When it rains and rains and rains and rains

Ever noticed just how many songs there are about rain? My personal faves include Rainy Days and Mondays (Carpenters), Rain (Mika), It’s Raining (Shakin Stevens), I wish it would rain down (Phil Collins), I think it’s going to rain today (Nina Simone).

I worked this morning – I was looking forward to it actually. James, my favourite 18 year old has just survived Freshers Week at uni which I have been vicariously sharing with him via Facebook pictures and status updates so I was looking forward to seeing him and hearing all about it. I spent the morning covering the enquiry desk and then putting up a Green Reads display so it was hardly hard work anyway.

Ady took Davies and Scarlett to Wildlife Explorers where they made bird feeders and coloured in pictures of birds. Even Scarlett is nearly too old for the group they are in now, let alone Davies but they may as well stay there for the next couple of months til we leave. They were both up at about 6am to do more lego building this morning (so were most horrid and low on emotional resources as a result for the rest of the day :rolls:) and carried on with that when they got home. Ady came to collect me from work and then we headed over towards Barnham to collect my car.

Unfortunately the rain started up again and got progressively heavier as we headed further west until I decided I didn’t have a hope of getting my car home even if it started on such wet roads so we turned round and came home again. Todays plan had been for Ady to do garage clearing and dump runs while I tackled the wardrobe in our bedroom but Ady had been foiled by the weather and was all depressed that a planned porch over the back door step hadn’t worked. The chickens and ducks area is a total marshland, in no small part due to Ady tipping out a pool full of water every morning in there and filling the pool back up again. I suggested he move the pool closer to the edge of the enclosure and empty it onto some grass with better drainage. I also suggested that some of the many, many roof tiles which are proving to be a total nusiance (removed from our roof when we built up, nearly 10 years ago, moved about 6 times from location to location around the garden, sat on the drive infront of the garage for a couple of years, moved to put the campervan there and now in the way elsewhere – no one is interested in buying them, I’ve had them listed on freecycle with no takers) get used to create paths in the quagmire. I do sometimes feel like the only person to have successfully reached the other side of puberty in my house, everyone else here seems to see sulking and sighing a lot as the only feasible solution to things. And for me to be feeling like the grown up things have to be pretty bad ;).

Anyway, he was struggling with not having succeeded in any of his planned endeavours for the day. I was quite happy to have some lunch (I was really hungry), shove some flapjacks in the oven (felt the need to eat something sweet and home made) and start a knitting pattern I’d sneakily photocopied from a book at work which I thought would be perfect for using up some wool I had and learning how to do cable knitting. Davies and Scarlett were very happy playing with lego / playing with Sploosh and Lucky on the lawn.

I got to the end of a row and decided to go and check that the van wasn’t leaking inside with all this heavy rain and to turn the engine over too. It will be insured from Monday and I want to get it full of petrol, have a bit of a go at driving it and maybe will need it if the rain continues and my car is unreliable – if we have another road legal vehicle it makes sense to use it if needed. But it wouldn’t start either 🙁 I was rather unsurprised to be honest – it’s been sat on the very sloping drive for a whole week, with loads of rain and it is old and we know it needs a bit of attention but Ady took this as another sign of doom 🙁 We then spent some time looking under the bonnet and trying to work out where the battery is.

At that point we realised we were standing outside and not getting wet anymore – ie it had stopped raining so we decided to head over for my car again. We gathered the kids and as Ady had a car full of stuff to go to the tip we went via there. Once we started driving it started raining again and the tip closed at 5pm – we arrived at 5.03pm to see the man locking the gate and driving away. Further doom for Ady 🙁

We came home and I made him a coffee and gave him flapjacks and tried to help him gain a bit of perspective about the whole ‘it’s going to rain forever, both of the vehicles we actually own are not working because of the rain, the garden is flooding because of the rain and I haven’t cleared the garage because of the rain. I suspect my suggestion that we should look on the bright side and proving the campervan floats we don’t actually need the engine to work as we could use it as a house boat instead didn;t really cheer him up…. 😆

So Ady did some being in the kitchen with music blaring which always restores his good humour, the kids and I watched TV, they both took themselves off to bed as they were so tired and Ady cooked a really nice meal and seems to have cheered up a bit.

I’ve spent some time online trying to work out where the battery might be and concluded I am probably right that it will be under the passenger seat so I’ll go and look tomorrow and hope for windows in the rain to collect my car and get the van started.

Scarlett has agreed that we should rehome Sploosh and Lucky sooner rather than later (they are too big for the area and house we have them in really, if we were staying we would remedy that but as we are not it seems silly to do it for the sake of a couple of months) so I spent ages talking to her about empty nest syndrome and the job of a mother to prepare her children to grow up and leave home. In lots of ways I think it will be better to get this particular hurdle over and done with, although it will be painful for her and so painful for us too 🙁