A satisfying day's work

Today was another relatively late start, with me not getting outside to my exercise until 7.25am. The night brought heavy, heavy rain, which drummed loudly on the skylight outside our bedroom. That was followed shortly afterwards by flashes of lightning and claps of thunder - and when all of that had finished, Lucca decided he wanted to snuggle down in bed and I had trouble keeping him off my pillow. So all in all, another somewhat disturbed night's sleep.

Once I'd finished my 45-minute spin on the turbo trainer in the steamy morning air, I felt slightly more awake and after a shower and some breakfast I settled down to work at my computer.

Stuart rose after I'd finished in the shower, and seemed to feel pretty tired again, but he ploughed on with some admin-type jobs during the morning while I worked.

First, he emailed the car dealership to try to determine what the situation is with breakdown cover while we are on their insurance. Their response was not a direct reply to the question, but to ask if anything was the matter, so Stuart replied to say that we'd had to replace the battery and that the engine management light on the dashboard has been flashing pretty much since we picked the car up. Their response was to ask him to take the car in for them to have a look at tomorrow. Since they are only a showroom, with no mechanics on site, we're not quite sure what will come of that. I see visions of a tired old Alfa Romeo being back on loan to us for weeks on end while they get someone to have a look at our car...

Next, he telephoned the place we had taken our hedge trimmers to be repaired a few weeks ago. He had tried calling last week, but we're pretty sure they were closed for the August holidays, this time he was in luck though - the hedge trimmers will be ready for collection tomorrow morning! That is actually quite fortuitous, as the car dealership is very close to where we need to pick the trimmers up from, so we can do two jobs in the one journey. Turns out we might need to leave our hand-held strimmer with them when we collect the trimmers as the strimmer is still misbehaving...

After that, he sat down in the office with me to update some spreadsheets. After a while we got talking, so I stopped the clock on my office work temporarily and we made a list of all the things we want/need to do in the house/on the land to work out how much we will need to spend. In the space of 3 minutes I went from being buoyed by realising we had a little more money than I thought left snaffled away in savings accounts/left over from the sale of our Abingdon house, to being depressed by how little money we will have (if any) when we've done all the things we need to do! Everything is urgent, everything takes time, and everything seems to cost a whole load of money. We need to do a lot of these things in order to save money in the long run (such as put in solar water heating, replace the wood burner with one with a back boiler to heat water in the winter, look into sourcing our own water from the stream that boarders our land.. and so on), but they are big initial expenditures. Oh well, we'll get there eventually (I hope!).

After half an hour crunching numbers and talking about our to-do list, we each returned to work - I returned to my office work and Stuart starting doing some work towards the VB conference we are both due to go to in the States next month.

It wasn't long before our tummies were rumbling and it was already 1.15pm. We sat outside eating our lunch, marvelling at what a beautiful day it was. The sky was blue, the sun was scorching, but there was a very pleasant breeze. The forecast had been for rain today and couldn't have been further from the reality. While we were finishing our lunch, Stuart outlined his plan for the afternoon - which was to do some more work on clearing terraces for Goose Island/Gooselandia. I mentioned that I was frustrated that I was unable to help - at which point he suggested I take the afternoon off and do some manual labour instead. I was tempted, but was in the middle of something, so compromised by saying I would do another hour in the office and then down my office tools to pick up land-clearing tools.

In a gallant act of solidarity, Stuart joined me for the hour in the office and we both beavered away at our respective work for the same conference - me on the papers, Stuart on the slides - but as soon as I was finished, we both headed outside.

Since the hand-held strimmer was still misbehaving, I was entrusted with the dream machine back-pack strimmer. I must admit I was a little apprehensive. First, because it's a pretty heavy piece of kit and I wasn't certain I would be able to operate it, but also because I was terrified of breaking it - both the hedge trimmers and the hand-held strimmer have conked out after *I* have been using them, so I was worried I might be the common denominator and if the dream machine broke that would leave us with no (garden) power tools!

I seemed to manage OK though - the backpack was indeed heavy, and I kept scalding myself on the part of the machine that gets very hot when it's been going for a while, but otherwise I handled the machinery with relative ease. I had soon cleared another section of terrace up until the point at which it reached a couple of fairly well established acacias and a tree of undetermined identity (the important point being that it was neither chestnut nor olive, and was in the way).

At that point, Stuart came to the rescue with his hand saw. With a lot of effort he managed to saw through the trunks (there were two) of the unidentified tree, then (having spent all of his sawing power) passed the saw to me to deal with the chunky acacias. All the trees felled, I then continued to clear the terrace as far as a large chestnut tree, then raked all of the tree/grass/bramble clippings from that terrace to the next, then the next, then the driveway.

Going in. (Please note I am not dressed for fashion in this picture...)

Raking clippings.

By 6pm, we had done a solid three hours of labour on the terraces and made a fair impact. We reckon that the clearing we have done between us over the last week had doubled the length of the three terraces above the house. And we are a step closer to being able to get geese (our next challenges will be sourcing chicken wire, fence posts... oh and geese).

Just after 6pm we downed tools and relaxed for an hour on the patio. I felt exhausted but with a deep sense of satisfaction. While doing office work is earning us some pennies, it's the other type of work that I came here for and that makes me feel happy. Putting in some solid physical work, being able to see what a difference your hard work has made, and seeing a very real impact on the state of things is way more satisfying than sitting on your backside all day staring at a computer screen. Or so I find.

So tonight it's Stuart's turn to cook dinner - squash and feta risotto, and it smells delicious. I think I might sleep well tonight.

Butterfly enjoying our mint flowers.