...and relax, a little

This morning passed very enjoyably in a blur of laziness: a slow breakfast, good coffee courtesy of our little Nespresso machine, and just mucking around on the internet in an altogether more aimless manner - Helen largely searching for information on the local area and events nearby (with good success: for example, she found out that there is a ham sandwich festival in the next village from us in August - that's going straight into the diary), and I made a start on setting us up a new account on holidaylettings.co.uk. That was until the internet started dropping out intermittently. It did this yesterday, but we'd been told that was because hail had been battering the dishes at the satellite park - so either the same was happening today (which seems a little too much of a coincidence), or something else is amiss.

We were both a touch annoyed and frustrated - having spent a large amount of money on the satellite connection we were expecting a more reliable service! I duly sent an email to Brad (Mr Satellite) during one of the brief periods of uptime to ask what was going on. Anyway, we gave up with the internet in the end and had lunch (on the patio in case you were wondering), and decided to head out shopping to attempt to buy a storage solution for the living room. We'd seen something that looked like it fitted the bill on the Ikea website (when the internet was working) so we headed for Pisa.

We were after something a little like this. (Kind of.)

Ikea was considerably busier today than on our previous visit, and it turns out that Ikea at the weekend is hellish no matter what part of the world you are in. What was odd was the number of times we heard dogs barking in Ikea. Never experienced that before. We lost count of the number of dogs we saw out shopping for furniture - weird.

We managed to wander around browsing at a fairly leisurely pace (for us at least) until about half way round, then just couldn't tolerate the throngs any more - one universal fact of life is that people get in the way!! Having found the cupboards we were after, we headed for the vast self service area. 

After finding that all items were in stock, we grabbed a trolley and loaded it up with the six cupboard carcasses, but we had to leave the cupboard doors for another trip as we couldn't make it all fit in the car. 

We left Pisa and headed eastwards for home but stopped off at Mercatone Uno in Altopascio on the way to see if we could find out when the kitchen (that we ordered two weeks ago) was going to be delivered. It seems that there's a thirty-day window for kitchens, so we can expect delivery some time around the middle of June. It was good to find out that things are in hand and that we hadn't missed a call from them to try and arrange delivery.

Our final stop before home was the supermarket for a bit of grocery shopping - it was busier in Esselunga than we'd ever seen it before (no dogs here though), although perhaps the fact that Monday is a bank holiday over here played a factor in that. 

When we finally got back to the house (some 4 hours after setting out!) we tried to call Richard to find out if this evening's trip to Vellano for dinner was still on. We couldn't get any response from him, so we decided to have a beer on the patio and sit it out until the church clock struck half past eight, at which time we considered it safe to call time on the idea of going out and retire indoors for dinner and a bottle of St Emilion - another import from the UK (thanks Allison & Q!) with a little bit of TV or DVD, depending on whether or not the internet has sorted itself out!

We're looking forward to a lie-in tomorrow, but after that we are torn between doing things that need doing in and around the house/garden, and going out and doing something completely different that will give us some more insight into our local area (there are SO many places we haven't visited yet - we've not even turned right out of our drive yet, only left!). We'll see what the morning brings and what the weather brings.

Teeny tiny olives.