Stuart got up a little before me this morning and went downstairs to placate the cats with a bowl of biscuits each. As lovely as it is to wake up with a little furry face, well, in your face, it's not easy to sleep through the little prods and nudges they give you (sometimes claws in, sometimes claws out) in an attempt to get their breakfast, so I was grateful for another 45 minutes of undisturbed snoozing before dragging myself out of bed as well.
We had breakfast on the patio, looking over the collection of maps and walking/biking guides we'd picked up on our afternoon out in Abetone yesterday, and were excited to find that there are lots of walks in the area marked on the map, including several from very close to our house (we always suspected this was the case, but it was nice to see them marked on an official walking guide) - there are also some interesting-looking cycle routes, which Stuart has his eye on and I'd love to do to, if I can ever re-discover my cycling confidence (although I've a feeling that might not be until I've found myself a mountain bike/touring bike).
Anyhow, once breakfast had been dispatched, there was only one thing for it: suit and boot up and head for the olive tiers.
I'm afraid to say that our day doesn't really get any more interesting than that. We spent a couple of hours strimming and trimming and tidying before lunch, stopped for lunch (bread, cheese, cured meat), then spent another 3.5 hours strimming, trimming and tidying before exhaustion and frustration got the better of us.
By the end of the day you could be mistaken for thinking that I had been in a fight with a sabred-toothed tiger. My arms, hands AND legs are covered not only in bites (insect bites, that is), but also in scratches from the brambles and the acacia trees.
I'm sorry to say that the building site gloves that have stood Stuart in such good stead for all of his building-related tasks in the UK are not up to the job of handling acacia trees. We have been using TraffiGlove Red (cut level 1) as supplied by SE Workwear in Abingdon, but I think we need to upgrade to something tougher (Ady, maybe you could send us an emergency aid pack including some green ones for cut level 3?!! :-) EVERY time I attempted to move a cut branch of acacia, I seemed to stab myself through the gloves, drawing blood on several occasions.
For those who are not so familiar with acacia trees, this is the vicious state of their stems/branches:
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| The giraffe has a desensitized tongue and is able to strip leaves from the thorny branches and crush the thorns with its molars. |
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| It'll all be fine once our giraffe arrives.... |
My battered and bruised appearance was not helped by the fact that, when we went exploring higher up the tiers, where things get *REALLY* overgrown, I clambered through some vegetation that seemed to attack me, leaving one arm stinging and burning, with strange, blistery-burn-like marks all over it. (We're in the process of consulting Dad over what it could have been that took such an aversion to me.)
Climbing up the tiers was quite depressing. While we've been working hard on tidying all the tiers you can see from the house, the land goes on quite a bit higher (supposedly there is even some flatter land at the top, although we have yet to discover anything that could be construed as 'flat'). The land beyond what looks like the topmost tier from the point of view of the house is incredibly overgrown. While the upper tiers have been a struggle to clear of acacia and bramble, the land beyond them (which includes some olive trees, so we really need to clear it to reach them) really is like a jungle. It's going to take quite some manpower AND power-tool power to get that sorted, and we just have to accept that it's a job that we won't be able to accomplish quickly.
Today's before and after shots of the upper tiers go something like this:
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| Before. |
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| After. |
Sometimes it really goes against the grain to cut down the plants that are growing naturally on the tiers. There are some lovely wild flowers, and we often come across flattened areas which look very much like they've been used by something (deer?) for sleeping. It seems mean to disrupt their surrounding, and wrong to cut down the interesting vegetation, but it has to be done. One thing I haven't had the heart to chop down are the stunning lilies growing on the upper tiers:
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| Beautiful lilies. |
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| They seem to be growing wild. |
As ever, the higher we get up the terraces, the better the view back towards the valley seems to become:
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| Each terrace up affords a better view. |
We know that we have done a lot of hard work - the lower tiers have been treated to Stuart's fastidious strimming and tidying and look beautifully neat (in fact, they look as if they've been given a buzz cut), while my less neat clearing towards the top has resulted in us actually being able to see the outline of the higher tiers - they will eventually be subjected to the buzz cut as well. However, it still seems like there's an enormous mountain to climb, and looking back up at the tiers from the house, we sometimes find ourselves doubting the amount we have actually done. I therefore decided to do a compare-and-contrast exercise.
The picture below is looking up at the tiers on day 15 (4 weeks ago - the day our furniture arrived!) and the picture beneath that is looking up at them today. Regardless of which you believe is the prettier picture (the 'before' picture certainly has a bluer sky, and you might find the lush green of the vegetation more attractive than the brown colour of the cut grass), today's does show some progress towards where we are aiming - and some of the olive trees you can see on the upper tiers weren't even visible before.
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| Four weeks ago. |
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| Today. |
So that's your update for today - we're both tired, sore and aching and looking forward to an hour of downtime with some TV before heading to bed.
Buonanotte.
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