Back breaking

Today’s weather was better than expected – cooler and cloudier than recent days, but still relatively warm and for the most part dry.

We opted, therefore, to get straight out into the garden after breakfast and do as much tidying as the weather would allow. In the end that turned out to be quite a lot as there wasn’t so much as a spot of rain until around 5.30pm – by which time we were more than ready to call it a day in any case.

For the most part I weeded all day - outside the apartment and on the path running to it, while Stuart moved the pile of accumulated 'stuff' from the garden to a spot beneath a tree next to our parked car (and the left-behind car - which we noticed today has not had valid road tax since 2009...) and erected a tarpaulin to keep it relatively dry.

Weeding in progress - tarpaulin covering pile of 'things' in distance. Wine bottles in middle of the picture from one lunch sitting (just kidding ;-).

I also managed to get the washing machine on this morning, although was somewhat shocked to find out that a cotton wash at 40C takes 2.5h to complete – our machine in Abingdon was doing the same in just 60 minutes. Once the wash had finally finished I hung it out to dry – not in the sunshine today, but there was quite a stiff breeze and it dried very quickly.

Washing between the olives.

Tidy path!!!

Today's weeding pile.

We’re still finding it hard to get our heads around the fact that we live here - it still feels like a rather strange (and very strenuous) holiday. It was only this morning that I realised I should probably unpack my toiletries bag as, actually, I'm here to stay! We’ve also continued to live out of our suitcase since we arrived…

Hopefully our furniture from the UK will arrive soon – and it will make a world of difference to have our own stuff around us rather than the pieces of furniture that we've inherited from the previous people. Perhaps then we will feel more settled. The latest we heard from the removals company was that the lorry had been held up by the police in Italy, which sounded a bit alarming – but apparently this is something that happens from time to time, and they should be able to give us an idea of a delivery date early this week. 

Mum and Dad have booked flights to come and visit us in October, which is really nice. I look forward to them coming out and showing them around - and hopefully by then we should have made the place somewhere to be proud of.

Tomorrow will be the start of my ‘working’ week, doing paid work for VB – as long as I can get the Internet to play nicely. I imagine that I will find some time at lunch time and maybe in the afternoon/evening as well to do some bits on the house/garden though, as it’s hard to ignore! Stuart will still be devoting his time full-time to project-Italy J

~ Helen