Friends, Romans, Countrymen

Workmen arrived at 9:00 this morning to install three (3) doors and finish off the framing of one (1) window. Ostensibly less than a day of work for two people.

Lords, ladies, and gentlethems, it is now 9:30 PM and they just left and only one door and the window are finished. Original Contractor did something funky with the framing of the doorways and nothing is squared properly and so they have to buy some more materials and come back later in the week to finish fixing it.

There was shouting. In Polish I think. They are very clearly not impressed with Original Contractor.

Any vindication I might have felt that Original Contractor was in fact just making it up as he went along is somewhat overshadowed that I have to pay tradie's rates for a second day of work.

Haven't posted for a while, mostly because I've been working my ass off.

I had the week off and once again planned to get some work done on the house. This time I wanted to get the backyard sorted. My daughter came over at the start of the week, and the two of us spent two days pulling up the waist-high weeds in the hot sun. We filled five yard waste bags and I put cardboard over the bare dirt around the house. I did some initial raking around the house to try and slope the soil away from the walls. Somebody is coming over this week to finish the covering on the bottom of the exterior walls - once he's done I'll finish raking the dirt so at least the upper part of the yard is properly graded and then I'll toss some clover seeds all over it. That should hopefully help keep water out of the basement.

Then on Wednesday it started to rain.

And rain and rain and rain.

Thursday the ex-housemate came over and the two of us worked all day in the pour. The sump pump was dumping massive amounts of water into the yard and it was just - collecting on top of all that thick clay until the backyard turned into a flood zone. We built a clay dam along the fence to keep it out of the neighbours' yard and dug a six-foot long trench under the pump outlet. It's just a big water-filled pit right now, but at least it managed to keep the water in one spot.

Then we dug another long trench for my vegetable garden. We framed it with the wood the contractor had left lying around. I filled the bottom with the branches that had been left behind by the felled tree, and mixed four bags of composted manure into the dirt. It's covered with cardboard right now, just waiting for my seedlings to get big enough to plant.

When the backyard dries out enough I'll deepen the trench and fill it with rocks. Both of us vaguely remember from when we built a pig-roasting pit years ago - and the vegetable garden digging seems to confirm - that there's a sand layer about 3-4 feet down, so if I can get the trench that deep the water might actually drain instead of flooding. That's a project for later in the summer though, right now it's just a sea of mud.

Apart from the bags of weeds I have also have two extra bags of trash to put out this week, just from the garbage that the original contractor left behind. Apparently they just dumped all their left-over coffee cups and pop cans and chunks of plastic and scrap wood and metal onto the ground and threw the clay fill right on top of it. More than once after prying the imploded corpse of a bucket of drywall compoud out of the ground with a spade I felt the urge to stand upright, fists clenched at my sides, and shout at the uncaring sky, "Who Raised These People?!"

***

Got my head eplayed, so the vertigo is considerably less than it was.

Still managed to hit me a couple of times this week because I spent most of it digging, and there is nothing like being half-bent over a watery trench with a shovel full of heavy mud to make one's inner ear decide now is the time to send one's sense of "up" into a random dimension. I managed not to actually tip over, although I did have a couple of episodes of just having to tripod with the shovel until the world stopped spinning.

***

Lord Brock is - not great. He ended up having an endoscopy on Wednesday, which found a large mass in his duodenum. Now I'm just waiting on the biopsy results. In the meantime, he's on a steady diet of painkillers and appetite stimulants just to keep him eating.

I'm bracing myself for bad news.