A dose of sunshine to banish those Monday blues!

With Helen back at home after her trip away, this morning started when she resumed her animal duties at 7am.

I lay in bed and contemplated getting up as Reggie (who was now back in his crate so that Helen could exercise without having to keep running round the corner to make sure he wasn't jumping the fence) was having a bit of a whine. He obviously didn't whine for long though, as when I next looked at the clock an hour had passed!

Once Mom had surfaced after a slow start thanks to a less than perfect sleep, we had breakfast and got ready to head over to OBI to buy some wood and plasterboard. We left Reggie and Helen at home and set off on our way.

The weather was so lovely and sunny that we had to switch the heater off in the car and open the windows. It really was a beautiful morning and it was hard to believe we're expecting a full day of rain tomorrow.

Once I'd found out where the trolleys for large items lived, and handed over my identity card in return for one, we went and loaded three large sheets of plasterboard onto it. For a moment, it almost felt like old times, except this time it was Mom helping to load the plasterboard rather than my friend and workmate Dodge.

We squeezed through the tills with the enormous sheets of gypsum, loaded them into the car then went back in for some huge pieces of pine (for shelving). With all that strapped to the roof bars and my trolley returned in exchange for my hard-fought-for identity card, we hit the road as the clock hit noon.

It was lunch time when we got home, and you'll be pleased (or not) to hear that we ate on the patio outside today. There was a cool breeze, but the sun was just warm enough to make it pleasant.

I had planned to spend the afternoon doing some work in the apartment (fitting the plasterboard to the new wooden stud work in the bedroom), but the weather was just too good to be inside so I canned that idea and went back to pruning olive trees. While I did that, Mom lit and tended a fire on the first terrace to make a start on burning the olive cuttings that are strewn all over the terraces from last week's efforts.

An hour or so later, Helen emerged into the sun with hedge trimmers in hand and headed up the terraces to push up onto terrace no. 12 (that's terrace no. 19 if you count from the lowest one we've reached beneath the house).

Fungi!

At the top you see the beginnings of the clearing of terrace no.12 above the house.

It's a long way down.

As the afternoon drew rapidly on, one by one, we called time on our day's work: Mom took Reggie indoors to light the wood burner while I burnt the last of the pile of clippings, then took I Reggie for a walk around the woods while Helen finished up on the terraces and Mom collected the evening's firewood.

By the time Reggie and I got back to the house the fire was alight, wood piled next to it, and Helen was putting the geese away. As the sun sank towards the horizon, we were treated to a spectacular red sky - the photo below just doesn't do it justice.

Tomorrow promises rain - which is hard to believe after the last two beautiful days we've had - and a visit from an old conference colleague of mine who is en route to a job in Rome.