Home Sick Wet Dark

We both are very sick. Outside it rains and rains.

The electricity kept going out, so we called Tino the Electrician. He says it´s the fancy induction cooktop doing it, it is broken. So we stopped using it, and ordered another one, a different brand this time.

Meantime, the lights went out again. Out in the back yard I saw water coming up from under a little junction box where the wiring for Paddy´s studio is hidden in the ground. Obviously that is what´s grounding out the power, that is why the lights go out when it rains hard. I shut off the circuit at the main, so now there´s no light in the studio and no power for the chainsaw. I opened up the junction box and sucked out the water with a turkey baster, and contemplated the delightful cautionary tale:

Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
-- Hillaire Belloc

OK, I will leave the electricity to the electrician! Still...
Maybe, if this is the problem, this means we don´t need a new cooktop.
Maybe our back yard is an electrocution hazard.
Maybe someday it will stop raining, and the electrician will come back to install the new stove, and he will find out the bozo who installed that junction box did it all wrong and the problem will be solved and neither we nor our hens will electrocute ourselves, and we will not have to pay a month´s wages for the shiny new stovetop.
(I wonder, if a chicken electrocutes itself, is the resulting meat tender or tough, or even edible?)
  
I know this all will work out at some point. It always does.

Meantime, we will skip Mass for today, for our good and the good of all the holy Church. We will close the gates and curl up in our (seperate) beds and contemplate the group of pilgs who dined with us on Wednesday, and left us with these gifts: a brutal dose of germs, and two little bottles of Wild Turkey bourbon to medicate ourselves with.   

Pity the pilgrim who travels with this germ. Imagine being far from home in damp clothes, your head on fire, joints aching and eyes crying, in a reeking dormitory room of people you are probably infecting.  Poor old pilgs. Pray for them, will you?

And pray for us, too. I am not happy to be ill, but I am very thankful to be home.