Our day was fairly unremarkable up until our electric woes.
Stuart went out for another bike ride this morning, going up a different route which took him on a four-mile climb (that's solid climbing for four miles, no respite) to the village of San Quirico. Needless to say his return ride was a lot quicker and less strenuous! While he was out and about on his bike, I was out but not going anywhere on mine. I tried out the turbo trainer for the first time today, and had a lovely 40-minute cycle ride on our patio. Unfortunately the flies came along for the ride and I ended up cycling with a gym towel draped over my head in an attempt to at least keep them off my face / not have to look at them!! I really must get my road cycling mojo sorted so that I can go out on the real roads and see some real, moving scenery - I miss my trusty old mountain bike like you wouldn't believe!
Anyway, exercising excitement over, we knuckled down to work in our usual places.
I was hard at work, right in the middle of something, when piff, paff, poof, everything went dark and quiet and my machine turned off. Stuart had been Wonderwebbing again (hemming a small curtain to hang at the window of the shower room in the apartment, made from the offcuts of the wardrobe curtains), so we both immediately assumed that the iron had tripped the circuit. Sigh. Still, thankfully not too much damage done and once the trip switch had been re-set, it was back to work. Stuart noted that the main electricity meter/ box was displaying some strange messages, which was a bit worrying, but we got on with our work and decided to think about that later.
As usual, lunch was an outdoor affair. Just tuna mayo sandwiches today though, as we need to do some shopping tomorrow so it was a store-cupboard special today!
After another hour or so's work, we decided to head out to Ikea to get some more bits and pieces. We needed to get a chest of drawers to complete the furnishing of the apartment bedroom, we still needed the doors for the cupboards in our own living room, and we had our eye on a large bathroom cabinet that would change our lives around (OK slight over dramatisation, but it would make a lot of difference to us).
Off we headed in the excessive heat (see,we're getting so used to it that I almost forgot to mention the fact that it was ROASTING today...). Our poor little car was belting out the air conditioning as hard as it could, but sadly we think the air con is past its best and all it could manage was a slightly tepid breeze. Still, that was marginally better than having the windows open - the air temperature was so warm that even zooming along the motorway with both windows wide open was too uncomfortable!
We reached Ikea and decided to beat the system and go straight to the warehouse to simply pick and pay for what we wanted and leave. Great plan. Except we couldn't find the bathroom cabinet on the computer system to work out where to pick it up from. Fine, we thought, we'll just walk through the shop until we find it on display, note down its name/code and come straight back to the warehouse. Brilliant plan. Could we find the darned cabinet?! We must have done three circuits of the display area (yes, including going against the flow of 'traffic' - I always feel as if I'm going to get pulled over and thrown out of the shop for walking in the wrong direction in Ikea), but just couldn't find it. We could only think that they'd changed the displays since we came a little over a week ago, and removed it. Disheartened, we made our way to the warehouse area through the 'marketplace' - and what should we stumble upon but another section of bathroom displays! And of course, the cabinet was there all along.
Armed with all of the codes we needed, we headed to the warehouse. We loaded the cupboard doors onto the trolley, then went to find the chest of drawers, and finally went to pick up the bathroom cabinet. On seeing the size of the box the flat-pack cabinet was in, we had a sudden loss of nerve and thought it might be a bit too much of a squeeze to fit in the car. So after ALL of that, we left WITHOUT the bathroom cabinet!
There's still plenty of flat-pack furniture assembly to be done tomorrow though:
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| Flat packs galore. |
On arriving home from Ikea, it was nearing 7pm, so we had a brief stop for a soft drink and a relax on the patio in the warm evening air. For some reason, we both felt shattered - probably a combination of physical exertion and the accumulation of several nights of disturbed sleep due to the extreme heat and stuffiness in our room!
We were happily sitting on the patio Googling animal noises on the tablet PC (attempting to work out what strange animal noises we keep hearing in the woods) when we lost connection to the Internet. Big sigh, as this has happened before. However, this time it wasn't the satellite's fault - it turned out that ALL of the electrics had gone off again.
Stuart went to investigate, reset the trip switch... and it went off again. There were various strange messages flashing up on the screen of the meter which SEEMED to suggest there was too much load on the supply. But nothing bar a couple of PCs and the modem was switched on - and we've had plenty more than that all going at the same time in the last few weeks. We reset the switch again... and off it went again.
Resigning ourselves to a quiet, dark evening, we rooted out some candles from the man cave, Stuart went to use up the remainder of the hot (warm) water in the tank that was left over from yesterday and I made a start on cooking dinner while it was still daylight.
After eating dinner outside (because it was lighter outside than in the house), we armed ourselves with Italian/English dictionaries and attempted to make some sense of the messages being flashed up on the electricity meter. We didn't really have much success, but Stuart went down to the apartment (where the meter is located) for one last look and managed to get the trip switch reset again. Which is where we are now... waiting any minute for everything to go off again!!
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| Puzzling. |
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