First time for 10 days as it happens, and aren’t the plants (and Yours Truly) grateful for it?

I woke up at about 05:00 due to the mouse in the roof doing his usual clog-dance, and I could hear a pitter-patter of rain on the skylights here.

That was it until lunchtime when we had a another quick 5 minutes or so, but this evening at about 22:00 we had a torrential downpour and wasn’t it pleasant to hear the water cascading into my water butts?

What was even nicer was that on the lean-to the water was cascading down the roof, into the guttering and out of the hole where it’s supposed to go. I can’t wait to install the water butts and to start collecting all of this.

And so I went back out on my wall, but I’m not convinced at all about what I’m doing.

Although I made some progress today, it’s definitely not going to be finished by the weekend, much to my dismay, and not by a long way either. It’s taking ages.

The problem is that all of the sand-mud mortar behind the large cracks has totally flaked away so it all needs to be raked out completely.

This means that some of the stones are loose so they need to be prised out, something that causes the wall to sag a little where you’ve just cemented – because you start from the top and work down, of course.

You then need to find a slightly larger stone which you then hammer into the gap until it’s solid – which causes the bit of wall that you’ve just done to rise up – and then wedge in with loose stones, and cement it in.

And then of course, the bit that you did earlier that you moved about just now needs re-cementing.

And this is how it goes – it’s taking ages, but then again if it had been so easy it would have been done properly long ago.

Then of course I need to keep raking away all of the sand and cement that falls out.

mean, it’s not as if it’s difficult – just time-consuming. So I’ve no idea when it might be finished.

The Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival started in Fredericton today so I clearly won’t be going to that.

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