No wife (temporarily) and it's showing.

2 points of business before I get into the business of the weekend.

Firstly, to Ian Whalley and all others that we're somewhat offended by a rogue apostrophe in the title of the weeks blog (I would have been too), I do know better despite my below par schooling and put it down to an over reliance on the editing department, a department which is blatantly absent, hence the error, I hope we haven't lost too many readers because of it :-)

Secondly a apology for the brevity of this post, I had spent two hours this morning writing and publishing the post only to find that Google Chrome was lying to me when telling me it was saving the post as I went along and then lied when it pretended to publish it, the end result I had lost the lot and wasted two hours of my life, I immediately grabbed the dogs lead and left in my wellies before the laptop took the brunt of my frustrations.

So, to the post...

Saturday morning was still dry, the wet weather that had been forecast had now been put back until sometime this afternoon so I headed out with Reggie for a walk in the dry.

After Reggie had a good charge around the river and in it, we headed homewards stopping for a coffee at Nerone on t he way, me that is not Reggie.

After a good run around we headed homeward bound stopping for a quick coffee at Nerone on the way as he was pouring the frothy milk into the coffee I noticed other English voices in the bar.

I took it upon myself to go oveer to them and say hello and they quickly invited me to join them and we sat and chatted for a pleasant half an hour, they were a couple of guys from London who have a holiday home in the valley somewhere near Medicina and were over doing a bit of work on their place and had stopped for coffee delaying a trip to OBI for paint, sounds like a familiar story and I can't blame them for not wanting to rush over there.

It turned out they had found this very blog only the night prior and had been reading it with interest as they had viewed our house sometime around the time we were doing viewings ourselves, yet someone else that could have been living here instead of us had things been a little different.

They were very complimentary about what we'd done to the place so far which is always nice to hear and we parted company saying that we would stay in touch, I said they should come and see what we'd done so far if they were interested which they indeed seemed to be.

It was on leaving that I wondered if Tom was the same guy I spoke to about our internet service sometime last year when a guy called me having been given my number by the now infamous Brad from Italia WiFi, anyway, that will be a question for when our paths cross again unless you're reading Tom? Did we speak last year?

After getting home I decided to cook lunch so that I could get out and do a few hours work as soon as possible before the rains arrived.

Lunch and tomorrow's breakfast in one tasty swoop.

After lunch I headed up the terraces to do some more pruning as I've seen a little growth on a couple of the trees so really want to get this finished sooner rather than later and if I needed any further convincing I noticed that both the Almond, Apricot and Fig trees are all in bud, the plant life it seems have all decided winter has run its course.

By mid afternoon I had pruned as much of the remaining olive trees that I could reach and decided rather than climb up high into them to try and finish to job I would replace our extendable pruners and do the job safely, especially as Helen wasn't around to scrape off the terraces and take me to A&E should I slip.

With that done I decided to spend the remaining couple of hours tidying up the parking area some more so lit a fire to burn another heap of wood splitting detritus while I set to work on a washing machine I'd picked up from the bins on Thursday afternoon after dropping Helen to the airport, there was another shiny steel drum inside and I wanted it for another fire pit, I won't need ever need 4 but It seemed a shame to let the scrap man have it when I could give it to friends or sell it even, it turns out they sell for anything up to €40 on ebay!

It wasn't long before the raging fire was dying down and I'd made a real mess with the washing machine, this one being the least happy to give up it's drum meaning I had to resort to cutting the back off with a grinding disk and then smashing the casing around the drum with a hammer.

After that was done and the carcass loaded into the car I decided to have a little play on the tractor, having acquired a manual for it in PDF form over the internet last week I was keen to try out the gearbox now that I had instructions for it and I can confidently say I can use all 8 gears now!

After unloading the last of the gravel collected from the gates at the house I put the tractor under cover and went indoors for the evening, the rains still not having arrived.


Sunday the rains arrived in earnest waking me up at 5am briefly by drumming on the roof window.

I finally woke up at nine and got up to take Reggie out for a walk, dressing him in his coat this morning as the rain was coming down earnestly.

He let me put the coat on without fuss but looked more than a little embarrassed when I tried to take his picture refusing to look at me except for out of the corners of his eyes.

Take your stupid photo quickly will you and let's go!

I pulled in to Nerone first though for a quick coffee in an unusually busy coffee bar, there was only standing room not that it mattered as coffee is only accidentally served too hot to drink here, coffee culture isn't about sitting around sipping litres of hot coffee, coffee is functional and as such is imbibed quickly, which I did this morning, paid and left.

No sooner had I pulled out onto the road than I saw a guy hunkering under an umbrella at the bus stop with his thumb out in my direction so I stopped to see where he was going...Pescia bound, so I told him to jump in.

Reggie was not contained to the boot as I had took he bars out to go and dump the old washing machine yesterday evening and not put them back in so he now hopped into the back seats as this short exchange was going on and he got up close an personal with this intruder growling at him at full volume.

The guy was too busy collapsing his umbrella and trying to get into the car without getting too wet to notice and when he shut the door Reggie instantly shut up and backed down, I guess with nowhere to run to he had chosen to trust me and my decision to pick this guy up and he didn't make another sound.

The guy seemed nice from the brief exchange the short trip into Pescia allowed, apparently he had met a girl on facebook and moved here from Milan to be with here, bit odd but love has it's way of doing things I guess.

Reggie and I then had a nice quiet walk along the river in town, it's reliably quiet when it's raining and I quite enjoy being the only one out when it's raining like this although we both got more than a little damp despite Reggie's coat and my umbrella.

That patch of grass is MINE!

When we got home a dried Reggie off as much as I could before the towel became the subject of a game of tug-of-war then gave up to light the fire.

I spent the next couple of hours while Reggie snoozed on the sofa building the flat packed bee hive that arrived last week

The 'brood box' and the 'super', the brood box is the living quarters of the colony,
the Queen lives here and lays eggs, young are hatched and some honey is stored here too.
The super sits on top and has the newly invented flow frames for easy honey extraction.

We're 'Founding Supporters', this is the inspection door to the super so that we can watch progress.

...and behind the door the cells of one of the flow frames.

The flow frames from the front, tubes are inserted into the bottoms and honey drained out, sounds too easy.

The finished hive...well almost, just needs a couple of coats of oil now and of course some bees!

By the time I finished it was time to change into 'civvies' and head up to Vellano to Join David, Sarah and their friends for lunch at Manero's as well as Donatella who joined us, we were just missing Helen to complete the gang.

Lunch was the usual epic affair and I didn't leave until 6pm leaving the rest of them to watch the remainder of the Chelsea vs Man United game on the TV with Fabrizio the chef.

Once home I settled on the sofa with Reggie for a while in front of the fire and Helen and I even managed to find time to talk on the phone rather than message which was really nice, her busy schedule hadn't allowed her time to call up until now.

Shortly after we put the phone down I found myself descending into something of a meat induced coma so took myself off to bed for an early night.

You'll be pleased to hear the next time we post Helen will be home and will have edited the entire lot before it makes it gets to your eyes for reading.