Blurgh! Roll on Mercoledi!

We had a very enjoyable evening with our guests on the terrace by candlelight last night - we got to find out what they've been doing while they've been here and how they've enjoyed their stay so far, as well as a little bit about them and their home lives. We feel very lucky to have landed ourselves with such a lovely family as our very first guests in the apartment. As seems to be the way with our socialising these days, it turned into another late night for us (though not as late as many of our recent ones), and we retired to bed after tidying up just after midnight.

Helen got up to exercise at 7.30am, having overslept by some way - but I wasn't even aware that she'd gone. When she came back in she said it had been a very brief and half-hearted attempt and was rathter disappointed in herself. As for me, I was feeling decidedly off colour and very nauseous so I lay still for a while longer until I could muster up the confidence to move. When I did, I headed downstairs for some juice and to check my email on my tablet, but I soon felt too far below par even for that so went back upstairs to lie down on the bed in the spare room. I snoozed on and off fitfully for a short while, or so I thought - when Helen popped her head in to see if I was OK and told me it had just gone noon, I couldn't quite believe her.

She told me that she had been the only one awake in the house for most of the morning - while I has been dozing on the guest room bed, Lucca was flat out snoozing on the rug in our bedroom and Florence was flat out snoozing on the rocking chair downstairs. 

Anyway, but this point, the worst of the roughness seemed to have passed, so I thought I'd have a shower and attempt a sandwich.

The sandwich had neither a good effect nor a bad effect on the way I was feeling, but by this time I did at least feel up to looking at the pile of paperwork on my desk that I have been collecting for over a month now, and to start the long task of translating the pile of papers we had received from the bank a couple of weeks ago.

The afternoon was a dull affair for both of us, and the warm, humid afternoon eventually broke into heavy rain with the odd rumble of thunder echoing around the valley and causing sporadic lapses in our internet service - it felt as if the weather was echoing the mood inside the house, or vice versa! Helen called time on work at 5.30pm and started the job of moving her office from our bedroom back down into the altogether better lit and airier office (we never thought it would seem so bright and airy in there, but there is no comparison between the 'bedroom office' and the 'office office'). Once she had brought all the paperwork, books, stationery and bits and pieces downstairs, we lugged the desk downstairs between us, and then I sat down to set her computer back up and ... set up the new printer.

The new printer WORKS, which is great news and means we can finally stopping throwing fistfuls of money at Esselunga for replacement inkjet cartridges every couple of weeks.

Happy days. (Note the stickers on the side - Helen has faithfully kept those on her desk since her nieces gave them to us when we saw them before we left the UK!)

While I was playing with setting up the new printer, Helen prepared dinner: vegetable fajitas. Not Italian in style, but the raw ingredients were certainly as Italian as they get: home grown pepper, zucchini and melanzane from our garden, along with some local mushrooms from the supermarket.

So for the first time in a long time, we finished dinner before 8pm and we are both looking forward to a couple of luxurious quiet hours on the sofa and catching up with the end of the Tour de France before an early night, and hoping that a good night's sleep will bring a better day tomorrow and something more interesting to report on!

Night all.