Work, rest and play (but without the rest)!

It has been another fun- and work-packed week for us here on our Italian hill. We've spent some lovely evenings chewing the fat with Allison and Q, and some very productive days working hard on our terraces. Q has enjoyed re-discovering the roads of the valley on his trusty steed (Stuart's road bike - which actually hasn't seen the outside world since...er last time Q used it a year ago), making the rest of us all shake our heads in disbelief at his energy and stamina and at the fact that he cycles up enormous hills for fun - and then does it again.

Meanwhile, the rest of us haven't exactly been putting our feet up - we've cleared terraces, cleaned terraces (raking and burning what we'd cleared), chopped and split wood, and cut down trees.

Stuart finally got around to trying a new method of efficiently cutting the small branches of a tree ready for the fire, having seen the idea on YouTube. It proved to work amazingly well, taking around ten minutes to load the 'rack', and three minutes to cut it all - in fact, it took longer to pick the cut pieces all up than it did to load the rack and cut them, saving HUGE amounts of time and effort - a great success!

The loaded rack.

First cut done.

Second cut done.

Final cut done.

Allison has learned how to wield a wood-splitting axe, putting her new skills to use helping us split wood for next year's wood pile, has raked and cleared on the terraces, and has also demonstrated her pyromania tendencies, spending hours on end feeding a bonfire with bramble and wood clippings.

A beautiful morning for starting a fire...

... the fire.

Clearing new ground.

More clearing.

6ft brambles.

More burning.

We did give Allison and Q a day off the hard labour for good behaviour - on which they paid a visit to the beautiful city of Lucca while Stuart and I got down to some paid work, me at my computer and Stuart up the valley in Vellano.

Reggie very quickly warmed to his new friends and has enjoyed some lovely walks this week, even being treated to an ice cream after one of them.

Do dogs get brain freeze from eating ice cream too quickly?

Morning sunshine on our Sorana walk.

Breakfast, pre-dog walk.

Dog walkers!

It has been lovely to spend the week with Allison and Q, they're great company and so easy to have around and we'll miss them when they've gone back home. Hopefully they will be back here again before too long though, and in the meantime, it's all change on our hill, with the arrival of my Mum and Dad tomorrow!