A wet week

You may have seen the devastating floods in northern Italy this week, the worst for 100 years with 14 people dead and 10,000 evacuated from their homes.  You might also have seen the sodden stages of the Giro d’Italia, in fact today the long stage was halved because of dangerous conditions having already been modified because of risk of avalanche. Those boys like me must be so sick of the weather.  We’ve had plenty of rain here, 5” fell on Tuesday, there hasn’t been a dry day all week.  

Fortunately on the side of the mountain the water drains away quickly but the damp and depressing low cloud remain.  It’s meant MrFF has not made much progress with the terrace.  The various people we had to price for re-laying the 1000 tiles all made a fuss about the marble edge, much tutting and head shaking so MrFF decided to do this part himself. He is bound to make a better job of getting the levels correct with his laser level and me chasing the red dot.  He has already set out both edge corners and started setting out the two opposite edges which are at the top of steps.

The guy whose price we accepted now says we need to be patient and he will give us a start date soon, that was two weeks ago.  We are used to being ignored here despite being the paying customer, but he might just do himself out of a job and several thousand euros. I wonder if the Italians have the expression if you want a job doing right, do it yourself, probably not.