Melting Monday

Our dinner last night was very generously and very deliciously provided by our guests, Diane and Ernest, who invited us down for dinner. We joined them (Reggie included) at 7.30pm and sat out in the apartment garden in the balmy evening air and enjoyed a lovely vegetarian meal and great company. The main event of the meal was an enormous bowl of slowly, deliciously roasted veg served with couscous and rocket - right up our street. It was only an attempt at politeness that stopped us finishing the lot! We did, however, have seconds and even thirds, followed by a fruit salad and then chocolate, and washed it all down with plenty of wine! Before we knew it, 11pm was upon us and, it being a school night, Helen and I declined the offer of a coffee and retired to bed. We'd had a thoroughly enjoyable evening - Ernest and Diane are great company and kind and generous to boot -we feel extremely lucky to have such lovely guests.

Another clear blue sky greeted us this morning - if there's anything to banish the Monday blues and clear a cloudy brain, it's a blue sky!

After breakfast, Helen went to her office wearing three-quarter-length shorts. This time last year, despite warm weather outdoors, we were experimenting with lighting the wood burner in the office, and Helen was looking forward to our boxes of furniture arriving from the UK so that she could hug her hot water bottle, snuggle her feet into furry slippers and pile on some extra layers to keep warm in the office - but right now, we seem to be maintaining a steady and comfortable 20-21 degrees in all rooms of the house. We're not sure how much of this improvement can be attributed to the new front door and windows, how much can be attributed to the fact that we've heated the house properly over the winter, or indeed how much of it is simply that we've just become a little more acclimatised over the last 12 months - it's probably a combination of all three factors, but either way, we're in a much better place than we were 12 months ago!

But I digress. While Helen went to her office, I headed outside for a bit of work in the cooler part of the morning. Now that the apartment is not only ship shape but also inhabited, my focus has switched fully to the veg terraces. A number of jobs need to be done down there as soon as possible, namely: finishing digging over the last two vegetable beds, planting out more seedlings into these beds, covering the banks and ground with weed control fabric, sorting out the irrigation (which means finding a hose for the tanks, finding fittings to connect them together, and then all the associated drip-type hose to trail across the beds), not to mention finishing the tyre steps of which there is a flight and a half left to do (one of which is going to be a large headache as the bank is full of tree root). Common sense dictated that I should get the beds dug over first, so that's what I did. Initially, I disappeared off five terraces down to finish digging over what will be our squash and pumpkin bed - on which Helen had already done the majority of work last week.

With that done, I headed up to terrace number two to make a brand new bed, so my first job was to drag up a load of logs from terrace four to create an edge for the new bed before digging it all over. I was really wished we'd finished the steps, as by the time I'd lugged these tree trunks up the terraces I felt done in, lactic acid pumping in my legs and sweat dripping from my nose.

I headed indoors for half an hour to rehydrate and cool down a bit before a massive headache swamped me. I've always suffered with headaches more from overheating than from alcohol (genes maybe?) Either way, I could tell that a heavy one would be imminent if I didn't hide away in the cool dark house for a while.

Feeling refreshed, I went back out with a few extra tools and dug the new bed over, before using some kind of hoe to break up all the soil and then rake it over, removing the roots and weeds along the way. It was back-breaking and very sweaty work, but it was pretty much done by midday, at which point I once again retreated indoors to escape the 30C heat to cool down before making lunch. We enjoyed lunch under the patio umbrella today - the midday heat was punishing but it was accompanied by a lovely gentle breeze of the sort that could easily lull you to sleep if you felt so inclined (and had nothing better to do), so we decided to stretch lunch out a while with a pick-me-up coffee before heading back to work.

I tinkered around on the terraces for a couple of hours, waiting for Helen to finish her work for the day so that we could head out to walk Reggie and then go to the agraria to buy some ground control fabric. When Helen finally emerged into the daylight, I loaded Reggie into the car while we got our things together to leave... except we didn't leave did we?! The ******** car wouldn't start again!!

Poor Reggie had seemed so excited to be going for a walk, that we decided to head off on foot with him, walking up the road in the direction of Vellano, rather than our planned walk along the river in town. It's a good job he didn't understand that I had been promising him an ice cream in town after his walk!

Despite the fact we were without ice cream and walking along the road rather than the river, it was a pleasant walk, on which we ate small wild strawberries, found dozens of porcupine quills, spotted some pretty flowers (some type of orchid?) and made good progress with Reggie's car attacks, with him only lunging at five or six of the 15 or so that passed us.

When we got home, after drinking a gallon of water each (and making sure Reggie had plenty to drink and that he went and cooled down in the house), we decided a little work on the veg terraces was in order, so we both headed down there and planted out the squash and pumpkin as well as a load of tomato seedlings into the new beds before the sun finally beat us into submission at around 6pm. So while Helen spent 40 minutes watering all the veg, I called England and spoke to my mum and my kids. Kerys started her GCSE exams today - the first two of 18 ahead of her. She's been studying very hard (harder than I ever did), and we both hope she gets the results she deserves.

We eventually settled on the patio in the still very warm evening sun and podded fresh peas and broad beans for dinner, what bliss. When the temperature finally dropped it was time to head indoors to blog and finish dinner preparations. There's another sunny but slightly cooler day ahead tomorrow (you'll be pleased to hear we have rain coming in towards the end of the week), so I think a trip to Lanciole is on the cards for me tomorrow.