Hail and wind followed by clear blue skies.

I'm told that the weather late last night was atrocious - Helen thought it must have been a hail storm (along with the almost constant thunder and lightning), as the din on the sky light outside our bedroom was so loud that she thought the roof was about to fall in. I have to take her word for it though, as I slept through the lot. Thankfully, it was calm and dry when I got up to do the 4am Reggie toilet trip.

After breakfast, Nick, Tess and I headed out into a chilly but clear morning - the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and there was no sign of the weather that has been blowing around the valley a few hours earlier. Nick and Tess cleared up the chaos on the lawn - their temporary wall re-pointing shelter had not faired well in the storms, with the posts ripped out of the lawn, the stepladders blown over, but thankfully, once ripped from its supporting posts, the tarpaulin had simply slumped limply over the wall, so there was still had some protection for it from the worst of the wetness. I'm pleased to report that the repaired and improved wood shelter survived the winds unscathed.

On finding out that woodpile 3.0 had survived the night, I went to work on wood shelter number two to implement the same improvements and repairs, as Tess was planning to resume wood cutting duties this morning.

So while I was finishing the repairs and Tess started wood cutting with the chop saw, Nick went back to emptying the affectionately named "sh*t shed" of the last (we hope) pieces of rubbish left for us by the previous owners.

I left Tess happily chopping and stacking wood and went to help Nick finish emptying the shed. That didn't take long though, as he'd already done a fair amount last night.

So, with a new pile of rubbish on the drive, Nick and I went to fencing work.

The fence starts to take shape.

We had our mid-morning coffee break on the patio - the sun had now made its way round to our part of the hill and we were all in t-shirts as the temperature was climbing towards 17°C. It was hard to tear ourselves away from the view and to stop basking in the glorious sunshine after the wet weather of the last week, but tear ourselves away we did - comforted by the fact that this weather is due to stick around at least for the next four days.

By the time lunch arrived (amazing Tuscan bean soup again - eaten outdoors again), the fence was looking great and so was the wood pile. Good weather makes such a difference to productivity and I can't help but get excited about the amount of work we might be able to get done over the coming days.

Just after lunch, Helen spotted a large while pile of what looked like the small polystyrene balls that are used to stuff beanbags. Incredibly, it was a pile of hail stones that were still frozen despite the weather now being sunny and warm and close to 20C.

Hail stones from the previous night's storm.

But the weather was like this!

As lunch was late, it was soon 3.30pm, time to stand the guys down and head into town to buy more fence posts.

By the time I returned with another 40 fence posts it was 4.30pm - I unloaded the car, then brought some wood into the house for the fire, called the cats in, fed the geese with lettuce and put them to bed while Helen headed off along the drive with Reggie for his pre-dinner walk.

When Helen got back to house Reggie seemed to have found a new reserve of energy and was in full-on play mode, bouncing around and virtually throwing himself off the terrace onto the patio. I went and fetched his towel for him to play with to try and tire him out- but that didn't work.

When we put him in his crate he wouldn't settle and was very whiny and barky - more so than at any other time since he arrived. The situation wasn't helped by the cats appearing from time to time - every time he sees or hears the cats he starts barking. When he still didn't settle after having had his dinner, we decided to take him in the car for his first trip into town for a 'proper' walk.

He travelled down into town happily enough in the passenger footwell with Helen (Helen wasn't in the footwell), and we parked up and walked along the river and around the square for half an hour where he was distracted by every person we passed, one of whom crossed the road to say hello to him. He met three other dogs in the square - the first of which he barked at, the next he barked and sniffed, and the third one he just sniffed. After 40 minutes or so, we were pretty chilly and were glad to get back in the car - Reggie spent the return journey in the footwell again, but this time seemed a little more relaxed. 

We got home to find Tess and Nick having started to prepare dinner (we'd asked them to cook some rice to go with the vegetable chilli we'd pre-made and frozen), so it wasn't long before we were all sitting down to dinner while Reggie settle down in his cage for a good sleep after his exhausting adventure - mission accomplished!