Monday again... Or is it Wednesday? Losing track!

Having last Thursday off to go yomping up a gorge has really thrown me - I genuinely don't know what day it feels like. I guess that, in a way, that's kinda part of our goal - blurring the lines between week and weekend, so if we ever do manage it properly, it seems like it'll take a bit of getting used to.

Today Helen was back to exercising after having Sunday off, and after that went straight to her computer as she had a deadline to meet to get the details for the conference badges to the printer this morning.

After that was done, and I'd scribbled a plan for a goose house on some paper, we headed into town. I decided the time had come to attempt to register with the local health service office to get our health cards. According to the internet, this is straightforward once your residency has been approved - just take the document from the comune, along with your EHIC card, passport and proof of address (after all, the stringent checks have already been done by the council).

Of course, at first we couldn't even find the office for the local health service administration - the internet was of no use whatsoever - the address that the internet had given me was a very closed-looking door sandwiched between a church and part of the hospital. That came as no real surprise, but we finally found the office near the bus terminus in town, as Helen remembered Sue telling her it was somewhere in that vicinity. We went in and found a long, wide staircase (in a very large, echoey old building). There was no signage, nothing (as is often the Italian way), so we just walked up the stairs and kept on climbing up, looking for a clue. We knew we were in the right building, but it was huge and we had no idea where to head. When we got to the top floor, and was about to head back down again, we noticed a small A5 sign outside a door leading off the upper landing into a corridor. We went through the door and found a long corridor with about ten offices annexed along it, most of which were unsigned and most of which were empty. We could hear a male voice coming from one office, but other than that there were no signs of life.

As I was halfway down the corridor, feeling as if I shouldn't actually be there at all, a woman appeared through some doors at the end of it, so I decided to ham up my efforts at looking for something. She picked up on my cues straight away and asked me what I wanted. I had barely got the words 'tessera sanitaria' (health card) out of my mouth before she was finishing my sentence off and dragging the pair of us through the door she had appeared from and introducing us to another lady (whose name was Maria, I think). We handed her our documents and asked for the health cards. A somewhat confusing conversation ensued, and then she picked up the phone and tried calling someone, who didn't answer. She then tried another number, but there was no answer. She tried again... NOBODY seemed to answer. At one point she got her colleague opposite to help by trying different phone numbers simultaneously, while she was also using a mobile to call and text. All without joy. This went on for an age, and I was just about to ask if it would be better if we came back later, when she finally got through to someone. More confusion ensued, but the short story is that we were told that we need to go to what we now know is the 'CUP' (and not the COOP) tomorrow morning to get Helen's work contract stamped (if the woman's gesticulation is anything to go by) and then return to her with it.

We walked back to the car, feeling rather confused and disappointed that the process had been nowhere near as straightforward as we had been hoping for, and having no idea where it was we were meant to turn up tomorrow morning. Thankfully, en route back to the car we found the CUP - which was a relief. (You can imagine our confusion when we left the health office thinking we would have to go into a COOP supermarket and ask them to stamp an English work contract...).

On our way home, we made a quick stop at the timber merchant to pick up some pieces of wood that I could use to make a start on building a goose house.

When we got home it was lunch time already - we'd spent the best part of an entire morning on that little hurdle!

After lunch, Helen went back to her office while I started work on building the frame for the goose house.

It was a beautiful afternoon - once again in the high 20s (not that poor Helen saw much of it) - and by around four o'clock the framework of the house was up and I could measure for flooring, roof and wall materials. That done, I managed to convince Helen to call it a day and take another trip to the wood yard with me to see Elena and place an order for ply wood cut to various sizes, tongue and groove, and a couple more lengths of timber to make door openings.

Spot the difference between this...

...and this! 

Goose Palace taking shape.

After that, we went to the place we bought the strimmer from, partly to see how our broken OBI purchases were fairing under the hands of Norberto the mechanic, but also to find out why the backpack strimmer (purchased from them at considerable cost) was refusing to start. Norberto insisted on looking at the backpack immediately, and very soon realised that the spark plug needed changing - apparently because we (or should I say I) have been running it with the choke half open and not fully open. It's completely counter-intuitive to me, but the proof was there to be seen. Spark plug changed, we headed off, leaving Norberto our broken tools to play with for a couple of weeks longer. He did seem optimistic about being able to fix them though - we'll see, they've already thwarted OBI's official repair man so it's our last throw of the dice. We've agreed that we won't be making any more 'economy' purchases as far as machinery goes - the work here is too intense for anything less than semi-pro.

On the way home, we faced the weekly supermarket shop. What started out as a pleasant and novel experience when we first arrived here has now firmly found its place in the drudgery box. I think it's because it's no longer a challenge, and there are so many other things we'd rather be doing. I suppose this is all part of the settling in process.

By the time we got home, it was getting close to 7pm, so we had half an hour on the patio before I grabbed my tablet and a beer to write this blog post on the patio. We are  now losing the sun behind the mountain opposite at around 18:45, and when that happens the temperature drops quite a few degrees - it's perfectly comfortable for me to sit here in my shorts and a t-shirt, but even with a jumper on, Helen feels the cold more so she retired inside to start dinner. 

Tomorrow promises new apartment doors as well as the trip to the CUP, so we'll see how that pans out!