The first job on the list today was to sort out Helen's invoicing (that we should have done yesterday). We'd set up a template last week and sent it to our accountant to be checked to ensure it complies with all the necessary rules and regulations over here - it's made a touch more complicated as Helen is registered into the 'Minimum Contribution' scheme as someone starting a business in Italy, which means she should be able to pay less tax for the first five years.
Once we'd finally got our head around everything, it was time to go and acquire these special €2 stamps (marca da bollo) that must be affixed to each invoice - you can't invoice without them, and the date on the stamp must be earlier or at least the same as the date on the invoice, which meant we could put it off no longer.
In the end, I left Helen at home so she could dive into some work while I headed into town to the post office. Yet again it was busy today - it almost seems as if everyone waits until the holidays to do their admin and posting. There must be a quiet time of day but we've yet to discover it.
After 15-20 minutes waiting for my turn, I suddenly remembered that, on last week's attempt to acquire these special stamps at our local post office, we had been told to buy them from a tabaccheria. In the immortal words of Homer (no, not the Greek poet), d'oh! As I was next in line though, I thought I might as well try my luck. Sure enough, they didn't sell them and I was directed to the nearest tabaccheria, across the river, so I left the car and walked over.
When I started my conversation with the lady behind the counter with 'I'm sorry, my Italian is not very good', she looked genuinely panicked. I started to ask for the stamps (marca da bollo) 'for my invoices' while fumbling in my bag for various bits of paperwork to help me illustrate what it was I was after, but she had already understood what I needed and I was soon walking away with a strip of ten stamps.
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| The magic stamps. |
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| One per invoice. |
On my way back to the car, I dived into Lidl to buy some cat biscuits. By the time I'd stood in the queue waiting to pay for said biscuits and got back to the car, I realised that I had somehow wasted most of the morning already and that there was little time left to do anything productive before lunch - so I decided to go and fill the car with methane. I'd had to switch back over to petrol as of this morning, and wanted to get back off it as soon as possible.
While being filled up (a whole €19.37's worth), I managed to find not only some jump leads but also a headlamp bulb (to replace the other one that seemed to have blown last week) in the shop. So far, the car seems fine since having its new battery fitted, but having some jump leads just in case will at least give us a chance of getting out of trouble should we get caught out again.
By the time I got home it was nearly 12.30pm and Helen was starting to wonder where I had got to! Will we ever get geese at this rate?! We sat and ate our lunch in the sunshine - today was a breezy and slightly cooler day, the temperature still hitting the mid twenties, but the breeze made it feel a touch cooler.
With lunch dispatched, I settled down to have a look at the strimmer which had coughed and sputtered out on Helen at the weekend. I removed the spark plug, which seemed fine, but I cleaned it anyway, then removed the air filter, which again seemed fine, but I gave it a clean anyway. I then dismantled the fuel tank, rinsed it out and inspected the fuel filter. Again, it seemed fine, but as a last resort I mixed up a fresh batch of fuel and then crossed my fingers - but it's still misbehaving: too much on the trigger and it just loses power and dies. All I can do now is to buy a new spark plug in the morning and try replacing that. If that doesn't fix things then it will need to be repaired by someone with more experience of these things than I have, so that's both a broken hedge trimmer and a broken strimmer! I'm glad we spent the money on the second set of equipment last month, I just hope the large investment in that piece of kit pays off - you know what they say, buy cheap, buy twice.
My next task was to find a permanent home for the newly rebuilt bike storage unit. It's a bit of a lump so has to be fixed along the back wall of the house next to the wood shed. The only obstacle here is that there is a gully for drainage running along the back of the house. My plan was to fix large pieces of timber to the house at path level to support the rear edge of the unit, and then sink two concrete blocks into the path to which to fix the front edge of the unit. Three hours and some wall dismantling and rebuilding later, the site was ready and we have a floating storage shed!
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| Concrete blocks. |
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| Timbers. |
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| Floating storage shed. |
Tomorrow, once the concrete blocks and their mortar have dried and set in place, I can fix the unit down and we'll be ready for new mountain bikes! It feels good to be making some progress at last after last week's washout - maybe tomorrow afternoon I'll even get back onto the goose area, although the weather forecast is for a thundery day tomorrow, so we'll see.
While I packed all my tools away, Helen surfaced from her day's office work and went up to the terraces to start lopping as much of the new acacia growth as possible in readiness for a final strimming before Autumn sets in - though it feels like summer has plenty of life left in it yet! - it's incredible how much the acacias have shot up since we originally cleared the terraces.
So as I write, glass of white in hand, the sun just sinking down behind the mountain opposite, Helen is thumbing through one of our Tuscan cookbooks looking forward to having time to do a bit more cooking, I think Panzanella is high up on the list so if that goes well I'm sure you'll be seeing our results here at some point.
Talking of cooking... time to go and see what's for dinner.
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