From productive to unproductive in less than 24h

The thunder made a return for the first time in several weeks last night. To start with, it was a gentle distant rumble for quite some time, but at around 2am it truly made its presence felt and brought with it rain of the sort you'd expect around here. It was a cacophony of rain drumming on the skylight, crashes of thunder, flashes of lightning and trees blowing around which continued for a couple of hours. I don't know how much rain we actually got, but I do know how little sleep we got!

It had all stopped a little while before Helen's exercise alarm went off though, so she went out to burn off some of those pizza calories - fully expecting to find out car to be buried beneath a washed-away Goose Island. Thankfully, nothing of the sort had happened.

After breakfast I loaded my mountain bike into the car and headed out to Porcari to take the car to the mechanic so that he could diagnose the engine management fault for us.

When I arrived he asked if I could leave the car with him. Once again when I asked how long for he said 'it depends'. Being a little more prepared this time, I explained that my house was 20km away and I only had my bike in the car to get home (I thought this info might prompt him to at least attempt to diagnose the issue promptly while I found somewhere for a coffee or two), and that I needed the car to go to Siena on Wednesday (firmly laying down a deadline). He understood on both counts, but still wanted me to leave the car and said that Wednesday would be fine as long as no strange parts were needed. So I took down the mechanic's number and promised to call in the morning to find out how things were going, took my bike, helmet and rucksack out of the car and started pedalling homewards.

It was a lovely morning after last night's storm - warm sunshine and blue skies and made for an enjoyable ride home. Despite the trip being only around 20km, it was the furthest I've cycled since being here, as all my efforts prior to this have been from the house and up several hills, making my other rides much slower and shorter.

Beautiful morning for a cycle ride.

Warm sunshine and blue skies with little sign of the storm that preceded them!

Along the way I passed some tantalising grapevines and olive trees bearing large fruits, the sign of the summer slowly drawing towards autumn.

Ah, grapes!

I soon found myself in Pescia and decided to pull into the Societa Pesciatina d'Ortocoltura. This is quite a large outfit just outside the centre of town that specialises in plants and olive trees, but I wanted to ask if they knew of somewhere we could acquire geese.

I propped my bike against an olive tree and accosted a guy with a wheelbarrow to ask him. He rubbed his chin and shook his head thinking, and then called an older chap over and asked him. The second guy reached into his pocket for his wallet and pulled out a business card and a mobile phone (which looked like it was from the 90s and was held together with tape) and proceeded to dial the number for me. He asked me to wait as he said it was engaged, so I called Helen to tell her I was in town and would be home, via the panificio, soon.

Eventually the man came over and told me that the place he was trying to call was closed on Mondays and Thursdays, so I asked if I could take a photo of the card so that I would be able to call the number myself. He held the card for me like he was expecting to be in the photo, and after I took the picture he asked if the number was readable and wanted to see. He seemed genuinely amazed that it was perfectly legible and told me to ring tomorrow. We shook hands and I pedalled off into town.

After a few metres I noticed that my left pedal felt odd, I looked down to see that it had somehow started unscrewing itself. That has never happened to me before, and is not a normal occurrence (so much so that a pedal wrench is not on the list of tools recommended to carry around with you when out cycling), so I decided I would have to stay in a low gear so as not to put too much pressure on it. Thankfully, I was only three miles from home.

I stopped in the square briefly to buy a loaf of bread. Having been a great advocate (and user) of our bread machine in the UK, it now only makes gluten-free loaves for Helen. After calculating the costs of the raw materials plus the electric involved in running it, the savings compared to buying lovely fresh Tuscan bread are minuscule. That, combined with the fact that we've yet to find a flour here that works well in the machine and the fact that I quite enjoy the ritual of going to buy fresh bread, means that the situation is unlikely to change in the near future.

I decided to take the back route from the centre of town up the valley past Chris and Sue's towards San Lorenzo, as not only is it a more scenic route, but there are virtually no vehicles. Two thirds of the way along the path before re-joining the road, I was forced to stop. Now, while I consider myself an intermediate-level bike mechanic at best, even I could tell that the pedal on my bike should not be here!

No, that's definitely not where it's meant to be.

There was nothing else for it but to get off and push the bike the last mile and a half home, meaning that I didn't get back until gone 12.30pm - half a day gone just like that.

Helen made lunch today, before which she emptied the sink in readiness to drain some cans of tuna. In the process, she accidentally picked up (and very quickly put down again) a live scorpion that had obviously climbed up through the waste pipe and stinky u-bend to greet her! 

After lunch I was greeted with a few electronic annoyances. First, I received an emailed from the people in the UK from whom I'd ordered the portable gas fire, saying that, actually, they're not allowed to sell this fire outside of the UK and that, even if they did, the courier fee wouldn't be the £31 quoted (and paid for) but £250!! They said they would credit my card immediately and apologised. I almost told them that they should sort out their flippin' website if that's the case, but thought better of it.

After prodding Lycamobile yet again about the fact that I've not been able to register our new SIM online (and therefore not able to top up the credit), they replied saying that, despite assurances last Wednesday that their technical department would contact me within 24 hours, they still had not managed to fix the problem.

I decided that I would at least set up the internet on the phone using the settings provided on the Lycamobile website (which is very good, you can set your location and languages independently so this at least is one website I don't have to translate to use). That would have been easy enough had I not updated my phone's software last week (as requested to by Microsoft) to version 8.1, which seems to have hidden or removed the internet settings page!

That was the last straw. Any resolve I had left after such a poor night's sleep, a bike ride, a bike push and some irritating emails had broken. I had had enough of today, so I whiled away what remained of this unproductive day doing some washing up and thumbing through the Stihl catalogue I had been given yesterday so that I could start researching chainsaws.

While driving around yesterday evening, we passed through a tiny village just north of Vellano, I'd noticed on previous occasions that there was a 'Stihl' sign hanging above the door of a place, but it didn't seem very inhabited. Yesterday, however, the blind was up in the window, and I spotted a sign for opening hours in the door - only open between 18:00 and 20:00 on weekdays, but open all day on Saturday.

While we were parked outside and I was gawping through the window to see if I could spot any signs of life, an old guy across the road came out of his drive and shouted something to me. I said I wanted to buy a chainsaw, and I think he then said he would call someone, and hurried off into his house. So we waited a minute or two, wondering what on earth we'd got ourselves into, and sure enough, three minutes later Antonio came bounding across to us in his bright orange Stihl polo shirt and dragged me into his shop. I didn't even need to look at Helen's face (who was still in the car) to know that she was rolling her eyes.

Antonio and I had a chat about what I needed. He recommended a particular model, and gave me a catalogue to take home before I made any decisions - so that is how I spent the remainder of an otherwise is useless day until such a time as the cats started fighting over a mouse and Helen emerged from the office to make a start on prepping dinner.

Let's hope that things can only get better!