Spent a large part of yesterday working in the yard. Started out planting small trees Mac Abney got me from the state forestry people - nine live oaks and fourteen cypress. Started out on the woods border to the south of the house (outside the den and study) and then added several to the future Japanese garden area downhill from the house. Got a surprise while I was down there - I had turned the well on to keep it from silting up, and from the future garden you can see a pretty litle waterfall as the water pours down the canyon side and babbles its way down the creek towards the pond. Nice soggy creek banks adjacent to the J garden so I put six of the cypresses there. Haven't taken any pictures yet, but I'll get around to it eventually.
Also cleared the J garden area of small pines and bushes so I could start getting an idea of where to lay things out, and planted three (very small) live oaks. Plan here is still something similar to the J garden at the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg 
No pictures here yet either, but not much to see in the winter anyway.
Once that was done, I headed over to the dam/bridge to clear the path down to the creek below the bridge. While I was there (as usually happens) I started moving more rocks to expose more of the creek channel (stacking rocks is apparently very satisfying if you're compulsive/retentive). The goal is something that looks like the bass pond bridge at Biltmore. Here's the view from that bridge, and the view from mine.
Here's the reverse - the bass pond bridge at Biltmore with spillway, and then mine:
Had a little surprise yesterday. I discovered when I first started this project that all the water that comes over the spillway has been running under the rocks, so I dug back towards the bridge from where the creek came out. Yesterday when I started digging I found a wood pallet that the masons had used to walk on when they were laying the brick last spring. Took me an hour or two to excavate all the rock off it and get it up. It's still down there, laying on the side of the slope, but the hole where it was is now open (it's the larger water-filled area nearest the bridge).
Here are a couple of pictures showing it during construction - apparently when the riprap was dropped in, they didn't bother taking it out. 
Will get back to work on it next weekend, I guess. Rainy today. But there are always lots of rocks to move down there, so always something to look forward to obsessing over.