Work, play, and a smattering of frustrations for good measure

It's been a busy week here at numero 182 - lots of work, some play, and true to form, a smattering of frustrations for good measure.

Monday morning saw Stuart heading off up the valley to Vellano for a morning's work with David. Thankfully, given Stuart's recent thyroid issues, it wasn't a crack-of-dawn start and it wasn't too strenuous a morning's work: some 'gentle' tree pruning to break him back into things gradually.

After coming home for lunch, he decided to spend the afternoon making a proper start on the re-pointing of the wall alongside the house in preparation for us moving the water collection tanks into their permanent home there.

We rounded the day off with a dog walk alongside the river.

Tuesday saw an early start for all of us. I got up at my usual time, but instead of heading outside to my exercise area, I headed straight to my desk to make a start on my day's work. We'd learned from David and Sarah yesterday that today was Donatella's birthday and that she would like to go to the beach - of course we were up for that, but in order to fit it in we had a lot of things to pack into the morning! I started work at 7am so that I could be finished and ready to leave for the beach at 3pm. Meanwhile, Stuart took Reggie for a walk by the river so that he wouldn't feel too hard done by to be left alone all afternoon.

Stuart and Reggie duly walked alongside the river, and Stuart decided that he would lengthen the walk a little today - however, that plan fell flat when Reggie point blank refused to walk over the little footbridge with iron grating under foot. Even when Stuart walked across the bridge and called him from the other side, he stood rooted to the spot, not wanting to venture onto the iron grating.

I'm not going across there, no siree.

 Plans for a longer walk thwarted, they turned around and made their way back to the car.

After a quick lunch, I finished up in the office and went to search out some suitable beach wear from the bottom of our wardrobes. It must be three years since we last had need of trunks/bikinis and it was a bit of a tight squeeze getting into them!

We left Reggie with some chews to keep him distracted while we left the house and went to wait at the end of the drive for our lift. Sure enough, come 3pm we David, Sarah and Donatella arrived and we were on our way to the seaside!

We were heading for the seaside town of Torre del Lago (which, incidentally was home to Puccini), a little way north of Pisa. The drive took a little under an hour and before long we were traipsing across sand dunes to the beach and laying down our beach towels and picnic blankets!

We spent a lovely few hours chilling out on the beach, going for dips in the sea and toasting Donatella with some Prosecco. The beach at Torre del Lago is nicely sandy and inland there is a stunning view of the giant Carrara marble mountains. A great time was had by all, although Donatella was not impressed by her special birthday jellyfish sting! We realised there was a 'stinger' in the vicinity when a couple of middle aged ladies came out of the sea talking about a 'medusa grande' - a large jellyfish - and holding their hands apart to indicate its large size in the same way as a fisherman might when describing the size of his catch. It was only minutes after that that Donatella came rushing out from the sea after having been unfortunate enough to have made contact with said giant medusa.

As the sun started to dip in the sky and the beach started to empty, we decided it was time to try and take Donatella's mind off her stinging leg with a visit to David & Sarah's favourite pizza haunt. We'd all worked up an appetite after all that sun and sea, so tucked into enormous slices of very delicious focaccia-style pizza.

Finally it was time to wend our way back to Pescia and back to our respective animals - although, on driving through the middle of Pescia, David somehow managed to spot that the ice cream shack La Baracchina had peanut ice cream on offer - something that apparently they had tried once before and had been a huge success (and loved in particular by Donatella), but had never repeated... until now! We virtually screeched to a halt, turned the car around and piled out to relieve the proprietors of a large amount of their peanut ice cream. We can confirm that peanut may well be the tastiest of the ice creams we've ever had from there!

Finally, we were dropped off at home to feed the animals and collapse on the sofa after what felt like a tiring afternoon despite not really having done much - it must have been the sea air!

Wednesday saw a continuation of the wall pointing for Stuart, the final death throes of our washing machine (complete with burning smells and a haze of black smoke) and in the afternoon - most excitingly - a visit from an oven repair man. Ever since we moved here 16 months ago, the oven hasn't worked. The oven will light, but it won't stay alight. We were pretty sure it was a problem with the thermocouple but without knowing which particular thermocouple was needed for this particular oven, we were stuck not being able to fix it. We had a failed attempt at getting someone round to look at it in the run up to last Christmas, but since then there has been no movement on the oven front.

Stuart was rather pleased with himself, therefore, when he went into an office in Pescia last week which is set up to help people with their electric bills and the like, told them he had a problem with his oven, and walked out with a name and phone number of a repair guy!

The oven engineer (as we'll call him) came this afternoon and spent some time tinkering around, only to pronounce the problem as being a broken thermocouple (no surprise there then). He didn't have the correct spare part with him, so he left, saying he would order the part and return next week to fit it. After 16 months of not being able to use the oven, we figured an extra week was neither here nor there and were feeling very smug and happy with ourselves - the washing machine may have broken, but we were about to get a working oven! The feeling of smugness didn't last too long however, as shortly after the oven engineer had left, I sniffed, and sniffed again - yes, I could definitely smell gas. I checked the oven, but none of the knobs were turned on. I called Stuart in, who confirmed that he too could smell gas. He checked all the knobs as well, and pulled the oven away from the wall to check the connecting pipe - but with no obvious leak, we were forced, for the sake of safety, to simply turn the gas off and declare the entire thing, hob and all, unfit for use until the engineer returns next week. One step forward, two steps back!

With the gas all switched off, we headed out to give Reggie another quick run along the river before taking a drive around to look at electrical appliances. We went first to a large electrical showroom called Trony, in Ponte Buggianese, before heading to Euronics in Montecatini for what proved to be a better selection. After deciding what we wanted, we were about to call over an assistant when I suddenly thought we should check the price of the same items online - and lo and behold, they were each around €60 cheaper online... So we came straight home without having bought a new washing machine. By the time we got home, the evening was marching on, so we turned our attention to dinner - which involved preparing vegetables in our own kitchen then traipsing downstairs to the apartment with pans and ingredients, and then back upstairs again with cooked food (to be fair, we're lucky we have the luxury of a second oven - and lucky we didn't have anyone staying in the apartment at the time!).

There isn't much to report about Thursday, other than the fact that the washing machine was still broken, and the oven was still out of commission, but you can admire the amazing handiwork of my clever husband who as near as damn it finished the repointing of the wall at the side of the house. It looks beautiful - and it's a shame it's largely going to be covered up by six large water collection tanks!

Thursday also saw us harvesting tomatoes. It seems that the cucumber glut has been replaced by a tomato glut! There are at least as many tomatoes again still waiting to be picked on the plants...

After hearing of our oven/hob plight (Thursday was our second night of traipsing downstairs to the apartment to cook - and even after only two nights, the novelty was already starting to wear very thin), we were offered the use of a three-ring gas hob by Chris and Sue, who had used it to cook on when they first moved to Italy, before they had their kitchen up and running. We jumped at the chance, and consequently had a lovely visit from Sue and Erik mid-morning on Friday when they came to deliver the hob and share a coffee with us.

Literally cooking on gas.

Friday afternoon also saw us making our second trip to our local vet. Poor Lucca has not been feeling very well for a couple of days and we were sufficiently concerned to take him to the vet. I don't know what was going through the poor little boy's head, but as we pulled away up the drive, I realised that the last time he was manhandled into his travel crate he was setting off for a 5-day journey from Bristol and across Europe - I wonder whether he thought he was going back to Bristol. True to form, he complained a fair amount on the journey into Pescia and was most unhappy (and vocal about it) when we unloaded his crate in the middle of the busy car park next to the bus terminus. Thankfully, the vet's waiting room was quieter, but he didn't enjoy his first meeting with his new vet, who took his temperature (which was normal), squeezed and prodded him (nothing to report), declared that he must have eaten something to upset him, and as a final insult, gave him a hefty injection of an anti-sickness drug. Here in Italy, if you need any form of medication for your pets, the vet gives you a prescription and you take it to your local pharmacy, just as you do with human drugs, and so it was that we were pulling in at our local farmacia on our way back through Pietrabuona to pick up some three items for Lucca: some anti-furball paste, some homeopathic anti-sickness tablets, and some anti-parasitic tablets.

On the vet's instruction, Lucca will be kept indoors for a while and separate from Florence so that we can monitor how much he is eating (if at all) and drinking, so as soon as we got back to the house, we gently let Lucca out of his travel crate into the spare room. He immediately ran under the bed, where he remained cowering and giving us the could shoulder for the rest of the evening. Hopefully the weekend will see him perk up and back to his normal self.

Finally, it was time to welcome in the weekend with a glass of wine while cooking up some pasta on our makeshift outdoor kitchen - the end of a busy week!