Wet stuff falling from the sky

I think our drought has officially broken.  After a long dry summer when we’d all forgotten what rain is, two days of pouring rain (with several more to come, by the look of it) have reminded us.  It’s a bit of a shock, suddenly being all cold and miserable like this – I’m definitely not ready for winter yet!
Neither is the house, it seems.  I discovered yesterday that although I’d diligently cleared the gutters ready for winter, it was completely in vain, because some thirsty plant has grown its roots down the drain the downspout empties into, totally blocking the drain and the downspout.  So although the gutter is beautifully clear, the water can’t get out of it, so it’s backing up and some has flowed into the ceiling, producing a lovely wee leak in the corner of the sunroom.  Yay.
My attempts to clear the drain have been completely unsuccessful, so it looks like I’m going to have to call a professional of some sort tomorrow morning.  Wonder how much that will cost me?  And then of course I’ll have to see how much damage it’s done to the ceiling – hopefully it won’t be *too* bad, because it’s only a tiny drip coming through – most of the water luckily is flowing over the outside edge of the gutter rather than the inside edge, so it looks like not that much is getting into the ceiling (though of course any at all is a bad thing).

Apart from the leak (and clambering around on the roof in the rain making sure it wasn’t a broken tile causing it), I had a great day yesterday.  Jenny and I had been talking about an expedition to Hands for ages – she because she’d never been, and I because I had a voucher from Lytteltonwitch burning a hole in my pocket – so we finally got round to it yesterday.  We went for lunch first at a cafe nearby (which had an open fire – perfect in this weather!), and then spent a very pleasant hour or so wandering around Hands.  I ended up buying some materials for an experimental project I’ve got in mind – might try and make a start on it next weekend, in which case there’ll be some work in progress pictures coming soon (unless it all goes horribly wrong, of course – like I said, it’s a bit experimental… it’s something I’ve read about that I know is technically possible, but I’ve never actually tried it, and I’m a little vague on the details…)
Afterwards we went back to Jenny’s place out in Sumner to visit the tiny kittens she’s fostering for Cat Rescue.  They’re very young (about a month old, I think?), and still a bit unsteady on their feet, and incredibly cute – little bundles of fluffy silver tabbyness.  At one point I ended up with all four of them piled up on my lap, tangled up together in one big ball of fluff and all purring incredibly loudly.  I was sooooo tempted to sneak one into my pocket and take it home, but I don’t think Parsnips and Pushkin would have appreciated it (besides, I’m already breaking the “don’t have more cats than you have laps” rule with two of them!).
Later we got takeaways for dinner and watched Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson’s hoax documentary, which I’d never seen because it aired when I was living in the UK).  Jenny and MrJenny are both very knowledgeable about cinema history, so it was really interesting watching it with them – they saw a lot that I completely missed (and vice versa – there was a lot of NZ stuff that they were oblivious to, having only been here a few years).  Really cool film, anyway, and I could see why so many people were taken in by it – he was very clever in the way he made it just plausible enough and intermingled the hoax with a lot of genuine history and local legend to create a story that it was guaranteed people would want to believe.  Of course, knowing in advance it was a hoax I was easily able to spot the clues he’d put in (the frequent references to bulls (as in, a load of…) for a start), but I think if I’d seen it when it first screened I would have been totally fooled.