The move to Tuscany : Time runs away

We had all good intentions of bringing you a blog over the weekend, but time ran away with us - largely thanks to a lovely social day spent with our Italian "neighbours" Mara and Franco across the valley from us, who invited us to go over on Sunday afternoon to observe their weekly inspection of their 30 bee hives. We did exactly that, then followed that with a glass of Prosecco with them and another lovely set of their friends (well, it would have been rude to refuse, wouldn't it?), and after a quick time-out to dash home to feed Reggie and Florence, we went back to their house for a pizza and a thoroughly enjoyable evening chatting with Mara and Franco. It was a fantastic day and possibly the best excuse yet for not having got around to writing the blog - as well as being great fun, it felt like a whole afternoon and evening's worth of Italian lesson with friendly, like-minded people, which you really can't put a price on!

Anyway, we plan to bring you more details about the bees and what we learned about them in the near future, but for now, since we know there will be some of you wondering where we've got to... here are a selection of photos from the last week.

The dominant theme of the week was the deconstruction/reconstruction of the office floor/apartment ceiling - which again is something we plan to write about in more depth in future. Stuart's back started to suffer rather badly at the start of the week, which meant that I really got stuck in with a lot of the chiselling, all of the concrete mixing (around 900kg of it), and a large part of the emptying of the apartment of rubble (with some very welcome help from the ever generous and ready-to-get-stuck-in David).

Half the office done, with the half nearest the window remaining to do.

The next quarter taken up, new beams being laid.

New tiles going down

Concrete laid.

Final quarter being taken up.

Sate-of-the-art air con.

This was the mess in the apartment down below.

Looking up!

There is still a fair amount of work to do on the apartment ceiling before it's finished, but we do at least feel as if we've finally broken the back of the most labour-intensive and messiest part of the job.

Meanwhile, down in the poly tunnel, seedlings have been growing apace:

And on Friday, we took delivery of a new batch of tiger worms to re-start our worm composting. Our friends Paul and Kathy, from Castelvecchio, had kindly ferried them over all the way from the UK for us in their car, and they all arrived safe and sound and full of wiggle! We've already set them to work on eating their way through some of our food scraps and eagerly await the compost.

Last week was another week of lovely spring weather. As a point of interest, in Italian there are no words to differentiate between varying levels of heat. A searingly hot 38C day in the height of summer is described as 'calda', and exactly the same word is used to describe a gently warm spring day of around 18C - 'calda'. You can say "e una temperatura gradevole" - "it's a pleasant temperature" - but there are no words to differentiate between 'warm' and 'hot'.

When we last visited our friends Mara and Franco it was the middle of winter (January) and it was dark, so we didn't have the opportunity to look back at the view from their side of the valley (the hillside that we spend so much of our time looking out onto from our terrace), so it was an interesting drive to their house, taking in the view of the valley from a different perspective - and admiring our neat-looking terraces from afar!