After filling the car with methane we headed west towards Altopascio - a place that featured heavily in the early months of our Italian adventure as we regularly frequented the Mercatone Uno furniture store there, but which we hadn't had need to visit for many months. We also wistfully remembered the time we drove to Altopascio to meet the animal couriers who were bringing Florence and Lucca to us all the way from England - a happy time indeed. Anyway, today's trip was for a visit to the Brico DIY shop in Altopascio to attempt to acquire some blackboard paint.
Both Helen and I are list-makers and we would be lost without them. The thing here is that we have so much going on, and so many different lists floating around, that we struggle to stay organised and/or to stay on track - so Helen came up with the idea of having a blackboard somewhere, on which we could write all the jobs that need doing as and when we think of them (and rub them out when they have been completed). I thought this was a splendid idea - and it's something my friend Dodge had done in his house back in Abingdon, which served him and his family well.
After a little research on the internet we found that Brico had some blackboard paint for sale - there are Brico stores in both Altopascio and Montecatini, but for a change of scenery we decided to head west this time.
It was busy in the car park today and I had to resort to a very Italian style of parking, just abandoning the car and making our own parking space where none had existed a moment before!
We went and scoured the shelves for the paint we'd seen on the web but couldn't find it anywhere so in the end I resorted to asking a member of staff - who told us they had nothing like that in store. This had happened before - having seen an item for sale on the Obi website, but the staff claiming that nothing like it existed in the shop - so, feeling deflated, we returned to the car (which by now looked even more abandoned, 'Italian-style', than it had done ten minutes previously as the cars that had been parked next to it had now disappeared, leaving our car acting as a sort of traffic island near the exit of the car park - which I found quite amusing, yet another sign we're settling in?).
Having our hearts set on having a blackboard, we decided that we would take our chances and head to Montecatini to see whether the Brico shop there had any different stock.
Once again, we browsed the paint shelves with an ominous feeling - the range of stock looked identical to that in the Altopascio shop, and once again I had to resort to asking staff. This time, however, the guy turned to ask his colleague, who directed us towards the area of the store which contained all types of craft and art supplies.
After a quick scan we spotted a tiny bottle of blackboard paint! Not the 500ml can we'd seen on the web for €12 but a 80ml tube for €5, so less economic, but at least we'd found some and we walked away with three tubes.
With that done we headed to Pescia to get the food shopping done for the week before heading home for a bit of lunch in front of a fire - we were spoiling ourselves today, clearly! Talking of all things clear, the cloud cover that had made the morning so incredibly chilly had finally given way to clear skies during lunch, so we abandoned plans to do some cosy indoor jobs and instead changed into work clothes to go and tackle some of the acacia sitting in a heap in the car park.
I grabbed the chainsaw and Helen grabbed the axe, and together we set to work on the wood pile. After an hour I had cut enough logs ready for splitting to keep Helen - who was in a solid steady swing now - going while I went to the four post holes I'd dug yesterday to set the first four posts into concrete. It wasn't a difficult job, as the crude chestnut posts were 'au natural' (and by that I mean far from perfectly straight), so I just adjusted the posts to my eye, a spirit level would have been useless. The job would have been much quicker had I still had the use of my plaster and mortar mixer, but since that is still hanging up sadly in the shed in the hopes that I can find someone to take a look at it and fix it some time, it was a case of mixing in a large bucket with a shovel.
Once the posts were in, I went back to log cutting as Helen was starting to get low on logs, having worked her way through a huge pile already. And that was how we ended the afternoon, cutting and splitting, and when we finally went indoors to light the fire we felt like we'd earned a large glass of wine each, having made a noticeable dent in the mass of wood lying out there.
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| This crate had been standing in a bucket... which had filled with rainwater... which had frozen. This was the result! |
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| End of play Saturday! |
While I wrote up the epic blog for the week just gone, Helen put the first coat of blackboard paint on the wall between the kitchen and the office and we got the fire nice and toasty to combat the evening's falling temperatures.
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| Plain wall. |
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| A blackboard! |
Sunday is officially lie-in day, so we didn't surface until around 9am, and after dressing we headed out into a crisp and frosty morning beneath clear blue skies with Reggie in the back of the car. He was one extremely excited dog, about to go for his first walk since Tuesday, and he whined for the entire journey, the only reprieve being when we stopped in the village for coffee and pastries.
While we're on the subject of coffee and pastries, we often seems to come across articles about coffee etiquette in Italy, the 'do's and 'don't's, and a seemingly odd obsession with ex-pats about following these rules so that you don't stand out as a foreigner - completely overlooking the fact that the second a foreigner opens their mouth to order a coffee, they have given up their identity as a non-national regardless of whether they order a cappuccino after lunch or not! We don't care much about these rules ourselves - we're clearly foreigners and if we feel like a cappuccino after lunch then that's what we have (although strangely we increasingly seem to be moving towards the more Italian way of reserving milky coffees for the morning and sticking with the hard black stuff later on).
Anyway, despite all this advice on coffee we are yet to see a single word of advice on how to eat the accompanying icing-sugar-dusted pastry without wearing half of the sugar across your face and clothes and dropping the rest of it in an incriminating pile of sugary crumbs! Anyway, back to the story: we left the coffee bar, with me having much whiter trousers than when I went went in...
We parked up at our usual spot to do the chicken run walk and were greeted with bright sun and frosty river banks. It made for lovely morning walk, and Reggie was in his element after having missed out on a walk for several days prior.
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| Happy pup in the morning sunshine. |
After our walk we headed home, stopping for what is now our traditional Sunday lunch from Amanda's. There's nothing traditional about the food stuffs involved, just the fact that we buy our lunch from her, so it depends entirely on what she has cooked that morning. Today we opted for pork escalopes in a tomato and caper sauce with the obligatory (for us!) rosemary roasted potatoes and a heap of peas cooked with pancetta. Unusually, we took a bag of dessert too: 'castagnolo col crema', which we'd been given to try when we walked in - basically small, doughnut-type affairs filled with a vanilla cream and dusted in icing sugar. Need we say more?
We then headed home for an early lunch so that we could once again get out in the sunshine to work on the wood pile for the afternoon.
After finishing the delicious lunch and eating a couple of the castagnolo with coffee, we tooled up and went back to work on the acacia pile.
We spent the entire afternoon in the sunshine. Helen barely took her hands off the axe for four hours, swinging and splitting like a pro and making an ever bigger pile of split wood for next winter, while I interspersed cutting logs for her with a bit of hole digging in readiness for another four posts to go in tomorrow so that I can then finally rebuild the machinery shelter with enough space for the tractor to have a nice new and most importantly dry home!
As the church bell tower in Pietrabuona struck 5pm, I sat and watched Helen split the last the lumps of wood, feeling extremely proud of her and her efforts - in the three afternoons that she has been out swinging the axe, she has single-handedly split almost as much wood as we have burnt so far this winter.
Once she'd finished, and with the sun setting, we both went indoors feeling hugely pleased with ourselves and the work we've done this weekend, nurturing an immensely satisfying feeling of accomplishment, yet again having earned a large glass of wine and possibly a little more to end the weekend - the sort of weekend we could happily take more of in the future!
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