This morning I had planned to take Mom into Pescia - nothing new there, except today we planned to make the journey by bus, and that definitely is new.
After breakfast, Mom and I both turned our tablet PCs and our attention to finding out the bus times. As you might expect, this wasn't an easy task. We did find timetables of a sort, but we also found lots of conflicting information about the running hours of the buses, and before we knew it ten o'clock had been and gone, leaving us with little time to walk into the village, wait for a bus and then do anything useful in town before attempting the return journey to get home in time for lunch - so we gave up on that idea, left Helen and Reggie in the office and headed into town in the car.
We walked along the river and into town in the warm late morning sun and meandered towards the piazza, stopping at the pet shop en route to buy a tick removing tool as the pair of tweezers we've been using at home just aren't cutting the mustard and Lucca has amassed a collection of several over the last couple of days. I'm seriously considering getting a GPS tag for him (and Florence) so that I can work out exactly where it is he's going to collect so many! Anyway, the pet shop only had one set of tick tweezers (pinza per zecche) left on the shelf, so I grabbed them - only when I got home and opened the packet did I notice that the back of the packet rather sweetly describes them in English as 'Tweezers for Twicks'!
With tweezers in hand, we headed for the Piazza and ginseng cappuccinos in Franco's coffee shop. As usually happens, one turned into two, the second accompanied by little pine nut biscotti. This was a very restrained choice as we were sitting only a few feet away from the glass counter displaying a huge selection of delicious looking cakes and biscuits and we had both spent the time it took to drink the first coffee gazing at the offerings. I think sometimes not being fluent in the language is a help, as the language barrier today definitely also acted as a calorie barrier - had I known what all these amazing looking cakes were called I'd have done a bit more damage!
After coffees, we went across to the farmacia to buy a blood pressure monitor. As you'll know if you've read recent blogs, I've been to see my doctor here a handful of times over the last few months. Each and every time, as a matter of course, he checks my blood pressure - it was rarely checked in the UK, but whenever it was, it was always 'fine' (whatever that meant, I had no understanding of what the numbers meant at all). However, each time I've had it checked here, it has been around 140 over 86. When the doctor first told me this, he looked at me like I should know what that meant - my blank expression told him more than my Italian vocabulary ever could, and he said 'less salt'. Admittedly, we had been living a little like we were on holiday through the summer and there was definitely room to reduce our salt intake - which is exactly what I did, and got back to normal eating double quick.
Rather disappointingly, on each subsequent visit I was met with a similar reading and the same line of advice. Since we eat fresh food, cook all of our meals ourselves and I've stopped adding salt to most things, I so figured I might be suffering from a bit of white coat syndrome (having a higher blood pressure when in the doctor's surgery) and that testing my own blood pressure at home would be a sensible thing to do - especially as Mom informs me high blood pressure runs in the family.
After leaving the piazza, we crossed the bridge into the Santa Maria quarter and decided to investigate the shop called Giannino. It has a rather small exterior, but after peering inside a while back while walking the dog, it seemed deceptively large and intriguing, so as we were dog-free this morning, we ventured inside. It turned out to be a department store selling everything from clothes to fabrics to bed linen and even door mats over three floors - nothing compared to a Macy's or House of Fraser, but considering its location, a surprisingly large store and today a very busy one! We'd walked in on sale day and walked out after enduring a lengthy queue for the till with a rather nice turquoise jacket (for Mom) that had been reduced by about 90% to €5!
As it was now almost noon we called it a day in town, went into Lidl where we acquired six bottles of Prosecco for the princely sum of €2.79 per bottle and some dog food for our ever growing puppy before going home for a steaming bowl of spicy chick pea soup.
After lunch it was a change of pace and a change of clothes as it was time to put some work in outside while Helen spent an hour finishing her office work for the day.
Mom headed first to the wood pile to trim some of the bits of tree strewn about the place before taking a rake to the lawn to try and get up some of the gravel that had revealed itself once the green green grass of summer had receded.
I busied myself with making some steps up to the upper terraces while keeping an eye on the dog. A little later, Helen appeared in her work clothes, and then quickly disappeared with a fully fuelled set of hedge trimmers in her hands onto the lower terraces to continue clearing terrace no.7 below the house. We whiled away the afternoon until the sun disappeared around 5pm and had packed up our tools by 6pm as darkness threatened.
This evening we're going down to the Phillips house to be sociable for the evening before Mom returns home on Sunday. We've been told there is an 11:30pm curfew as the boys have school tomorrow morning, so we'll see just how that goes - it won't be the first time there has been a curfew, but it would be the first time we've stuck to it!
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