Wet, wet , wet

 

Let's just say it's been wet, very wet. 

We've had mizzle, we've had drizzle, we've had great pounding belts of rain, stuff that might have been hail, and just plain ordinary rain.

And to add to the fun, the leak in the roof we had a few years ago, came back. Not dramatically but definitely a drip.

We first noticed it a couple of days before we were due to go back to Melbourne for phase ii of Judi's medical procedure. (basically in phase i they implanted the stimulator but left it outside her body taping it in place with what looked like medical grade gaffer tape. In phase ii they confirmed it was working as it should, slipped it inside her body and sewed up the insertion site.)

As there was no way we could postpone phase ii, all I could do was file a claim with our house insurance people and leave a bucket in place to catch the drips.

Fortunately it didn't rain while we were away, and the insurers organised to get a roof repairer to come and make some temporary repairs, which so far, cross fingers, seem to be holding.

Well Judi's phase ii went well, and she only needed a night in hospital.

The only real drama was that I stupidly put my car keys on the roof of the car while I put her overnight bag in the back, and then drove off out of the hospital underground car park with the keys still on the roof, only for them to slide off when I made a sharpish left turn in traffic on the way out of the city. Fortunately Judi had her keys in her bag so everything kept working, and we could start and stop the car.

Solving the problem was a case of going back to the Hyundai dealer, telling them I'd been an idiot, and them checking I was the registered owner of the vehicle, and organising to have a new key fob reprogrammed, which meant taking the car back to them on a day when they could do it.

That was earlier this week, Wednesday in fact. It had rained in the night and I set off in what was either fog or low cloud to drive back to the Hyundai workshop.

They offered me a ride into the city centre, so I got them to drop me close to Albury Library, where I spent the morning researching Agatha Christie's trip to Iraq in 1930.

It was during this quite adventurous trip that she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, who was excavating at Ur, and quite remarkably she went overland, first by train to Damascus via Istanbul, a journey which in our adventurous days I always thought would be worth making, but now, sadly, is a journey that's probably never going to happen.

From Damascus she travelled on to Baghdad via an express bus - more adventurous that it sounds as there were no roads, let alone sealed roads, across the desert, and the bus was more akin to one of these rufty tufty all wheel drive people movers you sometimes see in the outback than your ordinary intercity express bus.

Anyway, they did the reprogramming in the morning and I got the car back in time to drive home before the rain started in earnest again. 

And it rained all day yesterday, and was still raining when I went up to the Athenaeum for my usual Friday morning cataloguing session.

It had turned cold, and apparently there was snow on the mountains, but in Stanley all there was was soaking sleety rain.

Unlike last week, where I had the pleasure of handling some early editions of Wilkie Collins lesser known novels, it was a fairly standard mix of late nineteenth and early twentieth century fiction - popular in its time, but now largely forgotten.

However, it did include an 1870's edition of Henry Cockton's the Adventures of Valentine Vox, Ventriloquist, which must be in the running for the 'most ludicrous novel title' award, as well as an 1870's edition of the History of Margaret Catchpole, which might suggest an early taste for Australiana among the good folk of Stanley ...