This is a soil engineer, Conrad, peering into a five-foot-deep hole. Bedrock has been located! Slowly, slowly, we're moving forward with the Back Yard Project - the construction of a terrace that isn't slowly sinking and collapsing, and a deck ... this will take a Very Long Time, I suspect, and certainly will have huge gaps in its progress. And a lot depends on how blind an eye inspectors turn to various aspects of our back yard (like too many retaining walls. But if we call them Landscape Features ... well, who knows. That might be ok).
I was very, very struck by how soft and crumbly the bedrock is - not at all what you'd call Solid: it's compacted sand, and clay, and shale, and no wonder it's loose and unstable in an earthquake. But it's not as though one could dig down a bit further and find something really solid - in the Los Angeles basin, this soft mess is some 30,000 feet deep. Conrad seemed a bit surprised that I knew anything about geology at all - I explained that I'd done a whole year of it (in what would, in US terms, be 11th grade), because it was the only thing that actually fitted my school timetable as one of my two "minor" subjects. The other was Italian, which has, until today, been of significantly more use.
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