Hillside cleanup continues despite the crappy day

Landscape fabric stapled in strips to the sidehill, done by 11 a.m. despite serious wind gusts

If you wait for ideal working conditions in Minnesota, you'll never get anything done.
The wind was gusting, it was cold and cloudy and son-of-gun, it was even snowing ice crystals now and then too. We ignored the example of idle International Falls homeowner Wayne Kasich and his striking dock worker, (see story above) and piled on a few layers of jeans, sweats and scarves then headed out into what should have been just another lost day.

What ever is he doing
out there?

We're cleaning up and mulching the side of the pond; some years the rugged bank has been mostly a thistle patch, a willow infestation, cattail hollow or just an embarrassment. In order to get the algae and debris out of the pond for the past year we've worked to reduce the amount of nutrition and weeds surrounding it. Presently we're sanitizing the edges and rebuilding the ecology. Starting over, kinda.
The other day we dug into Matt's pole barn near here and found an assortment of stub ends of vinyl and landscape fabric as well as a few hundred rusty landscape staples amongst his treasures. (Some day the pickers from the cable tv show are going to drive up in their van and Matt will be a star. He's got a ton of good stuff buried in there.)
We also bought a pickup load of western cedar chips and dumped them on a tarp by the mailbox in preparation for The Big Day. Two cubic yards, the landscape woman said, then slammed that Bobcat hard into the pile four times to fill our eight-foot box. $94.
That was it for expenses, the rest was labor. Today was the culmination of about two weeks of tugging stones in place and throwing dirt, but we're now in the home stretch. Here's the morning and afternoon views on a day that rightfully should have been spent indoors watching tv and looking out the window hoping for a better day.

By 4 p.m. much of the mulch was in place. Still a pile on top by the mailbox. Beer time. Finish tomorrow.
The lover's bench could use a coat of paint. What color?