Landslides and falling trees (or not).

'How did you sleep last night?' came the question from Stuart first thing this morning as I was peering, bleary-eyed into the mirror while brushing my teeth. Was he kidding?? 'Er... terribly, of course!!'. When we retired to bed last night, the rain was hammering down on the skylight outside our bedroom, and the rain continued hammering on the skylight all night long, along with wind gusting in the trees outside the bedroom window and the occasional clap of thunder thrown in for good measure. I lay awake most of the night fully expecting a tree to fall down onto the house or a huge landslide to send piles of rocks down onto the garden (as is the way my brain tends to work in the dead of night), or at the very least for all the noise to wake Reggie up, resulting in him barking the house down. I'm thankful to say that none of the above happened, despite my having forfeited several hours of my night's sleep to worry about them.

Stuart - who had also suffered a disturbed night's sleep, but who unlike me hadn't wasted his energy worrying about all manner of natural disasters - got up at the same time as me this morning so that, once I had taken Reggie out for his morning toilet trip, he could sit on the sofa with him and supervise him, leaving me to go and do my exercise without having to worry about Reggie or take him outside with me. I must admit that exercise wasn't top of my wishlist this morning - the rain had stopped by the time we got up, but the wind was still gusting and the sky was rather dark and foreboding. I was tempted to give it a miss today, but figured that, since it wasn't actually raining (or snowing), I didn't really have a good excuse. I therefore flung some kettlebells around for 40 minutes or so - and promptly felt pleased with myself for having put the effort in and glad that I hadn't wimped out.

I said earlier that none of the natural disasters I had imagined during the night had actually happened, but in fact, as I jogged up the drive this morning, I did come across a minor landslide: one large rock and a smaller one had been swept down the bank and rolled onto the drive. It was nothing major, but it shows just how much rain had come down.

After showering, I donned my office gear (2 jumpers, 2 pairs of socks + slippers, slanket, scarf, fingerless mittens...) and was treated to a bowl of hot porridge, along with a hot drink and a hot water bottle. It all felt lovely and cosy... for about 10 minutes!

This morning, Stuart joined me in the office to do some work on our website and some other computer-based projects he is tinkering with. He didn't feel the need for a blanket and hot water bottle, but he did concede to wearing a pair of fingerless gloves.

The pair of us worked through the morning, with Reggie keeping us company/causing trouble. I think the poor pup was bored today - usually at least one of us goes outside with him and is in and out of the house, so today he had a lot of pent up energy and spent his morning trying to steal and eat pieces of paper from my scrap paper pile, chewing at my slanket, chewing at the chairs, finding plastic bags to shred... and the list goes on.

Thankfully, lunch time eventually came around and we all had a break from the office for some sustenance and more hot drinks.

By the time we'd spent another couple of hours at our computers, the sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly - it could barely be any more different than the way things looked this morning! We therefore decided to make the most of the last hour of sunshine and take Reggie out to stretch his legs and run off some of his energy.

We drove down to the area next to the San Lorenzo hotel. As we drove down the road and through the village we realised just how much water had come down in the night. There had been a (small) mudslide at the side of the main road, there were torrents of water spurting out of banks that are usually dry, rivers of water running down the road, and the usually quite quiet river in the valley bottom was raging.

We decided today to walk in the opposite direction from our usual San Lorenzo walk - we turned towards the 'S. Caterina' part of the hotel complex and walked along the quiet road that leads to the back of a paper mill. At that point the road turned uphill - so we decided to follow it. We walked up and up the road, marvelling at the brand new perspective it was giving us on the valley below. Reggie enjoyed the new smells and sights, and we kept going until the road seemed to end in just three tracks, all of which looked like they led to people's houses.

At that point, we turned back and made our way back to the car and back home. As we reached home it was nearing 5pm, so we decided we would put the geese to bed before retiring indoors for the evening and getting the fire nice and toasty. Reggie decided he'd like to help with the geese herding, although to be honest, wasn't that much of a help:

On tonight's menu is Tuscan sausages and beans - a hearty warming meal to kick off our weekend.