Dismantling and disarray

This morning started cold and bright with all the usual animal rounds. We still haven't had a frost here yet, but this morning must it have been close - the thermometer on the wall by the front door (courtesy of Wendy) read just 4C when I came back in from letting the geese out and taking Reggie for his morning toilet duties, and it was a definite scarf-and-gloves morning.

By the time I was bringing Reggie back in, Stuart was already up and dressed. He looked tired, but this was the earliest he has managed to haul himself out of bed unprompted for several days. I went outside to do a quick 30 minutes with the turbo trainer before coming back into the relative warmth of the house (I say relative - without central heating it really is only relative). While I was getting showered and changed, the phone rang - it was Allison, who had a nice long chat with Stuart before he passed the phone over to me. It was lovely to catch up with her, a really nice start to the day.

After I'd had a quick bowl of cereal, we headed straight into town with Reggie. As is becoming our habit, we parked close to Chris and Sue's then headed for the river to give Reggie a good walk and run around. He enjoyed looking at the birds on the river.

After that, we headed into the main square to see whether we could pick up Stuart's blood test results - despite today being a bank holiday here (the feast of the immaculate conception), the misericordia was open and Stuart came out clutching an envelope containing the results.

Our final duty in town was to visit Sue's chickens. Today there were only 6 eggs for us to collect - productivity seems to be reducing as the week wears on!

By the time we got back home, it was close to 12pm. I settled down for an hour's work before lunch, while Stuart went back to the big man cave/wood shed clear our and tear down.

After lunch, we decided to experiment with moving Reggie's crate into the office. We figured that this way, I can keep him with me most of the day, while allowing the cats safe and less scary passage from outdoors to their new safe haven upstairs, without having to pass the barky monster in his crate. The jury is still out on whether this is going to work as a medium to long term solution, but for the afternoon the view from my desk looked something like this.

As the afternoon wore on, Reggie and I heard banging, drilling and more banging. Knowing that Stuart hasn't been feeling the best recently, I decided to put my office work on hold and see if I could help him with what has turned out to be a mammoth task.

My contribution was to take all the bits and pieces Stuart had earmarked for the rubbish shed down to the rubbish shed, so I spent the rest of the afternoon running up and down the garden steps moving all sorts of tools and bits and pieces to their new temporary home while Stuart continued with dismantling the shed:

We continued with the moving and dismantling until dark - when I retired indoors to feed the cats and dog, write a blog post, wash up and prepare some dinner. As I write, Stuart is still labouring outside dismantling the floor of the former man cave in the cold and in the dark. I sense that he has long since lost his patience with it and is utterly exhausted. I wish that he could leave it - but Andrea is due at 9.30am tomorrow to take photographs, and both the canopy over the apartment door and the satellite dish will also need to come down before then as well.

I feel as if we are in an utter state of disarray now and our property looks almost as untidy and as decorated with piles of rubbish as it did when we first arrived. I know we'll get it back to being tidy and beautiful again at some point, but I resent all the upheaval - especially when we are already experiencing health issues and in the run up to Christmas when we really ought to be making our house cosy and concentrating on making sure we are prepared for the season's festivities (be warned, we have yet to complete our Christmas shopping or organise any cards...).

So, tomorrow's blog lies in the hands of the satellite gods - our connection to the outside world depends on how the satellite dish handles being taken down and put back up again and on whether we can 'tune' it back in again. Wish us luck.