What Lies Beneath

Well, this took a grisly turn.

We have a lot of concrete in the backyard, and had always planned to remove most of it, leaving just a little here and there to prevent mud. There's one chunk of concrete,  in particular, that was a nuisance. It was a big triangular area that somebody must have poured ages ago as the foundation for a garden shed or something. Whatever its purpose, it's in our way now.

You know how one thing leads to another? One morning after accidentally kicking the stupid concrete pad yet again, I started poking at the edge of it. I wonder how thick it is... I wonder if I'll need to rent a concrete saw to cut through it... I wonder if I can just remove the wood boards around the edge of it... Two hours later, the entire concrete pad was gone.

Turns out the concrete was only about four inches thick and responded well to a sledgehammer. No concrete saw required. A few mighty whacks along the corners and it broke up nicely. It became a game to see how big a chunk I could break off without pulverizing it. Bonus points for big chunks; negative points for pieces that fly into the neighbor's yard. I ended up with 2,004,057 points -- a new high score!

A couple of interesting things were buried under the concrete. (We've learned to expect hidden surprises.) For one, there was a whole second layer of stone underneath the concrete that looked like sandstone. It wasn't a complete layer of stone, and I didn't break it when I smashed the concrete; it was already broken up. Instead, it seems to be fragments of something else that was spread on the ground before the concrete was poured. Maybe a temporary basis for something? The remnants of a paved walkway? The sandstone pieces were all the same thickness and fairly smooth, as if they'd been used as pavers. But they were also irregular shapes, as if they'd been broken off of something larger. A mystery.

Under that were the bones. A couple of good-sized bones, plus a few smaller pieces. As you can see here, the bones where cut off very cleanly, not snapped or broken, so I'm thinking (hoping!) they were butchered beef or lamb bones. Not, y'know... something else.

I also found this small glass bottle embedded in the underside of the concrete. It's really small, no bigger than a few fingers, and must have held only a few ounces of liquid. There's a logo or something embossed in the glass, but it's on the back side and stuck in the concrete so I can't read it. It looks like two letters -- maybe W, A, or L? Sadly, I broke the bottle trying to remove it from the concrete, so it's gone now.

Finally, there were clumps of blue goop scattered around in the dirt, too. I think it was contractor's chalk rendered damp and gooey after years of being buried underground. Either that, or the meat of the blue animals that were secretly buried in our backyard.