Suffering cats!

As I type this the rain is falling slowly but steadily outside. So I’m stuck indoors again and unable to do the work that I want to do on my new tool store as if I did go out and make a start, I’d be soaked through to the skin in no time at all.

This time last year, I was working on my wood store and looking back I see that we were enjoying a long, dry sunny spell with temperatures up as high as 30 degrees Celsius. So now I understand why I have this feeling that summer has come to an abrupt and sudden halt this year – it really has gone on for longer in previous years while I’ve been here in France.

A few minutes ago I was reading a news story about the El Nino effect. Scientists are saying that it is continuing to grow in intensity this time around. One outcome is that meteorologists are predicting a long, hard winter in the UK, a bit like that of 2009-10, so I’m wondering whether we should brace ourselves for something similar, but a bit less severe, here in the Dordogne?

Rain is forecast every day for the rest of this week, so the prospects for me making much progress on my tool store don’t look that good. So I’m sitting around and wasting my time as although there’s work to do inside my house, there’s nothing that I really want to make a start on. If the rain reduces to a light drizzle I’ll just have to bite the bullet and get out there, I suppose, because otherwise I’ll never get the ground work on the tool store done which will be essential for making progress on the main structure on the occasions when the sun does show itself. It’s very frustrating.

Back to say that I did manage to go outside and get a bit done around mid-afternoon, but only a little bit before I decided to abandon play for the day. I managed to get the long rear shuttering board into place by first driving my trusty metal rod into the ground at each peg position and wiggling it about to enlarge the size of the hole, then banging the board down into position and levelling it up.

With the rear board in place, it was time to move on to the two shorter side boards. Flushed with my previous success, I thought that putting in place the right hand board with only three pegs compared to the five of the back board would be a piece of cake. But I was being a bit premature. I used the same method of using my metal rod to make holes in the ground first before dropping the board into place but no matter how much I banged it down, I just couldn’t get it level. So I dug a bit more earth out and then put a larger diameter metal bar into each peg hole, but it still resisted all of my attempts to bang it down to the right level.

And by this time the mud was beginning to cling to my shoes like snow on Ranulph Fiennes boots as well as becoming really trampled down, which will make it more difficult to dig out and level again later on when I eventually come to put hardcore inside the shuttering. It was time to call it a day. I can only surmise that due to the wetness of the earth, it was creating an airtight seal around the board’s mounting pegs, so when I was banging them into the ground, they were compressing the air contained in the cavity below them, which prevented them from penetrating into the ground and gripping the soil particles. This doesn’t bode well, of course, should the rain continue, but I’ll have to think of ways to deal with that when I go out to try again next time 😐