A new library

I woke up feeling closer to normal today. I think our exertions must have taken their toll, as we both still felt tired in the head this morning, but much better physically. Helen managed, yet again, to get up at 6.30am and exercise while I opted for the extra hour in bed. Weather permitting, I'll be out on my bike again in the morning now that I feel like my energy is returning.

After breakfast, I headed out towards Pisa again for yet more furniture. I wasn't overly keen on having to do the journey (50 minutes each way), as I've done it half a dozen times now, but without it I couldn't get our 'library' sorted, and that was the next big job to do.

After an incident-free trip, I arrived at Ikea - it was still quieter than at the weekend, but a bit busier this morning. We think that the local schools have broken up, which would explain the number of mums with kids I saw in the shop - when we were driving out of Pescia a couple of weeks ago, we saw throngs of kids having a water fight by the river and recalled that Richard had told us this was the end-of-school ritual each year before the 3-month (yes, 3-month) summer holiday!!

I managed to get three two-metre-high bookcases into the car, but it was the tightest squeeze yet - I even had to unpack one of them to get it all in, but thankfully I was soon on my way.

By the time I got home it was noon already, so we had a light lunch outside... again, and then Helen went back to the office while I set about building bookcases. We'd planned to go out this afternoon to find another shop to buy some herbs to plants, and we also said we'd try to retrieve our documents from the bank manager so that we're ready for starting the residency process later this week (the bank manager needed copies of birth certificates for the mortgage application process months ago, and still has them).

As it turned out, Helen managed to get into her groove after lunch, and I'd managed to build up a decent head of steam as well, so before we knew it we'd already missed the bank's one-hour post-lunch slot, so that's a job for tomorrow morning now.

We eventually headed out about 4pm and went on a voyage of discovery to find plants. As we've mentioned before, this area is famous for its nurseries, and Pescia has the second biggest flower market in Europe - so when driving around you see plenty of nurseries, and in particular olive nurseries. The trick we haven't yet mastered is working out what each place sells, which ones sell to the public, and where the entrances are (they're not as obvious as in the UK, with a lot looking like residential driveways) - we've often driven past them before we've had chance to stop, but this time we'd identified a road with a strong concentration of nurseries, and drove along it like Mr Magoo.

We managed to find three places to pull into that had flowers as well as olive trees on display, but in each case their herb offerings were somewhat depleted - we overheard the sales assistant in one tell of them a chap that the herbs were 'finito', so we wondered if they stop growing them after spring. Nevertheless, we managed to find small mint, rosemary and thyme plants - which were sold to us at discounted price of one euro each (further confirming our suspicions of the end of the herb growing season).

On the way back, we decided to try and pay Oscar Tintori a visit - he seems to be a bit of a legend amongst lemon growers but deals only in lemons (and other citrus) from what we've gleaned - you can even make a day of it and go and visit the Citrus Garden there. After seeing lemons growing well in a couple of places in the area, we figured we might do OK growing them, so decided we'd like to pick up a small lemon tree. However, Tintori isn't so easy to find either - we know where the turning is for the nursery, as it's clearly signposted, but then we seemed to lose the scent amidst the other nurseries down this particular road, and after doing a couple of laps of the same route we conceded defeat and decided to look him up on the web before trying again. (My newly found barber told me that Oscar Tintori is doing a lemon exhibition in Pescia this weekend with tastings of various lemon-flavoured products so I think we'll try and find that and see what it's all about.)

We stopped off in Pescia on the way back to have another attempt at looking in the little agricultural shop we drive past regularly here - they usually have racks of herbs out the front when they're open, but today there was nothing (another confirmation that herb season is over?). We went in anyway to see what else they sold. Turns out that they mainly sell pet food - shelves and shelves of gourmet cat food - as well as a very small selection of human grocery products and a few packets of seeds, so we left with packets of raddish, cavolo nero, basil and cucumber seeds.

We couldn't help but break our no-alcohol-on-a-school-night rule while in the square so had a bottle of beer each and watched the world go by while listening to the Italians next to us out in their finery nattering away to each other eating ice cream.

Just the one - it's a school night after all.

On arriving back at the house, Helen set to work planting the herbs. She soon stumbled across an obstacle when attempting to dig a hole big enough for a large pot to put the mint into though - it seems there is an enormous slab of flat rock directly under the new guest herb garden! Strange. I wanted to dig up the whole area to see if there was an old millstone buried there, but I got 'that look' from the boss (you know the one), so I admitted defeat and left her to her planting while I went back to writing this blog post.

It's a bit bare still at the moment, but we are still hoping we might find chives and sage to add.

After this, I'll spend another hour sorting books and putting them on the new shelves which are in the stairwell - hard to explain, so a photo is easier:

The set of shelves sit on the ledge next to the stairs in the stairwell.

I'd earmarked this spot for our books ages ago, and it works well. In true library style, we'll need a ladder to get to the top half of the cases, but in my head, all proper libraries do the same. It would be nicer with a set of wooden ladders rather than our aluminium one, but that might be a shopping expedition for another time!

Looking more and more like a proper library. It's nice to see all of our books out again.

While I've been doing this, Helen has been busy cooking a Ligurian salad of potatoes, olives, green beans, boiled egg and heaps of pesto, so I'd better leave you for now and get to my work as a librarian pronto!