Helen's flight on Monday wasn't until lunchtime so that meant it wasn't an unsociable hour when the alarm went off and after breakfast we were Florence bound.
We arrived a little ahead of time, something like 2 hours 20 minutes before the flight time which meant Helen could check straight in at the bag drop without queuing, it didn't take long to realise there was something of a problem as they tagged her bag but gave it back to her and requested she returned in two hours time as there were strong winds and the captain was having to do some form of weight & fuel calculations before any more bags or people were loaded, to work out how many more passengers and bags he wanted to take with him to Munich (turns out you can't fly directly from Tuscany to Prague). A lucky few had already checked in for the flight as usual, but from Helen onwards, it was a case of having to wait and see. For those he decided he couldn't take on the flight, there would be a coach transfer to Bologna for another flight to Munich - a potential nightmare!
Now, while Florence airport has been modernised and expanded over the last few years there is precious little seating and only one café land-side which made for a painfully dull two-hour wait. All the time the number of passengers to Munich were increasing and with their numbers so was the confusion and subsequent tension in the airport.
I don't know why, but one of the universal rules of life is that ALL airports are totally inept when a problem arises: they fail to communicate properly with passengers and fail to manage the situation at all well, and so the tensions and confusion escalated until eventually a hassled young Italian in a high-vis jacket turned up to start calling out names and handing out boarding passes to the chosen few who had been deemed suitable to fly to Munich, each of whom promptly ran off to get through security for a flight that had been scheduled to depart 15 minutes earlier and which, according to the information board was already boarding.
After emptying his hand of boarding passes he called all the remaining passengers to another area away from the check-in desks - it seemed like the writing was on the wall and Helen and the others had been bumped onto the coach and my mind turned to driving her to Bologna myself. That was until the young guy went to the counter and took a handful more boarding passes - Helen's was amongst them and after quickly dumping her bag onto the belt for loading we dashed to security and made a hasty goodbye.
I've since learned there has been a cyclone out in the Mediterranean somewhere causing trouble, which must have been the cause of the problems - that and the fact that the flight was operated not by Luthansa (through which she'd booked the flight) but by Air Dolomiti, nope, I've never heard of them either.
It was mid-afternoon before I got home, stopping to grab something to eat on the way back and as poor Reggie had been house bound for hours I loaded him straight into the car to head back into Pescia for a walk along the river.
Shortly after arriving home Stefano - the guy from the tractor/dumper shop - arrived. Stefano had called me while I was at the airport to ask if we could meet to talk about the mini-dumper we were on the cusp of buying from him (my latest round of questions about the machine had caused some confusion so he wanted to talk it through face to face), I'd asked if he would come to the house to see the terrain for himself and he had agreed.
As we approached the bottom of the mule track that we plan to use to access the woods for wood cutting, Stefano was already shaking his head Not only did he think the distance to and from the house was too far to go with the dumper (it being so slow), he also thought the track was too uneven as it was would mean not much wood could be loaded into the bucket before making it top heavy and liable to tip. Having got so close to buying a dumper from him this felt like a close call, but I had been starting to have my own doubts, hence the delaying of making a deposit payment.
Stefano took out his mobile phone to call a friend who lives in Sorana to ask him to come and have a look some time to see what he thought was best and whether even a small tractor would be suitable. As it happened, his friend, Romeo, was down in the valley near one of the paper mills so Stefano headed straight off to collect him and was back at the house in no time for the three of us to repeat the walk to the mule track. Romeo was very complimentary about how much clearing we have done on the terraces - he told me that he has noticed its progression since we moved in as he drives past regularly.
Romeo immediately agreed that a mini-dumper was not a good idea for our terrain. I asked what he thought about a small tractor - which he said would be perfect! Stefano said he would be too scared to drive a small tractor up the mule track - which caused Romeo to burst into laughter, telling me again that a small tractor would be perfect so long as the tracks were cleared a little first, and even offering to bring up a mini-digger to clear it for us (for a fee, I'm sure). He was a really nice guy and I warmed to him immediately and even managed a couple of jokes with him before he left. Stefano told me he would email a price and photo of the only suitable tractor he had which had the all important 'good brakes', although he said it was nowhere near our price range (which I already knew from my first visit to him months back), so it seems like we're back to square one for now and destined to be collecting wood the hard way again this winter.
With the day rapidly vanishing I re-connected the irrigation system after fixing a small leak before heading down to pick some tomatoes that were lurking amongst the plants. I emerged an hour later with a crate full: 12kgs!!
It was now time to call it a day so I sat down to do some research on our water harvesting system including various types of 'first flush' mechanisms to keep the tanks clean. This kept me busy until well into the evening, leaving just dinner and an hour and a half on Duolingo before retiring to bed.
Tuesday was a much earlier start. Under normal circumstances, Helen is up early to exercise and therefore deals with the animal routine, leaving me in bed for an extra hour. Of course, today she was too far away to do any of that so it was me who Lucca woke up for his breakfast and me who he woke again to be let out at 7am.
This being the earliest I'd been up for some time, I decided to capitalise on it and head straight into town before the sun rose on Pescia to walk Reggie and then go straight to the supermarket to shop for the week. My start was so early that I'd done both and was home unloading before 9am! It felt great and I was looking forward to having a full day ahead of me to get some work under my belt.
Angelo, the builder, soon called asking if he could pop in to see me, I'd asked him to come by and talk through his quote for repairing the driveway with me. Reggie yet again took exception to him, escaping out of the gate and running at him in full bark mode, Angelo disappeared somewhere to hide - not that I can blame him, if you don't know Reggie he can be an intimidating sight when he's barking at full volume, spit flying from his mouth.
I grabbed Reggie and put him in the car so that Angelo and I could talk in peace before he left to go an price up another job somewhere in the valley.
NOW I was clear to start work... or so I thought. Just then, Paolo the oven repair guy called and asked if he come straight away to look at the oven in the apartment. I'd asked him to come over to have a look at it this week as it has been leaving a terrible black soot on anything you place over the flames on the hob.
I gave him the instruction manual in Italian to thumb through, and he said that the jets needed changing over to use GPL as the oven had been supplied Methane-ready (as normal in Italy) so he rummaged in a box of bits trying to find 4 GPL jets while I went to try and fine the box of IKEA bits and pieces I had collected from when I fitted the kitchen. Luckily I was able to put my hand straight on it and inside was a bag with four shiny new jets - could they be the correct ones? Sure enough they were and in ten minutes we were cooking on gas, so to speak. With 30 euros in hand Paolo waved me goodbye and left me to start my own working day - although now it was lunchtime already!
After enjoying the leftovers from dinner the night before on the patio with a beer, I set to work decommissioning the downstairs bathroom. When I say 'downstairs bathroom', I mean the middle floor of the building, which is the ground floor of our part of the house, not the apartment. There is a perfectly good and fairly new bathroom on the top floor with the bedrooms - perfectly good, that is, except that the water doesn't get very hot. This is not a problem in summer, but last winter was miserable when the bathroom temperature dropped to 10C.
Anyway, the 'downstairs' bathroom is now full of stuff we need to store, cleaning products, dirty boots, vegetables and so on. It's also the same room into which we fitted washing lines and used as a drying room last winter (with the aid of a dehumidifier), so it has become a utility room for us - a multi-purpose room from which we'd already removed the toilet and basin in March with the help of Zach, one of out HelpX-ers.
As part of our planned new water heating system and associated works we'd asked the plumber to move the water heater in the downstairs bathroom from right by the door (a place perfectly chosen to maximise the number of times you could hit your head on it on entering and leaving the room) and to site it out of the way in the shower area, hooking it up directly (and only) to the shower which we intended to leave in there as a doggie shower facility.
After receiving the quote for the new system last week and talking it all through with Helen, we decided we would scrap the doggie shower idea altogether and reclaim the entire room for storage and drying - largely because we've had Reggie for 11 months already and he has yet to have a single shower, so keeping it seemed something of a waste of space.
It didn't take long to demolish the glass brick wall and remove the tiles (such was the quality of the workmanship), which left me just the plumbing to tackle, removing the water heater and shower mixer and either capping the pipes or reconnecting them if they still needed to go elsewhere.
Plumbing is not my forte, but I have a little experience of it under my belt so was happy tackling this job. Nevertheless, a very confusing few hours followed, along with three different trips to get different fittings and connectors as the job required. By the time six o'clock arrived I had done what I needed, capping off most pipes but reconnecting one that fed the bathroom directly above. Along the way, I realised that the plumbing was set up in a rather unconventional way, as the upstairs heater and the one in the room in which I was working both fed the kitchen tap and the shower via T-pieces. I'm not convinced this is good practice as you could effectively be sending hot water from one heater to another without any form of non-return valve involved (of which there were none). I was secretly hoping that this might turn out to be the cause of the pipes squeaking when taps are turned on.
I headed upstairs to the working bathroom and took what was by far the best shower I've had since moving here - the water was so hot I could easily have been scalded had I not dived out of the way. I could barely tolerate it at 50% heat! Was it a coincidence that I had just disconnected it all from the downstairs bathroom?
Afterwards, I cooked dinner and sat down for another hour and a half on Duolingo - after which the interactive language website informed me that I was now 17% fluent in Italian. I have no idea who decides what represents 100% fluent, but it was encouraging news nonetheless.
On Wednesday I was summonsed back to Amanda's grocery store in the village to take her more tomatoes. I'd been in yesterday and sold her half of the 12kg I picked on Monday and now she wanted more. When I got there it turned out that it was her mum who wanted the tomatoes, having failed to get her hands on any of the ones I sold to Amanda yesterday, so Amanda took the other 6kg before I headed out to Frateschi to buy some materials in the form of concrete blocks and bagged concrete.
I spent the rest of the morning playing with stone to find the right pieces to build up the floor behind the house which currently slopes down towards the patio - which is going to be a problem when I'm trying to build a shed along the length of the house! Some building up was required to about the depth of two courses of concrete block which cunningly would leave me a nice big hole to put some freshly made hardcore straight from the old bathroom.
After lunch I spent the rest of the day laying some stone and blocks to give me somewhere to start throwing the rubble I'd made in an attempt to start slowly putting the house back together, it was mid-week already and I still had a lot to do including cleaning the house from top to bottom.
By the end of the day I'd cleaned out the utility room, and headed upstairs for a shower - which was yet again scalding! Two nights in a row now, I was starting to believe I'd inadvertently fixed the shower in the main bathroom, but it still seemed too soon to count any chickens.
This evening I had been invited to the Phillips house for curry, so with the animals safely indoors I busied Reggie with a chew and made my escape to head into Pescia for a lovely meal and good company - finally dragging myself away from an indepth discussion on immigration just before midnight.
Lucca gave me something of a lie-in on Thursday morning so I wasn't cleaning my teeth until 8.30am when I heard my mobile ringing downstairs. I dashed down thinking it was Helen calling before work started in Prague for the day but when I checked the number it was not hers but another Italian mobile. I called it back and spent the next five minutes guiding a courier to our house to deliver our new washing machine!
When he arrived at the house in his long wheel base van he had a look of terror on his face and stumbled out of the cab exclaiming 'MAMMA MIA!' (the first time I'd heard a real Italian say this cliched phrase). He was clearly unhappy about bringing his van down our driveway. I shrugged and told him we'd had bigger at the house while I helped him offload the machine, signed his form and sent him on his way.
After breakfast I spent the next couple of hours putting stuff back into the utility room. Despite being far from finished, I had no choice but to start tidying the house now, I didn't have anything like the time needed to re-plaster the room or fill the hole in the floor that was under the shower, so these will be jobs for another day, another month even, as all being well we should have permission to start our other jobs next week, and the new woodshed will take priority.
After lunch I unhooked the old washing machine, ripped out the sink and nasty cupboard that was built around it and reconfigured the plumbing to take the new machine before David arrived having offered to help move the new machine indoors.
With the old one out and the new one indoors we chatted over coffee before he headed home having invited me for dinner that night - it was shaping up into a bit of a social week.
Having connected the new washing machine I put a load of washing on, which gave me a rare hour of waiting around so I sat with more coffee to check emails until the wash cycle finished so that not only could I hang the clothes up to dry in the utility room (it was a damp day today) but also make sure that nothing leaked. Of course it did leak, but not from anything I'd done: our predecessors had attempted to connect newer pipework to the old lead waste pipe, and botched the job, which explains the state of the floor underneath the old machine when I moved it. It wasn't a huge leak, which is why we've never seen evidence of it, so for now, a plastic container will have to live under the leak to catch the drips until the machine eventually moves out of the office and to its permanent resting place outside.
With the washing drying I headed out to Montecatini for a dual purpose trip: primarily for a TV wall bracket. Not content with having a few spare hours I now decided that I would finally get the TV off the old freezer in the living room to try and push this room slowly towards being sorted too. As well as the bracket I bought a piece of wood to make a shelf to hold the DVD player, and a new tyre for Helen's road bike as the current one had just died at the hands of the turbo trainer.
It was five o'clock when I got home, so there was just time for a little bit more work before showering (a hot shower again) and heading up to Vellano for dinner at David and Sarah's.
Yet again I had a lovely meal in good company while we chewed over the trials and tribulations of life in Italy - a common topic you'll not be surprised to hear. We enjoyed a veggie shepherds pie followed by crumble, a portion of each of which came home with me around 11pm for my lunch the next day.
Friday was a less exciting day - I'd set aside the entire day for cleaning, but not until I'd hung the TV, after which I worked my way from upstairs down, starting as always with hoovering the ceilings (I really was working from the top down).
After a busy day which included a dog walk in Pescia (by the way, Reggie has had a walk every day this week) I yet again escaped under darkness while Reggie had a chew in his mouth to head back to Pescia for another dinner at the Phillips's: fresh free range eggs, with peas and chips and of course bread and butter! After a tasty belly full of food we retired to the sofa to talk tractors and house heating options until almost midnight when I left them to go and check whether Reggie had undone all my good work (fortunately for both of us he hadn't).
What a week! I'm looking forward to having my wife home on Saturday afternoon who as I finish this blog post is sat in the airport in Prague waiting for the first of her flights.
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