The move to Tuscany : And the rains came... (and left)

After the last week's holidaymakers returned home, Monday morning was time to get the apartment sorted and ready for the next set of guests who would be arriving at lunchtime tomorrow. Thankfully, it didn't take too long to whip the place into shape as Yvonne and Mum had left the place in good order on leaving (thanks both!).

After lunch, and while Helen returned to her work in the office, I turned my attentions to repairing a pair of shutters from the holiday house next to David and Sarah's in Vellano.

Some weeks back I had taken a couple of pieces of the old shutter into the wood yard and had them machine to the correct dimensions the required amount of wood... or at least I thought I had.

I've no idea what link in the chain fell down here, but the short version of the story was that the wood was still too big in both width and thickness, meaning that hours of adjusting with a router were required until by the end of the afternoon I had a system that was working. It was a little repetitive in the repeated changing of bits for the router (three times for each slat), but it worked and I was pleased I didn't need to return to the yard for a second time.

Just need a lick of paint needed now.

Tuesday was back to the normal routine, the first early two hours of which were at what we shall henceforth call 'the pool house' to clean the pool and water the pot plants, followed by a trip to Vellano for some more wood staining with David. At the end of our morning's work and before I headed home, David and I sampled a new brew from a well known German brewery entering what now seems to be the primary growth area in the market, that of IPA style beer - and respectable it was too, enhanced perhaps by the view from David and Sarah's terrace.

Not quite IPA but LPA.

Just after lunch, our latest set of apartment guests, Katie and Greg, arrived. We knew that they lived in Abingdon but had no idea how they had found us and whether it was a pure coincidence that they came from our old town - but we soon put the mystery to rest when we found out that Greg works in the same building as Helen used to work in, and had seen one of our flyers circulated (thanks to our friend Allison) over two years ago!

After a brief chat we left our guests to settle in while I headed over into the next valley, north of Collodi, to help out Brunetta, the lady that owns the pool house, at her own house. Are you keeping up?

It turns out that she and her husband are two months into a two-week building/loft conversion project - so it seems Italian builders can be as bad as (some) British ones!

Needless to say, Brunetta and her husband had got utterly fed up of sleeping in the lounge by now and had decided to throw some money at me to help get the job finished. This involves filling all the gaps between the roof tiles before painting them white, then staining the beams dark brown so that the walls can then be painted.

After an afternoon of looking up at the ceiling
I could sympathise a little with Michelangelo... a little..

The converted loft space, soon to be a bedroom, but not soon enough.

Typical method of supporting earthen walls,
may need a bit of this at our house.

It was clear after an afternoon's work on the ceiling that the job wasn't going to be a quick one and that I would have to make some return visits.

I headed home, but after a busy day, rather than chill out on our patio, it was time to clean up and dress up for an evening out - we had been invited to dinner with Amanda and Alessio in Pietrabuona.

With both Amanda and Alessio working in the food business (Alessio is a chef, about to start a job working as a private chef to a wealthy Russian family spending the summer near the coast), they both clearly enjoy their food and the conversation largely revolved around this topic while we demolished the first three courses: home-marinated anchovies served with samphire and a salad, followed by ricotta gnocchi with a fish ragu, and then a fillet of mackerel with a yellow pepper sauce and potatoes.

What a delicious feast it was, and by the time we came to the amazing cake that Amanda had made (ricotta with pistachio & pumpkin seeds) - which had me thinking back to childhood egg custard tarts - we were onto much more philosophical subjects. It was gone midnight before we knew it, and we left with a copy of Alessio's first published book, for which he won a prize recently in the form of a huge trophy and which we've said we will attempt to help translate into English for him.

Wednesday, as ever, was our Johnny lesson, but this week without David and Sarah as, following a flight delay, Sarah had arrived home from a 24-hour work trip to the UK in the early hours so had opted for catching up on sleep instead.

It was an enjoyable lesson, one of the random ones that Johnny throws at us from time to time, and this week it was on the subject of superstitions. It was fascinating to learn not only how many we Brits have in common with the Italians, but also the history and "reasoning" (or lack thereof) behind them, something we often know little of.

After the lesson I dashed straight into Pescia before lunchtime closing to get fuel, pay the electricity bill and pick up some essential drugs from the pharmacy, at which point the much needed and long awaited rains arrived.

After dashing through the rain and heading home for lunch I succumbed to heavy eyes and crashed asleep for an hour while the sound of rain hammered on the roof window and the thunder rolled around the valley, is there a better more soporific sound to fall asleep to? I think not.

After my nap I joined Helen in the office to do a bit of work on the computer, namely updating our friend Marie's website and a bit of other admin; with the rain stil pouring it was an ideal opportnity to do so.

We invited Katie and Greg up that evening for a drink and a chat so that they could meet Reggie and pick our brains to aid their planning for their stay with us. We had a very enjoyable couple of hours talking to yet more lovely guests before they headed down during a brief reprieve in the rain, leaving us to make a late dinner before heading to bed.

The rain was still coming down, although more intermittently, on Thursday morning, which meant there was no point in heading over to the pool house early in the morning. Come mid-morning, we found ourselves Pescia-bound (yes, i said we) as, having been stung on the knuckle by a wasp that was making a nest inside the pole of the rotary washing line two days ago, Helen's hand was continuing to swell, and perhaps more concerning was the fact that the swelling was starting to travel from her hand and along her arm this morning. We decided it would be prudent to seek a professional opinion at the pharmacy in town.

Both hands belong to the same person... who needs botox?

The lady in the pharmacy recommended steroid cream for immediate application followed by a trip to Helen's doctor for maybe something stronger, so with cream purchased we headed over to the hospital where Dottoressa Ida has a clinic.

After a wait of only 20 minutes we were in and were told it was nothing really to worry about, it was quite common for wasp stings to react like this, but to take a course of steroids to get it under control.

After lunch we had our weekly lesson with Samantha, dealing once again with the conguintivo. It's starting to feel like we'll never get the hang of this particular part of the language and Samantha telling us that even most Italians use it incorrectly was not encouraging! I particularly struggled this week, feeling like yesterday's tiredness was still well and truly with me.

An 'accacia' tree cut last Autumn growing lots of straight new stems.

Spot the rainbow!

On Friday, as the weather was much improved, I headed over to clean the pool only to find that the strong windy gusts of the last couple of days had claimed a casualty. I was turning into the bearer of bad news for Brunetta: last week a broken pool net, now this.

Is it just sitting down or broken?

After the pool house it was back to Brunetta's other house for a bit more work on the roof/ceiling. In fact, I spent the entire day there, opting to have lunch with her and her husband which was the first time I had said anything but hello to Sergio, so it was nice to chat properly while we ate chick pea soup and then huge pieces of salmon baked with olives.

Slow and laborious work, more so when you are too tall to stand.

Job one DONE!

Another working week under our belts and at last with the better weather on the horizon, the arrival of the weekend meant that Helen could join me outside to get some vitamin D and work up an appetite for dinner at Sandrino's this evening for our friend Kathy's birthday.

We spent the afternoon cutting young acacia regrowth before strimming the ground around them both around the car-parking area and around the poly tunnel below the house as these two areas had recently gone crazy and were looking horribly unkempt.

One of many loads of acacia off to the chipper to become compost.

Can you see our new oleander?

There it is!!

After a VERY sweaty afternoon we packed up tools and cleaned up ready for dinner that evening but not before Reggie got his second walk that day on the upper terraces. He has a fascination with a particular olive tree that has a split trunk and that must be providing a home to some creature or another - that is quite probably now deaf.

We had a great evening out with Paul, Kathy, Donatella, David and Sarah at Da Sandrino, eating a delicious variety of pasta dishes before diving into main courses. For whatever reason, it was the best meal we've eaten there and the restaurant had gone up a number of degrees in our estimation by the time we left - I, for one, could have happily sat there with a huge bowl of their spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and chilli, so simple and yet SO AMAZING! I must get a version of this classic (aglio, olio, pepperoncino) under my belt.

Sunday was a lazy start, as is customary, although breaking with custom we didn't have coffee and breakfast out at one of our usual haunts but had coffee instead down at our neighbours Valerio and Rosanna's as they had been asking us to pop in for coffee for a few weeks now.

We took them a bunch of our precious garlic as a little gift, knowing they hadn't grown any themselves this year and enjoyed a piece of cake with our coffee while trying to understand the two(+) simultaneous conversations that were going on at high speed at the same time (did I mention that Rosanna's brother and elderly mother and father were also there?).

We left around midday, heads spinning from attempting to converse with these speed-talking locals.

After lunch we headed down into the veg garden to do the weekly tidying etc., as well as harvesting whatever was waiting for us. The weeding now is almost zero, which is amazing and pays tribute to the amount of regular weeding we have done up until this point which hasn't allowed anything to set seed, meaning nice clean veg beds.

There was still an afternoon's worth of work for the two of us though, as the cucumbers, tomatoes and squashes were rampant and needed a fair amount of training.

By the time we had worked our way from the bottom up to the top terrace and had watered everything, it was getting on for 6pm, which is wine o'clock on a Sunday, so we retired to the terrace and waited for the heat of the day to slowly lower along with the sun before heading indoors to cook up a feast with some of the day's harvest.