Hello Rain?

My replacement modem is here (yay!) so I took a few quick shots last night. We haven’t had any rain since the day before Hurricane Fiona arrived in the region a few weeks ago (she missed us). Oh we’ve had some forecast but it always passed us by. Today, finally, the wet stuff has arrived and that is good news for at least 2 reasons.

For me personally it should mean I can make some progress on my sunporch ceiling. Rain should show me where the leaks are, right? I have the rubber spray I need to seal them but I have to be putting it in the right spots.

Conveniently, for the manufacturer, they don’t indicate how much coverage is provided by a can on its label. I had to go online to discover that each of the little darlings will give you 10 feet by 1 inch of protection. Nice – particularly since you’re supposed to use two coats. I have 3 cans – which should be plenty, assuming I can pinpoint the exact problem areas. 🙂 I’ll let you know how well I do navigating the rafters once that’s done.

The second reason I wanted to mention involves Ella’s house. Well, house is at the moment a slight exaggeration. It looks like more of a shack although the “bones” are pretty good. Picture a 440 sq ft home built in the 1970s – bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom. It has cedar shakes on the outside walls and a decorative painted fascia trim around the roof line.

Nobody has lived in it for years but the first time I went inside it looked (apart from inches of dust and animal droppings) like the inhabitant had just stepped out. There were tchotchkes on the sideboard and magazines on the table. It was a little eerie.

Ella has some land with nothing on it. This building has been sitting on land that the owner would like to use for something else and it has just been in the way. He gave it to her with the understanding that she would have to move it.

Preparations have been going on for months. Her land has been cleared and a well has been dug. The “house” has been emptied, jacked up and a variety of logs and supports put underneath to facilitate its transport.

Now, when I say transport, I don’t mean it was going to be lifted onto a truck. No, no, no. I mean it was going to be dragged from its current spot to its new location. This is why the rain was going to be so important. All the preparations in the world were not going to be enough if the road wasn’t going to be at least a little slippery.

Today was the day. I didn’t take the camera – it was 6:30 in the morning when we set out. It was 7:30 when Boo arrived with the dump truck which was going to do all the heavy pulling. Curtis depressed all of us by saying he measured the distance last night and it’s 3.3 km (2 miles). We could have done without that information.

Something peculiar happens when “manly” work projects are undertaken such as this one. The number of men involved multiplies exponentially the longer the project takes. When we first started there were 3 and when Boo arrived there were 4. After the 5th hiccup I came home to get coffee (this was all happening 200 yards from my place) and left 18 guys discussing the situation.

There must be a german word for this phenomenon – the closest I could find is zusammenkommen – which sounds like lots of men coming but probably isn’t. Honestly, I figured another 10 minutes they could have just lifted the damn thing and carried it.

They did get it on the road and they did get it up to its new plot of land. No power lines were harmed in the process and Ella is thrilled. Also, by the time it got unhooked from the dump truck, there were over 3 dozen pickup trucks parked along the road because zusammenkommen. 🙂