Friday 30 May 2014

A little bit of rain never hurt anyone...

Helen was up bright and early this morning, although not as early as I first thought when her alarm went off - it seems that my radio-controlled alarm clock will insist on being on UK time, and despite me manually changing the time before I went to sleep, it had sneakily reset itself to UK time during the night. So it was half past six, and not half past five, when she left in lycra to try out her new exercise mat and kettlebells. Panic over, I went back to sleep, still tired from yesterday's exertions.

After breakfast, Helen went to boot up the computer and log into her office work, and I decided to head back into the apartment again - it hadn't seen any of my affection since last Friday. Gosh, how I get bored of painting! Today's must have been coat number 3 or 4, and there's still one more required.

My painting was interrupted, pleasantly, by my wife with my walkie-talkie in hand - not only had I forgotten to take it downstairs with me, but we hadn't even tested them yet! She went back upstairs and we tried a quick test - turns out they work perfectly between the house and apartment. A longer range test (end of drive to house) will be conducted in drier weather though - this morning was humid and damp.

In between painting, I had a quick look at the ceiling in the bedroom of the apartment. We knew that it needed some attention - the boards had been un-jointed and moved by the previous owner and not repaired, so with the ladders that had arrived from Abingdon, I was able to get up and have a look at it. When I moved the boards, this is what I found!


Granted, the cobwebs are unattractive, but the beams and tiles make for a far more attractive and traditional ceiling than plasterboard!


Further investigation is needed (by removing some more of the ceiling boards), but we're now considering pulling the ceiling down and exposing the beams and tiles - although it will depend on what we find this false ceiling is hiding (possibly the services running to the bathroom) ... to be continued!

On calling upstairs on the walkie-talkie to find out what time it was, I was told it was lunchtime already! So we lunched - on the patio, of course, as it was still 24 degrees, but don't worry, the smugness ends here as halfway through lunch it rained AND thundered a little. Undeterred, we soldiered on with the use of an umbrella.


We won't be put off by a bit of rain.

Actually, a fairly large amount of rain.


After lunch, and having finished the coat of paint in the apartment, I joined Helen in the office (after having moved mountains of linen and other things to pick my way to my desk), the plan being that I would do some final tweaks to our website and, now that we have an internet connection capable, upload it for the world to see. The small flaw in this plan was that our super-fast, super-reliable, super-speedy, go-faster satellite internet connection kept disconnecting. Regularly. For about two hours.

In between drop-outs, I emailed Brad (a.k.a. Mr Satellite), the installer from Italia-WiFi, who replied to say that the 'satellite park' (I had visions of larger satellites supervising their offspring satellites on swings and roundabouts) was being battered by hail, which was causing a bit of flakiness. Sure enough, a couple of hours later it was restored to its former high-speed glory and I was able to upload our website.


www.numero182.com


Mid-afternoon, we went for our usual walk to check the post and retrieved some rather soggy mail from the postbox. It seems that the post box hanging on the gate is a little on the small side (we often find larger mail protruding from its mouth if it's anything bigger than a standard letter) and while, this time, the important mail made it safely inside, a new phone directory was left protruding - which had (not so)helpfully collected rain water and funnelled it straight into the post box and onto the letters inside. We were horrified to find letters from our loved ones completely soggy, but we left them outside to dry as the sun was making an appearance again at this point.

We were planning to head out to the supermarket this evening to get a few bits for the weekend, but decided instead to stay in, relax and make do with what we have in the fridge until tomorrow when a trip to Ikea in Pisa beckons (we are hoping to acquire some storage shelves/cupboards/boxes), after which we really need to try and decipher the list of documents we need before we can apply for residency. Oh, and we might be going to a social event in Vellano (the village up the mountain from us) tomorrow evening - the excitement at having something to go out for is almost unbearable. Helen doesn't have a clue what to wear...

Happy weekend all!






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