3 rain-free days!!

but not all together, that would be too much to hope for. But Monday, Thursday and Friday were all warm, dry and sunny. We even had lunch outside in the sunshine. But today and for the next few days it's forecast to drizzle. It's nothing personal, the whole of Spain is wet. Strangely the temperature is absolutely level, day and night it's due to be about 7 or 8 degrees.

So when it's been dry I've been tidying the garden and have put some more broad beans, peas and potatoes in. We don't plant many, just those that have started to sprout indoors, they get cut up and planted out. Also J saw on a website called Instructables - people's ideas of how to make or do things, sometimes quite unusual ideas - that if you plant the base of the onion when you cut it off to peel the onion, it will grow new roots and put up shoots. You can then divide the onion if there is more than one shoot, and eventually you get a free onion. If it works, we never need buy an onion again. Anyway, it seems worth a try so all onion bases are now being planted.

J has made a new drain in the corner of the front garden as the one we had just hasn't coped with all this rain and the garden floods every time it rains. Monty and Pips kennel also fills with rain, their bed gets sodden and takes days to dry so we moved the kennel out from the corner until the new drain was in place. All is finished, the rain is going out the drain and watering the roses and geraniums outside and the kennel is bone-dry.

Yesterday we had a log-splitting day. Well, he chainsaws and splits and I re-stack. It's all wood from last years pruning that is just too big to get in either wood burner. We still haven't had enough dry time to do any pruning this year. Hopefully soon!

On wet days it's on-going kitchen wall rendering and capa fina-ing, tiling round the sink, all things that need to be done before the floor is tiled. I've just finished a batch of baking - 3 loaves, 8 rolls and lots of cornish pasties for the freezer.

The final stretch of new road around here is open, from Yator to Ugijar. It takes 8 minutes now, the old road took about 20 minutes. There are still problems on other roads due to the ongoing rain and we have no date for our track upgrade. Mariano says the cost was €190,000 to concrete it but it's now a rebuild and will be €300,000 of which the Ayuntamiento of Cadiar has to find €30,000 more than was already budgeted and they say they can't afford it. There must be a big call on all councils money after this winter although we did read that central government are providing millions of euros to repair the damage caused. So we will continue to think twice before buying anything and carry what we need from the car a few times a week - it's a sort of mobile larder! One of our neighbours has 6 dogs up here and last Saturday carried up a 20 kg sack of food, followed the next day by a large sack of dry bread for them. I'm looking forward to 6pm today to see what he's staggering up with this week!