The move to Tuscany : Release the felines!

A DHL delivery was in control of our day today: Helen's birth certificate was winging its way back to us complete with Apostille (legal verification) from the UK. We had received notification that it had set off yesterday afternoon and it was due to arrive by courier today - all for the sum of £12.50, an absolute bargain compared to to the €30 paid for sending it to the UK in the first place, which took four days (there's a lesson to be learned here somewhere).

So while Helen had work to get stuck into, I was left wondering what to tackle from the enormous to-do list. Strimming was definitely off the menu, and there is so little to do in the apartment until the kitchen arrives I couldn't get motivated to scratch around in there to fill my time. So I wondered: do I go to Obi to replace the broken hedge trimmer? Do I go to Arcaplanet to buy two catflaps? Do I go to Ikea to pick up some more furniture? Do I find a stationery shop to buy some suspension files so that I can finish filing in the office? Oh, and what about a BBQ, we need a BBQ so I could I buy one of these from somewhere!

Well I/we couldn't go anywhere until the courier had been, so I decided to tinker with the website in the meantime, and while I was at it, make a start on the guest information we're compiling.

I ended up in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here as there was some stuff I couldn't put into the guest info until I had finished a page on the website - one depended on the other, so I had a slow morning with yet again lots (and lots) of huffing and puffing, and I'm sure my wife was wishing I was back in Lanciole strimming.

Lunch rolled around very quickly indeed and my grumpiness started to swell - I wanted to get out and do something REALLY useful, tick something off my list. It's fair to say that I'm feeling the weight of what's left to do. I know I'll get there, but that doesn't allay the worries or concerns. Part of the problem is mentally juggling so many things - I now have a comprehensive list of things to buy and do, but prior to compiling that list, everywhere I looked I kept thinking 'mustn't forget to do that' or 'damn, still haven't bought that so that I can finish that job'.

So, the pressure is mounting and it did in the office as well - I was trying to finish a page on the website that required a few photos, but I couldn't for the life of me work out the digital filing system that my wife had used. I didn't want to keep distracting her to ask for things, so decided the only way was to 'sort' the filing by renaming everything. If only it was that easy - either my PC or the network hard drive wouldn't allow me to rename certain folders, and kept telling me someone else was using the resource so I couldn't make changes. I knew damn well nobody else was using the resource - and it turned out that punching the keys on the keyboard HARDER than normal wasn't going to change anything...

I think that at this point Helen needed some air, as ours in the office was a touch blue. She went to the post box and returned not only with my replacement Amazon delivery (the right thing this time), but also a DHL package and other post - most of which had been wedged into the gate as the post box isn't big enough. I've no idea how long that had all been there, but it was now half past four and we'd been waiting all day for a phone call from a lost courier.

Anyway, now that our documents had arrived, we could actually go out and do something 'useful' so we headed for Obi in search of a BBQ, plus some other bits. We managed to get the other bits, but left empty handed on the BBQ front - they didn't have the one we wanted in stock, so we left and headed for Mercatone Uno. We chanced our luck in Brico en route, but didn't find anything suitable there, so were thankful that we eventually found something in Mercatone - not quite what we were after, but certainly perfectly well up to the job of cooking on.

It was now around 6pm, and we really needed to pay Esselunga a vist - we were out of almost everything in the fridge and store cupboard. We both felt ready to go home, and supermarket shopping was the last thing we felt like doing, but knowing we had a busy weekend ahead, we turned into the car park - only to find it the busiest we'd seen it. The shop was busy too - Helen likened it to Tesco, which did nothing to improve my mood, but on the flip side, there were more cashiers on than we've ever seen before, so can't grumble.

On returning to the house, we unpacked and headed onto the patio with refreshments ... and finally left the door open for the cats! Although they have only been here under house arrest for two weeks, they spent about eight weeks indoors in Bristol prior to that - so haven't really experienced the outside world for about 10 weeks. They came out tentatively at first, but soon disappeared!

This is a bit different!

What?! We're allowed outside?!!

They ventured much further than we expected - we almost lost them up the driveway at one point (making up for lost time I suppose). There were no real dramas to report but they seemed to thoroughly enjoy it - so much so that they have spent the last 40 minutes asking to go back out again. I just hope this doesn't have repercussions in the early hours of the morning...