Quiet!

(This post covers 14-20 August 2017)

This week has been heavily dominated by the effects of a misbehaving thyroid on the one hand, and a large pile of needy conference papers with a deadline looming on the other - meaning that Stuart has felt up to barely more than lying on the sofa, while I have had my head down and barely left the computer, so we haven't done much to do the proverbial writing home about.

Having said that, we have managed to squeeze out some highlights in an otherwise quiet week, namely an interesting evening spent with our friends Mara & Franco attending a talk on the Italian wolf and about a project that monitors the wolf population in our province, and a lovely visit, albeit a short one, from friends from the UK.

At the start of the week, Stuart managed to muster up enough energy to start moving the enormous pile of wood we split back in the late winter/early spring up to the wood pile, where it now needs to be moved so that it can go under cover and start drying out for the winter (it has been exposed to the elements for several months for seasoning - and now needs to be kept dry for burning). Unfortunately, the effort he put into moving the wood on Monday pretty much drained him of all energy for the next couple of days, so it was back to the sofa and a blood test to check thyroid activity.

All this wood (and more that's already gone) needs to get up to the wood pile.

Partway up the hill.

A little further.

Almost there.

Stacked.

The wolf talk we attended was fascinating. Not least because it was quite amazing to realise that despite being tired, we comfortably understood enough of the 2-hour presentation to feel engaged and interested throughout. That in itself was quite a revelation! The talk was given by a local lady who is involved in a research and monitoring project concentrating on the wolves of the Pistoia province. One thing that we hadn’t realised was that wolves have not been reintroduced into Italy, rather they have always been here and what is happening now is a natural dispersion and a natural increase in numbers that corresponds with a large population of ungulates (deer, wild boar, etc.). It is well documented locally that there are wolves in our area, a fact that poor Mara and Franco know only too well, having lost their pair of nano-sheep to the local wolf pack, and having caught several shots of them on camera. In fact, there is just one family unit in our area – the range that wolves cover is quite staggeringly large, so just one family unit covers an area that far exceeds the area of just our valley. The purpose of the talk really was to educate people about wolves and to underline that they are neither inherently "bad" nor "good", and to advise on some of the "do's and don'ts" concerning their welfare and that of the human and domestic animal population. The talk was well attended, although it didn't seem as if there were any of the local hunting crowd in attendance, which is perhaps the group the members of the research project would most like to target.

Wolf talk.

Back at home, something large seemed to have been taking a liking to our melons and squashes - not wolves, but a rodent with some sizeable teeth and enough muscle to have moved the (relatively)heavy fruits across the terrace.

Who's been eating our melons?..

... and our squashes?

Something with big teeth!

Come the end of the week, we did a quick turnaround of the apartment on Friday morning, and made up both the sofa bed and a camp bed in the living area in order to create enough sleeping space for a family of four - cosy, but hopefully comfortable!

Cosy but comfortable.

Our friends Kathryn and Steve along with teenage children Jasmin and Alex, arrived with us just before 8pm on Friday night, having driven from the Alps (well, originally having set off from Oxfordshire, but having spent a few nights camping in the Alps on the way down), with a week's holiday to go onto at a villa in the Garfagnana the following day.

It must have been 16 years since I last saw Kathryn (literally a lifetime ago, as Alex wasn't even born when I last saw her!) but she hadn't changed a bit, and from the moment the family arrived, it was non-stop chatting, laughter and a really lovely evening. With such little time here, we stayed up chatting with Kathryn and Steve until long after midnight (the youngsters having sensibly retired downstairs earlier), and could have gone on for longer had our bodies not told us that sleep was required!

The next morning, the Newings stayed with us until about 1pm, allowing us enough time for me to take Kathryn on a tour of the woods on my morning Reggie walk, and for all 7 of us (Reggie included) to head down to the river to inspect the hydraulic ram pump that had stopped working (Steve, being a plumber, was keen to have a look and had a couple of suggestions as to what might be the problem). All too soon, though, it was time for them to set off on the next leg of their journey and to the next, hopefully relaxing part of their holiday. We'd had such a lovely time with them, we were sorry to see them leave - we are hoping they will be back at some point!

We had SUCH a lovely time catching up with these lovely people. (Thank you Jasmin for the photo!)

The rest of the weekend was a bit of a comedown after such a lovely start - the tiredness kicked in for both of us this time, and we were left feeling, well, like this:

A bit worn out.

We did manage to do a couple of hours' of strimming on Sunday morning, the terraces having started to turn into jungles once again. We strapped our his n' hers strimmers to our backs and together we tackled the uppermost terraces and the ones below the polytunnel, leaving them satisfyingly tidy by the end of the 2.5-hour stint.

Sunday strimming.

Before strimming.

After strimming.

That was more than enough exertion for us for this weekend though, and we allowed ourselves the afternoon and evening off to watch films on TV and have an early night in the hopes of re-energising ourselves for the week ahead.