A rant and a half

[oloriel]

We've been waiting for rain all through the past two weeks. The garden needed it; I couldn't even weed because the earth was baked so hard (our soil is very loamy) and I refuse to waste drinking water on soaking earth for weeding; and the rest of the environment kind of needed it too. The weather forecast has been promising rain for every day ever since last Sunday.

It's been pretty cold for a week, though not as cold as up in the north, where they actually had frost. In June. (Cold (though usually not frost) in mid-June is, before anyone panics and cries ZOMG GLOBAL WARMING/ FIMBULWINTER/ WE HAVE KILLED THE PLANET/ THE WORLD IS GOING TO END yet again, a natural phenomenon that has been observed ever since they started writing the weather down, even though it surprises people again and again - but then people also act surprised when there's like, winter in November. Or winter in March. But I digress).
So: Cold. But dry. No rain.

Now this weekend we'd planned to continue the pigsty renovation. We've made some good headway - the Eastern wall is dug out completely, and it has been smoothed and repaired and even partially been covered with tar. I made a pit in the corner for the pump pipe (in case it rains too much for the normal drainage system that we're also building just now, we can put an immersion pump into the pump pipe to get the surplus water out), which was a major pain in the rear end and various other body parts, because of course the rock in the corners is not slate like most of the rest but Blaustein (which is not the same as bluestone and I couldn't find the English name of the bloody rock - EDIT: grey limestone, thanks, cowboy_r). Grey limestone is less yielding than slate.
A lot less yielding.
And in a ditch corner you cannot use a pickaxe. Unless of course you want the whole wall to come tumbling down, which I assure you you don't, especially when you're standing where said wall would land. It was also a Sunday, so we couldn't use a jackhammer (because, loud machinery = unhappy neighbours or stupid hikers that call the police on you because you are being noisy on a Sunday).
So instead I chopped at the lovely grey limestone with hammer and chisel.
(Next person to say something about "Waaah, Nerdanel was a MUCH STRONGER WOMAN CHARACTER before CRJT went and made her ONLY a sculptress!" in my hearing - because apparently sculpting is totally stereotypically soft and womanly, oh yes - will have me chisel their eye out throw great amounts of grey limestone at them. I can haz muscles of steel from chopping at grey limestone. And grey limestone is nowhere near as hard to work as marble. Just sayin'. But I digress again.)

ANYWAY, what I was meaning to say, in the past weeks we've made so much headway that we finally ordered the gravel to fill up the ditch on the Eastern side. 20 tons of gravel. That'll be dropped in our yard on Tuesday. And all we needed to do this weekend was prepare the Southern wall as far as possible: digging, cleaning, plasterwork---
Guess what happened?
Did I hear "it rained"? That's right! It rained! Mightily, too! Repeatedly! Both on Saturday and on Sunday! Guess what you can't do when it's raining? That's right, digging, cleaning, plasterwork...

So, virtually no work done. But we'll have 20 tons of gravel on Tuesday. In the middle of our yard.
To make things better, the tenant has finally told us when he's going to move, and of course it's the coming 2-4 weekend. He has been told that he should let us know well in advance - because there'd be the whole gravel thing at some point, and you cannot drive a moving van into our yard when there's 20 tons of gravel lying around. FOUR DAYS isn't well in advance. Especially on a Saturday evening when you can no longer call the gravel pit and tell them to wait another week after all.

There was some housework done instead, and we sawed some part of the wood that cluttered up our shed. We probably have firewood for the next five years now. Which, energy crisis and all, is not so bad. Jörg finally installed the exhaust hood for the kitchen (he's been meaning to do this for two years now), we did some preliminary spring-cleaning and sorted through some stuff.
And of course we voted in the European election (ZOMG HOW EXCITING >_>).

Still feeling kinda unproductive.

On the plus side, we were invited to a brunch by fuchs, kaneda and eliathanis, which was veeery delicious (including such perverted delights as tomatoes pickled in fennel and aniseed), so thank you folks a lot, that saved the day! :)

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

If you imagine our driveway and yard sort of as a mirrored, overturned L, the gravel will be unloaded roughly at the right angle (i.e., between the corner of the house and the junction between barn and pigsty). In other words, right in the middle of the way (and in front of the tenant's working shed, too).
The moving van could park down on the grassy bit without any trouble - but as idiot tenant has already complained about having to climb stairs (OME!) when coming home from work, making him climb stairs while carrying furniture (... although probably he'll hire people to do the furniture-carrying for him anyway) will probably make him bitch and fight again. And we're just too tired of that. *sighs* So as it is we'll apparently have to have the gravel unloaded, THEN shovel it INTO the pigsty, and THEN shovel it into the tunnel/pit once that is prepared. Argh. If only we didn't need the rent. >.<


Bad Ella. No more mushrooms for that cat.