First thing on Monday morning, almost as if timed to coincide with Allison & Q's departure, the chickens came out of their house for the first time. Poor Allison had been hoping to see the chickens out and about before she and Q left, having spent considerable time and effort preparing their enclosure for them, as well as coming along on the chicken-buying trip and sharing the back seat of the car with a box-load of them. Bad chickens! Their appearance on Monday was only brief though, and they soon hurried back inside again - but it was a start.
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| Sneaking a peak just before they all headed back inside. |
And it was a chilly start, just 5.4C when I got up and went out for my daily exercise regime, and although the sun soon came out and warmed everything up nicely, the air seemed a lot fresher than last week.
Monday morning proved to be eventful for Stuart - after having got out of bed at 02:40am to go and do a check-out for guests leaving the pool house (getting back home at 03:25am), when he later got out of bed after a much needed extra few hours of sleep and turned on his phone he found a barrage of messages from the owner of the pool house complaining about the way he'd done things. To cut a long story short, after an exchange of words with the owner, he resigned from the job. I can't say I blame him - over the months, a combination of lack of information available (both for him and for the guests), very strict rules (but without necessarily all the information to back them up), a lack of willingness on the part of the owner to make (or pay for) necessary repairs to the house/equipment, and an expectation of Stuart being available at the drop of a hat, all proved too much of a frustration, and while watering the plants and cleaning the pool were pleasant work, the interruptions and inconveniences (phone calls from guests, requests for him to go round to the house) that were seeming to happen at all times of day and night, and all days of the week, were not worth the bother.
In fact, the day proved to be eventful all round, with us ending the afternoon with a dead deer on our hands thanks to our super-prey-driven Reggie. We'd decided to take Reggie out for a run around our woods late in the afternoon, where and he found and chased a young deer. That in itself was nothing unusual, but on this occasion, whether because he took it by surprise or whether it was somewhat slow off the mark, he managed to catch it. I'll save the details other than to say that it was all pretty gruesome and upsetting, and some help was required on Stuart's part to put the poor creature out of its misery, but as horrific and upsetting as the episode felt at the time, it's important to remember that this is nature - as a highly prey-driven dog, a natural predator, Reggie was doing what he is hard-wired to do and what comes naturally to him (and I keep reminding myself it's really no different from Florence killing a mouse).
As much as we had intended to have a dry week this week, a glass of wine was much needed to wind down after such an drama-filled day.
Thankfully, the rest of the week was relatively uneventful.
The chickens eventually showed their faces again a couple of days later - that is, after we had finally worked out that they had managed to push their water bowl around inside the house and it had ended up barricading their door, blocking their exit! Once the bowl was moved they started to venture out quite regularly. They seem to all come out at the same time, and all go back in again at the same time. Strength in numbers I guess!
There are no signs of any eggs yet, but we always expected it to be anywhere from couple of weeks to a month before they started to lay, so we have no reason to worry about that yet.
On Tuesday afternoon we made a trip into Pescia for an appointment at the council offices to talk about our refuse tax - something that has been weighing on our minds for ... about 3 years. To date, since moving here we haven't paid any refuse tax - because we haven't ever received a bill. Quite some time ago (2015 as it turns out), Stuart had gone into the council offices to ask about said tax (to notify them that we were the new owners of the house and to fill out various paperwork), on which occasion he had filled in some forms and had been told to do nothing but wait until we received a bill. Two years on there had been no bill, and having heard horror stories of people in similar positions having been presented with enormous fines for the late/non-payment of taxes (as it seems the onus is on the individual to chase these things up, rather than on the organisation to present the bill), I had visions of us having to pay thousands. So it was with a mixture of trepidation and relief that we went to the council offices this week - trepidation with regard to what bills we might end up being presented with, but relief that we would finally be sorting things out.
At first, the woman dealing with us tried to find the paperwork that Stuart told him he had filled in "a while ago" - she did various searches on her computer but came up with nothing. We were just about to start to fill out a new form when she suddenly stumbled across something on her system and the next minute she was pulling out a set of papers from a filing cabinet complete with Stuart's handwriting on it. It was dated July 2015.
After a while plugging details into her computer, and us wondering what calculations it was making, the printer eventually whirred into action and started churning out pages, which proved to be three bills: one for 2015, one for 2016 and one for 2017 (we were spared the 2014 bill on the assumption that "the previous owners probably paid it" hmm, well, yes, maybe...). Having stated that our nearest set of communal bins is more than 500m away from our gates (we measured it in the car just to be sure - they are 700m away), we qualified for the 60% (yes, 60%) reduction in the annual rate of refuse tax, bringing it to €121 per year. While for the first year we had to pay the higher rate (which is standard practice when you put in a claim for such far-away-bins), there was surprisingly (and much to our relief) seemingly no penalty for late payment, and by the time we had left the council office, made a quick trip to the post office and relieved ourselves of around €500, we were all up to date! A huge weight off our minds!
Over the rest of the week we dedicated time to office work, a day's work in Vellano, Italian lessons, strimming and tidying up our lower terraces, and other general tasks.
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| Amazing fungal growth on an old oak tree stump. |
At the weekend, having initially decided we would spend our time working on starting to tidy up the end of the house in readiness for rendering, we changed tack and instead turned our attentions to our own patio area - an area that has been sorely neglected this year and had become very messy, but which, with the construction of the new herb garden, was slowly starting to look tidier.
The first step was to take out the old herb garden, so with spades, shovels and muscle power, we worked on dismantling the low wall that bordered it before digging the plants and a lot of the soil to begin to flatten the area.
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| The mess of before. Complete with Reggie's self-dug bed and Chippie the chipmunk. |
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| Unruly! |
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| Removing plant growth from the stone wall before pointing (at a later date). |
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| An almost-flat bed. |
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| We haven't forgotten Reggie in all of this and plan to leave him a dedicated area that he can dig in (and lie in) to his heart's content. He doesn't know that yet, of course. |
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| Eventually the base of the pergola will be levelled out to the level of the top of the orange pipe on each pergola leg. |
It was tough but satisfying work - just the right amount for a (semi)relaxing weekend!
We ended the week with an enjoyable evening with our friend Mara. With Franco having gone away (for work) for a couple of nights, we'd invited Mara round for a bite to eat while she was home-alone. Mara made the most of the opportunity of Franco being absent to spend the evening speaking in English - Franco usually tells her off for speaking to us in English (and rightly so, we need the Italian practice after all), but she enjoys it and who are we to deny her the pleasure?! After a good catch-up with Mara, we called it a night with busy weeks ahead for everyone.
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