it was winter now, and bitterly cold. although most of South Africa has a summer rainfall, the Western cape has a winter rainfall.. And with the cold and the rain, also comes the leaking through my roof, and it is a horrible feeling to wake up during the night with icy cold and wet feet, or a wet face! So the past few days I have been busy trying to combat the rain from dripping onto self and furniture, and had come up with one very good idea, or so I thought!When Irma moved to Belgium, she left a lot of her paintings, and some valuable furniture with me for safe keeping, and as my house is as small as a Barbie house, (well almost) I was getting frustrated with this huge paintings leaning against walls all over, as I have a blue small toe, and that toe was aching like the blazes, and if it wasn't painful enough after the first time I caught it on one of the paintings, I bally well kept on bumping it all over the place.
So then a brilliant idea struck me, and I was quite amazed at the old self because of my brilliance! I was going to put hooks into the frames of the paintings, and corresponding ones into the rafters, then hoist the paintings up, and hang them upside down from my sitting room'srafters so that one could view it from that angle. Into the back of this paintings I was going to put plastic, and on that I was going to put buckets to catch the water!.
So off to the Co-op I went, and bought the needed hooks. Back home the ladder was fetched and positioned underneath where the first painting would be hoisted up! Then I stated sweating, and groaning, and also did a wee bit of swearing, as only I can when really in distress, because  to get a brilliant plan is okay, but to actually do the job is another story altogether! To get a painting with a heavy frame of about a meter by sixty cm up to the rafters, and holding it up with one hand while trying to interhook the hooks on the painting, and the ones on the rafters, proved to be quite impossible. But an old proverb in South Africa says, ''n boer maak 'n plan',meaning a farmer always makes a plan, and as I sat outside in the winter sun, totally exhausted and very much at a loss, the obvious solution suddenly came to me. I would put lengths of twine through the hooks, and hoist the bally things up by that, shortening the twine first on one side, then the other.
It worked a treat, but it took me the whole day to hoist up four paintings, and left me with about five bumps on my head that was made every time the twine slipped, and of course I was directly underneath.
There were some more paintings that I could hoist up in my bedroom, but I was a bitty wary of my sore head, and decided to wait a while as to work up some courage again!
My garden still looked quite nice, and as the front door plants were a bit protected, I still have some beautiful colour to enjoy when I sit on my little bench having my breakfast!