(Wednesday, 29 April 2020)
This morning it was raining. Proper raining. None of this chuck a few random raindrops around the place malarkey, proper consistent rainfall.
Normally of course, this is not a cause for celebration but there are several reasons that this is a good thing: 1) The garden needs it 2) The pool contains nothing more than a big puddle so far and needs it and 3) I really need a good kick up the ass stylee reason to do indoor jobs that I don’t really want to do. If the sun is in the sky, this is a perfectly good reason not to do them and if I have to do them on a nice day, I get grumpy… which probably leads neatly to 4) Mark therefore needs it 😜 He also managed to tweak his knee somehow on our walk the other day which is causing him some pain and bother, so he also needs it to force him to sit still for a bit 😉
Having grown up and lived my life in the UK until we moved here, we are of course no strangers to rain… or wind (no, not that kind, that’s a whole other subject 🙄). Anyway, moving on… in the UK, rain and wind tend to go together a lot. Somewhat surprisingly, that rarely happens here and usually only with a full blown storm.
Austrian houses have a distinct style, no doubt you know exactly what I mean, the huge roof overhangs, specific roof pitches, the balconies etc. I’ve always admired the look of them and never really given much thought to the fact that they were built that way for a very good reason.
In winter, for example, the roof needs to hold a substantial weight of snow – preferably without avalanching it onto some unsuspecting passer by. Being able to get in and out of your front door without needing to dig yourself out is made much easier by the big overhangs which generally protect at least 1m around the house from snowfall.
One of the things I most appreciate about Austrian houses, is that when it rains, there is usually a nice wide path around the building that is stone dry, for exactly the same reason. And that brings me to the subject of rain here in the Salzkammergut. It is very different from the UK. We get the usual variations… heavy, light, drizzle etc but without the accompanying wind, heavy rain tends to fall straight down in a very pleasing vertical manner.
They have a word* for it here, it equates to ‘Rope Rain’ or ‘Cord Rain’ as it falls straight down from the sky, almost in strings or ropes of water. Of course, with the overhangs on the roof, you still have the normal dry space around the house and even better, you don’t necessarily have to close windows or doors as they are usually completely unaffected.
*Typically, as I’m writing this, the actual Austrian word for it escapes me, but that’s essentially what it is. Hopefully one of my eternally helpful friends here will provide the actual word and if I remember, I’ll add it in. 🙄 😂
We started the day by having a nice leisurely breakfast. Thanks to Mark’s foray to the local Spar yesterday, we were once again able to have a traditional Austrian breakfast, having survived on nothing much but cereal for breakfast the last few days as we tried to put off the shop for as long as possible.
Just as we were finishing up, the phone rang with a call from the delivery driver that we were expecting today. Trying in my bestest Deutsch to give him directions to find us, I then spotted a large lorry crawling up the road. Eek! I had been hoping for a small van, but no such luck. As you know, it’s not possible to get a large lorry up to the house, so nothing for it but to run down the drive in the rain and direct him to a place we could offload. The ‘parcel’ also turned out to be a lot larger than expected and weighing in at around 100kgs, meant that our pathetic little sack truck would be about as much use as a chocolate fire guard. 😆
Thankfully, the driver was a particularly cheerful and helpful guy, so between us we managed to get it off the truck and trawled it up the road, up our drive and into the garage. Mark was forcibly barred from participating, on account of his knee troubles and instead stood duty over the now abandoned lorry in case it needed to be moved, particularly since the first available place to park it was outside the fire station… Sod’s law an’ all that. But we were lucky today and the delivery was incident free, if a little damp. 🤨
So, with all that sudden activity behind us, we were both confined to doing indoor jobs today. I’m mucking about on the computer and Mark has taken a deep breath and has started tackling our much beloved coffee machine, which has started making various worrying hissing an squawking noises of late.
The capuccino making bit had rather explosively stopped working a couple of years ago, but it still made a nice espresso, so we weren’t overly concerned as it was a minor inconvenience. Although the cappuccino making bit is also a vital part of the descaling process, so this hasn’t been done either for a couple of years which can’t be doing it any good and has probably contributed to the rather alarming noises it is currently making.
Between us, we’ve become very good at learning new skills via the extensive worldwide training course known as YouTube. You name it, we’ve had a go at it… plumbing, appliance fixing, changing headlights… pretty much, if we have any kind of problem that requires spending cash, our first port of call is YouTube.
It’s really quite surprising what you can actually do yourself if you put your mind to it… or rather… train your mind to follow the exact instructions in the video and step firmly outside of your comfort zone. Although, it has to be said that today’s efforts did require a little lateral thinking, extensive searching for instructions and in the end, a combination of videos to cover what we needed and is probably the most complex problem we’ve tried to fix ourselves. 😳
We did find the problem (a burst hose) and did actually manage to figure out how to fix it, but we’ll need a new bit of hose first. Mark’s first job tomorrow will involve trying to figure out how to fix the bit that is now making the worst noises and that’s promising to be equally as challenging. More of the same tomorrow then… 🤨 😆
Stay safe everyone xx
