In which I build a ziggurat

The attentive reader will no doubt recall the sidewalk-repair saga. (The attentive reader needs to get a life.) One side effect of the sidewalk repair was a pile of leftover slate paving-stones in the back yard.

shalmestere has been suggesting for a while that we grow something in the narrow strip of dirt-and-gravel between the (concrete) back yard and the garage... but the slate was piled up there.

A few weeks ago I got an odd letter from the City Department of Environmental Protection. Seems they have a chronic problem with storm runoff overwhelming the sewer systems, and it occurred to somebody that if they could spread the rainwater over a longer period of time, they'd be fine. So they got a bunch of plastic barrels from an olive importer that didn't want to ship empty barrels back to Spain, drilled some holes in them, and dubbed them "household rain barrels", to be used to collect rainwater that can subsequently go onto lawns and gardens (presumably when it's dry and the sewers have lots of unused capacity). So they're giving away these rain barrels and kits to attach them to your gutter downspout, for free. Of course, if you want to run a garden hose from the barrel, it really ought to be elevated...

So I decided to move the slate paving stones from one side of the yard to the other, so I could put the rain barrel on top of them, near the downspout, and also liberate some gardening space.

One little problem: there were four full-sized paving stones, weighing (if I'm doing the arithmetic right) an average of 300 pounds. In addition, I wanted the biggest one on the bottom, and they were actually in the order 1, 4, 2, 3, so it was going to take some shuffling.

( cut for pictures )

Take that, Cheops!