Our day started as usual with a wake-up call from Lucca, and I hurried out of bed and did my rounds of the animals - swearing under my breath at Mr Goose who has become a vicious little piece of work over the last week or so, making the task of hanging their feeder up and clearing up the soiled sawdust a risky business. I have to confess to having laughed at him - in his eagerness to attack me when I opened up the door to their house, he came lunging out of the house and fell straight onto the terrace below, clearly not having remembered that one edge of the house is not actually on terra firma. The change in behaviour really has only been over the last couple of weeks, so we are hoping he is just getting more territorial because the mating season is about to happen. Still no sign of any eggs though...
After I'd done all of my animal duties I did a very brief exercise session, managing to fit 20 minutes on the bike in before rushing in to shower, have a bowl of cereal and be leaving the house at just before 9am. Although Sue no longer has need of our ferrying services from the supermarket, we had pledged that we continue to do our shopping early on a Saturday morning both to get it out of the way and to take advantage of the quieter shops. We were duly on our way back up the hill having shopped at both Lidl and Esselunga by 10am - result!
We decided to stop off at the café next to Frateschi's for a coffee on our way home. Having a post-shopping coffee with Sue over the last couple of weeks has been a real treat, and although we didn't have the company, we did treat ourselves to a couple of cappucinos each inside the tiny little establishment.
Coffee fix done, we finished the journey home, quickly unloaded the car then jumped straight back in it again to take Reggie for his weekly walk up the refuge track. The poor pup hasn't really had a proper walk for the last couple of days - the weather has been so miserable that not even he has really shown any enthusiasm for venturing out the front door, so today (when the weather was bright and sunny) he was due for a good run and frolic.
He did indeed have a really good stretch of his legs - and even found some snow to play in a little further along the track. He had a great time catching (or trying to catch) snowballs, although seemed a little confused by the fact that these balls were cold and disintegrated in his mouth when he tried to chew them.
We were back home by 12pm - thinking we would have an early lunch before cracking on with some outdoor work this afternoon.
However, while I was prepping lunch, this happened:
Reggie was quietly dozing in the sun on the doormat inside the front door when Lucca decided to make an entrance, launching himself through the cat flap and leaping straight onto the worktop, and from there to the stairs before even Reggie had worked out what was going on. Unfortunately, as he leapt from the worktop to the stairs, he kicked over our almost full bottle of olive oil, which duly smashed and covered the tiles with an enormous oil slick.
Between them, Lucca and Reggie have smashed a bowl (Reggie, getting over excited when barking at a noise he'd heard outside and smashing his water bowl in his excitement) and smashed the olive oil bottle within the space of 24 hours. Boys eh? I hate to think what would happen if they ever collaborated...
So, after Stuart had spent a good half hour mopping up the oil spillage, I had washed up and made some bean dip, it was almost 1pm by the time we sat down for lunch - not a particularly early lunch, but a respectable hour nonetheless.
Once lunch had been cleared away, it was time to move Reggie to his post on the grass (his lead attached to a stake in the ground as we can't trust him not to jump the fence and escape) with a pillow to sit on, a bowl of water and a chewy buffalo hide 'bone' to keep him entertained, then gather our various tools (hedge trimmers, rakes, bow saw, reciprocal saw, chain saw, and assorted safety equipment) and head down the terraces.
By this time, the weather was glorious. I can't imagine that the temperature was actually more than about 12C (although once we started work, we soon worked up a sweat), but the thermometer which sits in the full sunshine right up against the wall of the house seemed to think it was summer!! (This after a 4.5C reading first thing this morning.)
On the work front, today's task was continuing with terrace no. 5 beneath the house. This one was a tough one! This terrace had trees growing across it in addition to all the brambles - with the trunks and branches of the trees all entangled in the brambles. The process therefore was for me to go in with the hedge trimmers and cut away the brambles, then Stuart to go in with the chain saw and cut up the branches and trunks that were lying across the terrace, then for me to move all the trunks and branches before continuing with the hedge cutters. It was slow going, but we made a big impact and we're almost halfway along the terrace now. By the end of tomorrow we hope to have finished clearing that one and maybe even made inroads onto terrace no. 6 (or maybe I'm getting ahead of myself - we'll see!).
While I was busy with the hedge trimmers, Stuart spent some time disentangling a poor olive tree that was being choked by brambles higher up on the terraces. We worked for a solid 3 hours or so, before feeling that we'd done enough for one day and traipsing back up the terraces with all our tools to reassure the poor pup that we were still there, letting him run around the garden after a ball for a while, getting the cats safely in, putting the geese away and finally collapsing for the evening in front of the fire. All in all, a very satisfying day.
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