Soaking

It has rained, endlessly, all day.

By the middle of the afternoon I was longing with my whole soul to go back to bed.

We have got so much to do and it simply isn’t going to be done by any time soon.

We laid careful plans for the day, none of which happened the way we had hoped.

We want to lay the new concrete conservatory floor this week.

In order to do this, to make room for the cement mixer, we need to do something about the massive stack of firewood that is completely filling the yard from corner to corner.

It needs to be properly cut up and stacked.

We can’t stack it in the yard, because Mark’s tiresome divorce solar panel is not yet on the wall, and is occupying almost all of the space. He can’t put it on the wall because of needing more cash to finish it.

Obviously we do not have any cash. We have never got any cash. It is one of those mid-life things that you just get used to, like not having a waistline and having surprising hairs growing out of your nostrils and not understanding what the children are talking about. Hence he has not finished building the solar panel.

I am still talking to him but only when I am not thinking about the solar panel.

The place that he has been stacking the wood is in the conservatory, but that has all had to come out in order to get the floor down.

In the end we decided that we would cut up enough wood to fill the fireplace and then just work around the rest.

The problem, as you might recall, is that firewood stacked around the stove sets the house on fire.

Mark has been intending to build a steel structure to stop the stack from touching the stove, but has not got round to it.

This morning, before we could move the wood to bring the cement mixer to lay the floor in the conservatory, he had to build a steel fence around the stove.

He got his welder out and did this.

I was getting everything ready for Oliver to go back to school.

He has got some new vests.

When I cut the label out of one and he tried it on, he complained that it still made him itch.

I had to cut the labels out by opening the seams and then sewing them back up again.

This was not a quick fix. I am going to try him with a pea under his mattress and see what happens.

I cleaned the fire out and moved the washing and put some more washing on and sliced up fruit and vegetables for Oliver’s dinner and our picnic.

I have worked out that I spend roughly an hour every day cutting up fruit and vegetables for everybody’s dinners. That is fifteen whole days every year.

Perhaps not quite that many because sometimes I drink wine and then we just have cheese and crackers and don’t bother.

I cut mangos and melons and strawberries and pears and carrots and peppers and tomatoes and sweet potatoes and onions.

After that I made some lemon cream buns. This takes ages, no wonder people only ever had cake on their birthdays in the days before electric mixing machines.

Mark and Oliver took Oliver’s bike apart and repaired it. It needed a new bearing at the back. It had got to be repaired quite soon because he goes back to school on Monday, and in any case it was upside down in the conservatory with bits spread out all around it. We could not lay a new floor around it.

Once they had finished then Mark started cutting up the firewood. This was made slow and miserable because of the horrible watery weather that we are having at the moment. Rain dripped down his neck and all over the wood.

He had to change his trousers when he came in.

I stacked the wood by the fire, which is the picture. The wood was very wet indeed, and will have to sit there for ages until it dries, steaming the windows up and helping us all inhale mould spores.

We did not have a lot of time left then. Mark faffed about trying to stop his shed from leaking and I sewed laundry bags. I have finished three so far. Five to go.

Eventually we came out to work. There are a very lot of very big puddles. Some of them are too deep to drive through and I have been driving on the pavement. It is not raining at the moment but the water is gushing down from the fells and making waterfall torrents through the walls.

I think it is going to be a difficult night.