"Warmer" Wednesday

I say "warmer" Wednesday, but it's all relative!

Anyway, after failing to fit the new office light yesterday evening (or, to be honest, simply running out of enthusiasm), I decided to get up at the same time as Helen today to give me the time to finish wiring it up while she was outside exercising so that I wasn't tripping the electrics while she was trying to work. With daylight and a good night's sleep behind me, it was soon working and looking rather splendid. It couldn't be a more modern light fitting: four movable LED (to reduce power consumption) spotlights in ring shapes with a chrome finish. In the shop it looked great, and in my mind it would also look great hanging on our very old chestnut beams - though I couldn't be sure until it was in situ. When Helen went into the room after her shower, the noise of satisfaction that she emitted seemed like a gold seal of approval - in fact, we're so happy with the light that I think at least one more of the same design will be making its way into the house fairly soon.

After breakfast of yet more porridge with that special Tuscan honey, I decided it was time we owned a properly organised cutlery drawer. Now, you may well be thinking that I'm making a bit much out of this project (seriously, a properly organised cutlery drawer?!) but up until now our entire collection of cutlery, chopping knives, chopsticks, peelers, scissors, spoons, cake slices - you name it, ALL of our kitchen utensils - were living in the kitchen's only drawer. A drawer so small that no cutlery organiser would fit into it, meaning that it was rammed full of steel and silver - some items sharper than others, and in the simple act of reaching in for a teaspoon you would be running the gauntlet, uncertain as to how many fingers you'd come out with. After 9 months of living with this pathetic excuse for a drawer (did I mention that it also has the most ridiculous excuse for a 'handle' on it - a simple block of wood that you can't grip if your hands are even slightly damp) a 'real' cutlery drawer was long overdue. Before that could happen, though, I needed to find a new home for the contents of one of the sideboard drawers - the sideboard that has now been repurposed as a kitchen island.

Items re-homed, I used some pieces of wood from the old man cave (it's all about thrift now!) to make a divider and spent a very enjoyable hour organising the new drawer. For those who don't know, I LOVE organising. I remember doing it as a kid in my bedroom and the habit has stuck firmly with me - I just love the efficiency it brings to life, being able to lay my hands on whatever I want without searching. You may think that this is a good trait, and it is, but it comes at a cost: I get horribly frustrated if I can't put my hands on something immediately, so part of my interest in organising lies in cutting this stress out of my life (my friend Dodge knows this only too well and consequently named my old plastering van 'The Tool Shed').

Beautiful order is restored.

Anyway, that done, I went outside and fitted the remaining new gate latches to the other three gates and fitted yet more anti-dog-climbing measures to one of the gates. It's proving hard to stay one step ahead of our four-legged escapee.

I whiled away the remaining part of the morning by collecting fresh bread from Amanda's, boiling up some eggs for lunch and searching on Italy's version of the Yellow Pages for local firms that deal with septic tanks - an easy task back in the UK, but not here.

After lunch, I left Helen working in the office with the heater on (we'd sat it out all morning without the heater, but despite the temperature being slightly higher today than yesterday, it really was still bitterly cold in the office) while I fitted our 36-bottle wine rack to the rear of the kitchen island - the dining room side. That may sound a bit odd, but it actually looks good and is a good use of space! 

I also continued my search on the Yellow Pages before plucking up the courage to pick up the phone and attempt to ask if someone would come to look at our septic tank with a view to pumping it now that we can see it that is.

The phone call went remarkably well - I had, of course, prepared a few choice words and an opening sentence to get the ball rolling courtesy of Google Translate on my tablet. (Just a note here: the Googe Translate app is far superior to the web version on a PC, as the app lists your translation history on the same page, meaning that you can run through in your mind how the conversation might go and translate a whole load of usual words that then stay in the history on the page for you to scroll around while on the phone. Genius!). Anyway, the woman I spoke to took my phone number and said someone would call, so I'm infinitely more hopeful of a response than sending a useless email into the Italian abyss - so far, of all the emails I've tried sending only the carpenter has replied.

That done, we both headed into town with Reggie for a walk along the river with a stop at the chemist on the the way through town. The upside of the long closure for lunch here is that after a day's work you can still go and use the shops in town - which I kind of like. It also makes for a nicer walk around the piazza with people strolling around shopping rather than everything shutting at 5pm.

Once home, we let Reggie have his run around barking at the geese while we collected fire wood and lettuce to entice the geese into their home.

So another busy day, and as the fire roars and the animals settle down after their respective dinners we have opened a jar of marinated garlic cloves and poured a glass of red while we attempt a Thai-style vegetable curry for dinner using the amazing fresh lemon grass given to us at the weekend (and grown) by Sue. Last night's dinner (gnocchi with artichokes), for anyone interested, was a great success - not a faithful reproduction of our friend Dave's, but I'd have been happy to serve it to him regardless, it's now firmly on our list of favourite recipes and globe artichokes (now that I know how to prepare them) have moved up considerably in my estimations.