We slept well until the early hours of the morning: come 3am, there were the sounds of cats tearing around upstairs, across our bedroom floor, out to the landing, back into our bedroom, knocking their food bowls over, scratching around underneath the chest of drawers and generally causing chaos. We both woke and sleepily said to each other "there must be another mouse in the house", but neither of us had the energy to get up and investigate. Things eventually calmed down again, and we managed to get back to sleep until around 8am - by which point both cats were snuggled sleepily on the bed but Reggie started up whining from downstairs.
I got up to let Reggie out, after which Stuart also got up and saw to the geese. It was only later in the day that Lucca (who'd been outside) came in, ran straight up the stairs and started sniffing around the laundry basket. No sooner had I moved the laundry basket an inch than Lucca ran behind it and sprinted off into the spare room and started growling - he had a mouse in his mouth. I eventually managed to herd him out of the house, where he dealt with his prey accordingly. Two mice, two nights in a row is a bit of a concern - we suspect they may be coming in through a tiny gap next to the water pipes that come into the kitchen (which would explain Florence's station when we went to bed last night), then scaling the wall and popping up through a small hole in the mortar at the bottom of the wall at the top of the stairs, which is positioned directly behind the laundry basket. So a new job for Stuart's urgent to-do list is to fill the hole that allows them to come in from outside!
Anyway, despite a disturbed night's sleep, it was lovely to wake up to the sort of morning that feels like it promises lots of warm weather. It was overcast, with clouds hanging low over the hills opposite us, but still warm enough to eat our bowls of cereal outside while listening to the screech of tyres on the road. The Valdienievole rally was already up and going by 8am, and after checking the race schedule, we pottered along the drive after our breakfast to see what we could see.
We were a little put out to find a large number of people camped out on our land. Lots were standing on the end of our drive, some sitting on blankets, a race marshal had parked his car on the end of our drive, a couple of chaps had hung their coats on our gates, and one had even parked himself inside our gates, seated on our pile of firewood.
Trying as hard as we could to keep a lid on our 'an Englishman's home is his castle' tendencies, we bade a strained 'buon giorno' to the people clustered at our gates and joined them for 15 minutes to watch the rally cars zoom around our hairpin bend.
It was good fun for a couple of minutes, but we soon worked out that watching a rally from a single point is actually really dull. There's no racing involved in a circuit like this - it's simply a matter of each car being timed, so all you see is one car after another screeching around the corner. A race like this would actually be far more interesting viewed on the TV. Having said that, there were hair-raising moments when a couple of cars almost lost their back end as they slowed to go round the corner, but all in all, it was a lot of noise and not a great deal of excitement.
Anyway, it kept us engaged for 15 minutes, during which we took a load of photos, then retreated back down the drive to our house where there were far more interesting things to do and see. There were three main stages to the rally today - the one in the morning, one in the early afternoon and one later in the afternoon, but the short period we spent at the gates this morning was enough to convince us that there was little need for us to drop everything and go and watch any more of the race.
Once we got back to the house, we each changed into work clothes and while I dug some paving slabs into the grass across the guest lawn, Stuart finished up digging some post holes for a screen that we're planning to erect around the guest patio to hide the view of the car park and machinery storage area. When I'd finished with my paving slabs, I helped with the fence posts, and by lunch time we'd concreted 5 fence posts in, ready for the screen to be made this week.
Lunch was a delicious salad of potato, salmon, broad bean, rocket and horseradish, with the salmon char grilled over the fire pit. Last night we had 'fire pit vegetable fajitas' (with the veg cooked in a wok over the fire pit) and today it was char grilled salmon via the same means - it seems we have found multiple uses for our washing machine drum fire pit!
We enjoyed our lunch with a glass of wine while there was also a lunchtime lull in the noise from the rally. After lunch had been cleared away, we got out the laptop and the camera and started a mammoth search of our archives. Next Saturday is the one-year anniversary of the first night we spent in our house here, and we plan to post a retrospective blog, looking back at how things were back then and how much things have changed. We spent most of the afternoon searching our blog archives and running around taking 'how things look today' photographs for comparison - all very interesting for us to look back at how far we've come.
When we finally ran out of steam on the blog archive front, we sat and simply enjoyed each other's company in the a balmy late afternoon while being treated to some spectacular cloud patterns in the sky, feeling very lucky to be where we are.
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