done; it will be taller and flatter at this end.